Afterword: The Pendulum and the Slope

Summary

This book has characterised the performances of US presidents as following two trajectories. On the one hand, there is a need for balance and contrast in how presidents perform: between each president and their predecessor, between the abstract quality of presidentiality and personal authenticity, between associations with signifiers of high and low social classes, and so on. As such, presidential performances can be said to follow the trajectory of a pendulum in presenting resonant contrasts between one president and the next in a way that serves as a corrective and, ideally, staves off the public's fatigue. In this view, Clinton's approachability served as a contrast to Bush Senior's aloofness, whereas Bush Junior's Christian morality served as a contrast to Clinton's perceived moral failings. Obama's elegant rhetoric contrasted with George W. Bush's lack of rhetorical skill, whilst Trump's rudeness and his racist emphasis on White supremacy clashed strikingly with Obama's considered and professorial style as well as forcefully speaking back against the demise of what had been a White patriarchal monopoly on the highest political office. The election of Joe Biden in 2020 can be seen as a corrective to Trump, insofar as Biden is a career politician, Obama's vice president, and a known champion of reaching across the political aisle who is elected to follow the most populist president in recent memory.

But the pendulum is not the only, nor arguably currently the most important, trajectory of presidential performance. Performances of mainstreamed populism are incentivised in a fragmented and hostile media environment and so common that audiences, fatigued and angered by politics as usual, have come to expect them. I argued in the Introduction that the Capitol Riot of 6 January 2021 epitomised the politics of distrust with which this book is concerned. The riot is perhaps the most striking consequence to date of a ‘populist slope’ in presidential rhetoric leading to ever more forceful renunciations of Washington's politics as usual, but not the only one. The 12th American Values Survey found that ‘[a]fter the violent attacks on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the prospect of political violence threatening a peaceful transfer of power has become more than an abstract question’ (PRRI 2021a, 37).