Discussions of leadership, especially in moments of political upheaval, often focus on charisma, crisis management, or vision. Less frequently does public debate explore the methods by which leaders shape the perceptions and values of society. In the United States—and also elsewhere—over the last decade, one such method, gaslighting, has become not only a rhetorical device but also a genuine style of political leadership. The question is no longer whether gaslighting appears in politics, but rather what its elevation as a leadership style means for the health of democracy and the future of collective problem solving.
At a broad conceptual level, I understand “gaslighting” as persuasion that essentially involves besmirching or belittling, particularly through claims of violated values or commitments. Central to my argument, however, is a distinction common in philosophy, between concept and conceptions. Conceptions are more specific ways of developing a concept. The conception of gaslighting I develop here is “political gaslighting as a leadership style.” The leaders who exemplify this style—paradigmatically, Donald Trump and JD Vance in the United States, but also politicians in countries such as Hungary, Brazil, and Russia—alter how we commonly encounter leadership. Their gaslighting is a strategy designed to degrade the legitimacy of critics and opponents by accusing them of betraying the very norms that in fact are under assault by the gaslighters’ words and actions.
The resulting confusion and outrage are not accidental: They are central to gaslighting’s effectiveness as a leadership style. Gaslighting as a leadership style is a virulent form of populism. It is effective because there is so much indignation and outrage in contemporary societies anyway, and because related forms of behavior abound that are also often called gaslighting. Why contemporary societies are ridden by so much anxiety is not my focus here; but I see this anxiety as an important backdrop that enables gaslighting as a leadership style to flourish. And in fact, it seems to be one of the characteristics of our age that there is so much going on all around us, from manipulative behavior in relationships to leadership in politics, that analysts have felt was suitably treated under the heading of gaslighting.
This essay proposes a conception of political gaslighting specifically as a leadership style, to set it apart from other types of gaslighting, discusses key features and global variations, illustrates how gaslighting undermines democracy, and contrasts it with “adaptive leadership,” a leadership style that fortifies rather than weakens the democratic process. I conclude with a glance at the notion of statesmanship and with some suggestions of what citizens can do to make contributions—albeit necessarily very small ones—to the restoration of democracy.
Defining Gaslighting: Concept and Context
The term “gaslighting” originates from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, quickly adapted for film, wherein a husband manipulates his wife into doubting her perceptions and sanity to cover up his misdeeds. Unbeknownst to her, he searches the attic for jewelry that belonged to the previous owner, a wealthy woman whom he murdered several years earlier. When he turns on the gaslight in the attic, the lights dim elsewhere in the house. Whenever his wife brings this up, he dismisses her observations. Over time, references to gaslighting have become salient in clinical psychology, self-help literature, and—since the mid-2010s, amid the rise of social media and polarized politics—in public discourse.Footnote 1
Philosophers and social scientists have debated how best to conceptualize gaslighting. Staying close to the origins in Hamilton’s play, Kate Abramson’s influential account emphasizes the “emotional manipulation” that induces a target to doubt the reliability of their own beliefs and perceptions. Eric Beerbohm and Ryan Davis focus on “epistemic dependency”: gaslighters induce others to rely on the gaslighter (rather than their own faculties) for understanding reality, specifically in politics.Footnote 2
It is striking that gaslighting has become ubiquitous in ways beyond what can be explained by the commonplace nature of the phenomenon picked out in Hamilton’s play. We should think it is for good reason that people talk so much about gaslighting in ways not fully reducible to the same narrow notion. The distinction between “concept” and “conception” that is commonly deployed in philosophy might be useful to make sense of the phenomena. The concept identifies a broad phenomenon, and various conceptions then offer more specific versions that nonetheless all still find room under the broader concept.
If we were to identify a concept of gaslighting, it might be persuasion that essentially involves besmirching or a kind of belittling not warranted by facts. Much of what has been discussed as gaslighting fits under this concept. From there, more specific conceptions can be developed. Abramson’s account in terms of emotional manipulation fits here as one such conception: the besmirching or belittling consists in undermining a person’s (often a partner’s) confidence in their ability to form reliable beliefs and perceptions. Since Abramson is inspired by the original play, the belittling happens in a very direct way: the target is being told to her face that her perceptions are no good.
Beerbohm and Davis’s approach also fits: Here the focus is on how in a political context the gaslighter creates epistemic dependencies by getting the target to take the gaslighter’s cues about what happens in the world, even though the target would themself be perfectly capable of processing pertinent information on their own. This would not normally happen by directly confronting people’s abilities. Instead, it could happen, for instance, by flooding public communications with conspiracy theories so that the targets themselves accept that they need the gaslighter to tell them what is really going on. In both cases, besmirching or belittling not warranted by facts is essentially involved in the manipulation, but it happens in very different ways—exemplifying the kind of work that that the concept-conception distinction does.
My own conception, which aligns but does not merge with Beerbohm and Davis’s perspective, makes central unjustified accusations of violated values or commitments, rather than epistemic dependency. By focusing on such unjustified accusations, epistemic aspects remain very much part of the equation since the questioning of reality is central here—but the guiding theme of my conception is about values and commitments. By not making epistemic dependency central, my conception is then closer to Abramson’s account. But unlike Abramson’s interpersonal focus, my conception of gaslighting is as a style of leadership at the political level. Nonetheless, my conception still fits squarely under the “concept” I introduced earlier.
Not only does “political gaslighting as a leadership style,” as I am about to explicate it, incite indignation and outrage in its audience but a leadership style of this type can succeed only because contemporary societies are characterized by widespread phenomena of gaslighting as captured by these other conceptions that are not focused on leadership, and because there is so much indignation and outrage already.
On my conception, X indirectly gaslights Y and directly gaslights Z if X tries to persuade Z that Y violates certain values or commitments that X, Y, and Z all are taken to endorse, whereas in fact it is X that violates them. Here, X, Y, and Z can be individuals or collectives but are always understood as political actors within a community that recognizes some common commitments. Y is being besmirched in terms of their values and commitments, and Z is being persuaded of Y’s transgressions in the context of shared values and commitments among X, Y, and Z. Y and Z can in some cases be identical: One and the same entity is targeted by these efforts at persuasion and whose values and commitments are discredited. Or Y and Z might be different. This kind of gaslighting is common enough that our definition needs to be capacious enough to capture both the case when Y and Z are identical and the case when they are different. Let me elaborate.
For many people, “gaslighting” is associated with the rhetoric of Donald Trump. This view is reflected in the work of political columnist Amanda Carpenter, who devoted a book to Trump and gaslighting, as well as in the work of Beerbohm and Davis, who use him as a source of examples.Footnote 3 Indeed, a paradigmatic illustration of my conception is what Trump did after the 2020 elections. He (X) accused Biden’s Democrats (Y) of violating democratic norms (targeting the electorate, Z), whereas it was Trump himself who did so by filing and inspiring numerous frivolous lawsuits around “election fraud,” persistently ascribing multifarious versions of seemingly boundless dishonesty to Democrats.Footnote 4 In what we can sensibly understand as a vindictive response to a lost election, Trump agitated many of his followers to the point of storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In this case—where Trump discredited Biden’s and his party’s democratic values and commitments—the public was targeted. So, Y (Biden, the Democrats) and Z (the public) come apart.
Now consider a speech given by JD Vance on February 14, 2025, at the Munich Security Conference (MSC).Footnote 5 In this speech, Vance exported the Trump administration’s approach to domestic politics to the international arena. Far from addressing ongoing crises, such as the war in Ukraine, he castigated European allies for allegedly betraying democracy and civil rights, drawing loaded comparisons to Soviet-era censorship and totalitarianism. These claims rang hollow to an audience well versed in the costs of defending democracy.
Yet the logic of the speech was unmistakable: By framing European efforts to protect against disinformation and extremism as proof of authoritarianism, Vance shifted the burden: Europeans were forced to defend their commitments, even as the Trump administration’s own record on democracy drew sharp criticism at home and abroad. After all, it was within days of Trump’s inauguration that his appointees started to go after people who tried to safeguard democracy from their onslaught.Footnote 6 Since the Munich speech, democracy watchers have only increasingly rung alarm bells about democratic decline in the United States.Footnote 7
As far as my conception of gaslighting is concerned—political gaslighting as a leadership style—Vance’s speech is interestingly more complicated than Trump’s ongoing attacks on the Democrats. Vance disparaged his audience’s democratic credentials. Obviously, he was speaking not only about but also to them. So, one might look at the situation in such a way that Y and Z are identical. But it is also arguable that the audience was European, American, or global publics writ large. In this sense, Vance was directly gaslighting those audiences while indirectly gaslighting European leaders. (There is yet a further interpretation of the situation wherein he was not trying to persuade anyone but rather trying to convey to European right-wing parties that “America is on your side.” And while these various interpretations are not mutually exclusive, for our purposes we will set this final interpretation aside.)
On my view, in cases of political gaslighting, there is always someone who is directly gaslit and someone who is indirectly gaslit, though these actors may or may not be identical. That is, there is always someone targeted for persuasion and someone besmirched or belittled in ways not warranted by facts—and this is what makes gaslighting genuinely distinctive. Direct gaslighting without anybody being indirectly gaslit would just be persuading. Indirect gaslighting without anyone being directly gaslit would be besmirching or unjustified belittling. In cases of gaslighting, besmirching and persuading occur together within a system of shared values and commitments. Y is being framed in certain ways so that within the same system Z gets invested in X’s goals. Though I introduce my account as a type of persuasion, this kind of framing involves distortion of reality (lies, misleading statements, half-truths, and the like) and thus considerable epistemic failures in political discourse—and for this reason political gaslighting as a leadership style is a form of manipulation and thus a form of influencing someone’s decisions or behavior through means that bypass or undermine their rational decision-making capacity.
To return to the concept/conception distinction one more time: What I have presented here is a conception of political gaslighting as a leadership style, and in that sense I have presented it as something that involves an exercise of persuasion within an actual system of shared norms. This conception fits under the general concept I introduced, which is about persuasion that essentially involves besmirching or a kind of belittling not warranted by facts. Theorists such as Abramson and Beerbohm and Davis offer different conceptions that also fit under the concept. I do not mean to suggest that their conceptions are misguided. On the contrary: one point I am making here is that it indeed is a striking feature of our times that there is so much gaslighting, understood in the sense that there is so much behavior that fits under the general concept in either of these more specific conceptions. So, what I am submitting here is that political gaslighting as a leadership style is a distinctive phenomenon in politics but also one that, via the concept-conception distinction, can be connected to a number of related phenomena as identified by other authors.
Also note that my conception of political gaslighting as a leadership style foregrounds the theme of shared values and commitments—but to reiterate, the epistemic dimension emphasized by Beerbohm and Davis remains important. After all, we are talking about “persuasion,” whose etymological roots connect to a Latin root for “sweet.” Persuasion, that is, is about making something “sweet” for someone, making something desirable for them. And the kind of persuasion that occurs here is about (a) wrongfully characterizing one party as not living up to values and commitments to which everyone in this shared context is taken to be beholden, and (b) wrongfully characterizing oneself (the gaslighter) as living up to these values and commitments. Such acts of making something sweet for others will typically involve distortions about the words and actions of the party about which they are indirectly gaslit.
Gaslighting: More Elaboration and Differentiation from Other Forms of Manipulation
Successful political gaslighting has three major effects. The first is that it creates a moral high ground for X and followers. X projects moral rectitude, and while they might well believe their own message and draw strength from it, they need not actually believe the truth of what they say.Footnote 8 Since gaslighting occurs before a background of shared values or commitments, it is often with outrage that X accuses Y of violating these values and commitments. X articulates offense at the situation (and at Y) and seeks to draw Z into sharing this outrage. Others then flock to X because they, too, draw strength from alignment with the seemingly rightful stance that captures their indignation. Gaslighting—certainly as practiced by Trump or Vance—comes with a distinctive performative dimension that in Trump’s case typically rises to the level of spectacle.Footnote 9
The second effect is that successful political gaslighting puts a burden on Y to prove it is not them (Y) that violates norms. Among the resulting cacophony, voices in defense of Y are in the mix just as much as those in defense of X. Twenty-first century America is characterized by highly fragmented information environments. There is nothing like the BBC in the U.K. or the ARD in Germany, which generally at least try to create a shared context within which the public consumes news. In fragmented information environments, people draw their news from a broad range of sources that focus on very different things and add their own distinctive flavors. In fact, were my conception to be broadly used, it would be almost inevitable that any charge of gaslighting is followed by a countercharge from the accused party. In other words, anyone plausibly accused of gaslighting would very likely respond by hurling that same accusation back at the person who made the accusation. The only way to combat the deleterious effects of such an environment is through rigorous factual work. One reason gaslighting is so common and pernicious, however, is that many will decline to do such work.
This leads to the third effect. Political discourse where gaslighting abounds is exasperating and off-putting even for many who are convinced by a gaslighter’s message. People who enter politics with anything other than a blatant desire “to win” might well feel discouraged.Footnote 10 There is also the danger that accusations of gaslighting are hurled back and forth instead of made within a process aimed at sorting out genuine disagreement. The proliferation of accusations of gaslighting increases the psychological toll of constantly having to question one’s perceptions of reality and may lead to cynicism about all leaders. But where all of this is true, we are talking about a political context where sincerity and commitments to the polity even to the detriment of one’s own ambitions are only weakly present. Proliferation of such accusations would be more of the same.
Let me now distinguish political gaslighting as I understand it from other forms of manipulation. Such an exploration will make clearer why such gaslighting is a distinctive political phenomenon.
“Bullshitting” is commonly used to refer to speaking without regard to the truth.Footnote 11 It is not per se about persuading, and it is not per se about besmirching or belittling. What bullshitting and gaslighting have in common is that they are practiced by people who do not care about truth. But the ways in which they do not care about truth differ.
“Bullying” is about belittling, but it is not about persuading anyone.Footnote 12
“Grandstanding” is about presenting oneself in an overbearing manner but is neither distinctly about persuading nor necessarily about belittling. What grandstanding and gaslighting have in common is the effort at dominating by garnering undue attention for oneself to the detriment of others.Footnote 13
A “testimonial injustice” in the narrower sense is the dismissal of someone’s testimony at a hearing based on a prejudiced attitude toward this person or the group to which they belong. For instance, an all-white jury in the post–Civil War American South might have disregarded the testimony of a Black person. Testimonial injustice in a broader sense is about sidelining certain perspectives on history; for instance, as done in school curricula or in memory culture.Footnote 14 These phenomena are different from bearing false witness against someone, which obviously is also a distinctive form of injustice. It lies in the nature of political gaslighting that it involves bearing false witness, whereas, as a larger practice of leadership, political gaslighting may or may not involve testimonial injustice of these other types.
“Spinning,” as commonly understood in political communication, is about presenting information in the most favorable light from a certain standpoint while still acknowledging basic reality.Footnote 15 It is about persuading, but within the constraint just sketched, and is not necessarily about belittling anyone. What spinning and gaslighting have in common is an effort at presenting someone in a positive way to the detriment of other perspectives. But they differ immensely in how they do so. Spinning might well straddle the border between what is appropriate and inappropriate interaction, whereas gaslighting falls clearly on the inappropriate side.
“Disinformation” or “misinformation” is about deliberately deceiving others or carelessly sharing falsehoods; it is about persuading, but not necessarily belittling others.Footnote 16
“Propaganda” is about persuading masses toward specific beliefs or actions through emotional appeals and selective information. Propaganda may or may not involve gaslighting.Footnote 17
Let me finish up this section by clarifying the connection between political gaslighting as a leadership style by discussing populism. Populism is a complex phenomenon.Footnote 18 One frequently noted aspect of populism as a style of politics—including leadership—is that it pits a seemingly purified understanding of “the people” against a “corrupt elite.” This understanding simplifies complex problems into binaries and polarizations but does not necessarily depend on attributing violations of shared values, which is the essence of political gaslighting as a leadership style. So, in the leadership domain, we can think of populism as the broader notion and of gaslighting in the sense that I am discussing here as one distinctive version of populism.
Gaslighting as a Leadership Style: Examples from around the World
Political leadership is about giving orientation to a polity. To call political gaslighting a “style of leadership” is to say certain people who aim to give orientation to a polity do so by besmirching others within a shared system of values and commitments. This style of leadership is now prevalent in, but not limited to, the United States. Gaslighting has become increasingly visible as a global, if contextually adapted, style of leadership. Let me offer several examples. Given constraints of space, I offer these examples telegram-style, as illustrations and research hypotheses, and refrain from doing the documentary work to substantiate my claim. In all these cases, the leaders in question are also populists in the sense introduced above.
Under the banner of “European values,” Hungary’s president, Viktor Orbán, has routinely accused domestic critics of betraying Hungarian national identity and EU officials of undermining Hungarian sovereignty. In Orbán’s telling, domestic critics, EU officials, and allegedly foreign entities such as the Open Society Foundations thereby undermine the Hungarian people’s ability to chart their own path. He makes such accusations even as he strips Hungarian media of independence, limits judicial checks, and rewrites electoral rules to entrench one-party rule. Orbán frames civil society organizations and opposition parties as “enemies of the nation.” He thereby turns sincere concerns about pluralism into supposed betrayals of Hungary itself.Footnote 19
Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, depicted himself as the sole defender of democracy against “deep state” actors, environmental NGOs, and “communists.” He did so while casting doubt on legitimate elections and subverting accountability mechanisms. His persistent attacks on the Supreme Court and electoral system forced defenders of democracy to argue on their back foot, fighting to prove that they were, in fact, upholding the constitution. Bolsonaro’s post-2022 refusal to acknowledge defeat and appeals for the Trump administration to intervene in his trial mimicked U.S. patterns.Footnote 20
Russia’s Vladimir Putin has used rhetoric of antifascism and “defense of Russian culture” to construe dissent as existential treachery, thereby rationalizing repression. While harsher and more tightly tied to state coercion than in the U.S. or Brazil, this usage similarly seeks to position the ruling party as the sole possessor of legitimacy. Critics are rebranded as traitors.Footnote 21
Or consider the U.K.: During the heated Brexit years, certain politicians and media allies branded opponents (“remainers”) as “saboteurs” or “enemies of the people” for voicing concerns about the national direction.Footnote 22 Much of this was populist framing, with episodes verging into gaslighting territory. This was so especially when those advocating institutional stability were painted as undemocratic, even as constitutional norms were being circumvented by executive attempts to avoid parliamentary oversight, ignore judicial decisions, and concentrate decision-making power in ways that departed from centuries of constitutional practice.Footnote 23
The throughline in these cases is a strategic move that denies opponents the possibility of occupying the moral high ground. Critics of the gaslighting leader(s) or defenders of inherited norms become the “real problem.” Thereby the locus of public anxiety moves away from the leader’s own actions. This works well where there is already much indignation and outrage across society.
The Work of Democracy and the Promise of Adaptive Leadership
Democracies are built on the idea that citizens, armed with diverse moral commitments and interests, can disagree, deliberate, and hold leaders accountable within a shared basic structure of values. For this to be possible, at least some level of common factual reference and mutual acknowledgment of norms is necessary. In addition, for democracies to do well, a critical mass of politicians—and of citizens—must be more committed to the flourishing of the polity than to their own political success. There must be concerted efforts to maintain this system and to advocate for change within it, through means that the traditions of the democratic system have established over time. This is the work of democracy.
Gaslighting undermines all of this through several mechanisms. Where gaslighting dominates as a leadership style, the public might well cease to trust either side—often disengaging altogether or retreating into confirmation-biased enclaves. The performative outrage of gaslighters maintains and incites indignation among followers. It also wears out defenders of ordinary norms, who must repeatedly defend ground that had previously appeared self-evident. The work of democracy—patient, iterative, and based on shared deliberation about adaptive challenges—is displaced by relentless contests over moral territory.
By contrast, a style of leadership that does the work of democracy is captured by the notion of “adaptive leadership,” which has been developed by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky and taught around the world.Footnote 24 For the purposes of understanding adaptive leadership as a counterweight to gaslighting, I will highlight three characteristics that Heifetz and Linsky themselves have emphasized about this approach.
To begin with, adaptive leadership contrasts leadership with “authority” (formal or informal) and the “wielding of power.” Positions of formal authority are appointed or elected offices whose contours are visible in institutional or organizational expectations. Positions of informal authority are defined by characteristics like charisma, relatability, social status, wealth, insightfulness, and empathy. These are features that often attract followers. Wielding power involves the ability to get people to do things that otherwise they would not do or would do for different reasons.Footnote 25 Some people wield power detached from formal or informal authority. Some people who have either form of authority wield no power. But often wielding power and holding positions of authority coincide.
Adaptive leadership understands leadership as something yet different. Here—and this is the second feature—leadership is understood in the context of particular kinds of problems, adaptive problems, which contrast with technical problems. “Technical problems” involve the exercise of skills or application of knowledge available within a system. A typical example is surgery. It takes years of training to do such work well but normally involves application of standards or practices shared within the medical profession. In contrast, “adaptive problems” involve adjustments to new circumstances. In the medical domain, to stay with that example, adaptive challenges often arise in addition to technical ones: after receiving medical advice, patients must make lifestyle changes so that the medical advice makes a difference.
Adaptive problems arise for companies that keep an eye on markets or for countries that handle changes in the global economy or developments in the regional balance of power. They also arise for families that work through crises. Adaptive challenges must be identified properly because they require adjustments to an institution’s structure, which cannot be brought about solely through power or authority. People must learn new things and interact differently, which requires a plan for how to adapt.
A third feature of adaptive leadership is that it views leadership as a set of learnable skills and best practices, rather than innate characteristics or personality traits. The adaptive leader may or may not have authority or wield power. In principle, anyone within the entity (institutions, companies, families) about whose adaptive challenges we inquire could exercise adaptive leadership—and thus could deploy a set of best practices that in the teaching of adaptive leadership are conveyed to help adaptive leaders do their work. Some best practices are about enabling people within the system to identify the adaptive challenge, assess how it concerns them specifically, and take steps toward required changes. Other practices involve pacing the work and keeping track of changes to make sure people are not overextended. The skills and practices conveyed in the teaching about adaptive leadership are about enabling whole groups to do the needed work.
These features allow for a critical assessment of gaslighting as a style of leadership in the context of democratic culture. The first opens space for critical questions about leadership by differentiating it from wielding power and exercising authority. Once we have such differentiations on the table, intriguing questions arise—such as whether Trump and Vance ought to be called leaders in the first place. Instead, they might be best understood as wielders of power rather than leaders—or maybe they are practitioners of a profoundly troubling understanding of leadership. Similar assessments apply to other figures mentioned above.
The second feature lets us formulate one essential demand vis-à-vis democratic leadership: To take the work of democracy seriously, one must prepare the polity for major upcoming challenges. The ways in and extent to which the Trump administration does or does not do such work is a big topic. Let me just draw attention to one thing to illustrate what I mean here: The reality of climate change is no longer disputed in any meaningful sense. Leaving the fallout from climate change to the creativity and resilience of future generations—as the Heritage Foundation proposes, and as the Trump administration seems to be doing—ignores one of the major adaptive challenges to any nation at this stage.Footnote 26
Doing so also shifts the burden of this challenge to a generation that will no longer have as much agency about the problem as we currently do. We need to take measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change now, since otherwise we are saddling future generations with what is likely to be irretrievable harm. It is hard to find an attractive vision for the future of the country in an approach to politics that simply leaves one of the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced to the ingenuity of those who will suffer from this inaction.
Regarding the third feature of adaptive leadership, for leaders to enable citizens to confront adaptive challenges, they must motivate and mobilize citizens to focus on challenges their polities face. This requires a willingness to deal with reality rather than the gaslighter’s fantasies. Moreover, gaslighting is highly divisive and thus undermines the unity of purpose needed to tackle adaptive challenges. While adaptive leadership offers a set of practices to enable first the adaptive leaders and then those who become enabled through their work to tackle future challenges, gaslighting leaves the work of democracy undone.
Conclusion, with a Glance at Statesmanship
This essay brings into view the contrast between political gaslighting as a leadership style and adaptive leadership. The ubiquity of gaslighting is, in itself, a characteristic of our times. The term is used to describe a number of different specific variations that nonetheless remain recognizable as different conceptions of the same phenomenon. Accordingly, I understand the concept of gaslighting as persuasion that essentially involves besmirching or a kind of belittling that is not warranted by the facts. I offer a specific conception—political gaslighting understood as a leadership style—according to which X indirectly gaslights Y and directly Z, if X tries to persuade Z that Y violates certain values or commitments that X, Y, and Z all are taken to endorse, whereas in fact it is X that violates them (where X, Y, and Z are political actors, individuals, or collectives). Z and Y may or may not be identical. This conception takes into account the omnipresent outrage that accompanies contemporary politics in America and elsewhere. This outrage also creates a cover for gaslighters to do just what they accuse their opponents of doing.
Let me conclude with a glance at statesmanship. In his book on international affairs The Law of Peoples, political philosopher John Rawls offers a brief discussion of the statesman. “Statesmen,” he explains, are high officials “who, through their exemplary performance and leadership in their office, manifest strength, wisdom, and courage. They guide their people in turbulent and dangerous times.”Footnote 27 Beyond this, like most philosophers, Rawls has little to say about leadership. Paradigmatically, he focuses on social structures and institutions, conceptualizing leadership in terms of what is needed to create and maintain the right structures or institutions. Also, he treats statesmanship as an ideal. This is very different from adaptive leadership, which comes with a set of practices and can be applied to every organization or institution for which adaptive problems arise (and to everyone in those organizations).
Still, what little Rawls does say suggests that in his view statesmanship involves adaptive leadership (though he does not use this term). He draws a distinction between the statesman and the politician, enlisting the saying “The politician looks to the next election, the statesman to the next generation.”Footnote 28 Statesmanship is about seeing “deeper and further than most others” do, grasping “what needs to be done.” To illustrate, his examples of statesmen include Washington and Lincoln, and those who fell short—even though they had much impact and power—including Bismarck, Napoleon, and Hitler. An adaptive leadership lens would likewise judge these “leaders” in a similar way. Notably, Rawls observes that statesmen “must be selfless in their judgments and assessments of their society’s fundamental interests” and “not be swayed by passions of vindictiveness.”Footnote 29 This requirement further distinguishes statesmanship, based in adaptive leadership, from gaslighting. I noted earlier that Trump’s attitude toward his 2020 loss amounts to vindictiveness. That spirit fuels gaslighting as a leadership style, rather than statesmanship.
Trump’s persistent denial of his electoral loss in 2020 and Vance’s MSC speech are paradigmatic examples of political gaslighting, as opposed to adaptive leadership and statesmanship. But let me also anticipate a possible objection that might say that surely not everything done by Trump, Vance, or any of the politicians I have used as examples in this piece counts as gaslighting, and thus my analysis does them an injustice. And indeed, what I have argued here neither shows nor even suggests that everything they do is gaslighting. What I have argued here is consistent with this administration doing adaptive work in certain domains, with them being recognizable as leaders according to other understandings of leadership, and with them having informal authority in addition to the formal authority they obviously have, as well as with them generating many adaptive activities around the world. All of these matters must be considered in a comprehensive assessment of these politicians as leaders—which is not my goal. What has been my goal, however, is to argue that gaslighting as a leadership style is very pronounced among the current American leadership and thus deserves to be singled out.
And indeed, such other aspects of their leadership notwithstanding, gaslighting is central to Trump and Vance’s style of leadership and gaslighting as a style of leadership is inconsistent with adaptive leadership. Given how much adaptation is currently needed in the United States and elsewhere, favoring gaslighting casts a long shadow over the whole planet. In many respects, gaslighting today is a global scourge on democracy. Adaptive leadership does the work of democracy. Gaslighting does not.
The future of democracy in the United States and elsewhere depends on things not staying this way. To confront entrenched gaslighting in public life, civic institutions and leaders—as well as everyday citizens—can do the following:
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1. Recognize the pattern: Understanding the differences between gaslighting and ordinary disagreement is a first step.
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2. Rebuild epistemic trust: Investment in fact-based media, deliberative fora, and education for critical thinking is essential. If this cannot be done at the federal level in the United States at this stage, states and cities that take this problem seriously should do what they can to address it.
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3. Empower adaptive leaders: Those who encourage shared work, refuse to scapegoat, and prioritize long-term adaptation over short-term polarization must be identified, supported, and held up as models.
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4. Resist the seduction of outrage: The politics of perpetual outrage and inverted values is corrosive to solidarity and governance. In their voting behavior and own political agency, citizens can avoid such practices and reward politicians who do.
All of this sounds straightforward when set in print right before us. And yet it is obvious how hard it is these days to follow up on these suggestions, and one point of this essay has been to illuminate further the context in which it is so hard to do so. It is therefore difficult to finish our discussion on a genuinely uplifting note. Democracy must be fought for—continually, creatively, and collectively. The path forward does not lie in denying our difficulties but in embracing leadership that is honest, accountable, and capable of guiding societies through transformations. Every contribution matters, from large-scale reform to acts of civic courage. Our future will be defined by whether we heed this call—because to defend democracy is, unavoidably, to confront and repudiate the corrosive leadership style of political gaslighting wherever it appears.
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