1B. Immature Leadership: President Trump?
A very recent paper by Scott Allison and others from the University of Richmond focuses directly on immature leadership and Donald Trump. The paper explores what it means for a person to show maturity as a leader. It also describes the developmental stages required to demonstrate mature leadership. The authors suggest the pinnacle of mature leadership is what they label as heroic transforming leadership. Two characteristics mark such leadership: unitive consciousness and non-dualistic thinking.
Unitive Consciousness
In Western society the authors suggest one becomes a mature leader by a process of becoming a hero. At the conclusion of this journey the hero is transformed into a wise elder.… Read the rest
Intellectual Humility
What might be a good candidate for a necessary personality characteristic for leading in complex, uncertain, and ambiguous times? I would nominate intellectual humility. IH involves recognizing that one’s beliefs and opinions may be incorrect. I note its resemblance to the notion of fallibilism in pragmatic philosophy, where one acknowledges that a personal belief may be fallible.
Psychological research sees intellectual humility as independent, different, from low self-confidence and even from the general notion of humility. Intellectual humility (IH) deals with how people think about themselves and the world. One might consider it a meta-cognitive that involves how one thinks about one’s thoughts.… Read the rest
Introduction to Part 2 (2 of 2)
In the first part of this two-part post I discussed one reason for my move from perhaps a naïve optimism to moderate pessimism about today’s polity and society. In this post, I discuss several additional reasons for my change in attitude.
One is the deep, intense political polarization now present in our polity and society. I think it important to differentiate between strong cultural divides or polarizations and our deep political polarization. During the past several decades the country witnessed several significant cultural divisions that were not aimed at or involved specific political parties.
In the 1950s, the Supreme Court’s Brown v.… Read the rest
White Evangelicals, Power, Fear, and Trump
An earlier post mentioned that differentiating the subcategories of category 2 () was very difficult. This post, the first of several on the Christian Right or evangelicals, illustrates this difficulty. I place this post under the category of Christian Right although it mentions the 2016 election in which 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Since the late ’70s the Christian Right has significantly and continually affected our society and polity. I believe this makes it worthy to treat as a separate subcategory. At times, however, I will treat the Christian Right within the context of Trump’s nomination and election.… Read the rest
White Voter Support for Trump
Two frameworks are useful in trying to explain the surprising 2016 election, and even the surprising nomination, of Donald Trump. One framework focuses on the macro level, covering the larger circumstances and conditions that permitted if not facilitated Trump’s election. The other framework focuses on the micro level, on the specific variables that resulted in Trump’s election. One can justly see Trump’s election as a perfect storm, a combination of many things that permitted his razor edge victory, about 70,000 votes total in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
American voters have gone to the polls five times in this young century to elect a president.… Read the rest
Trump’s Rhetorical Power
I found a recent paper by Timothy Haverda and Jeffery Halley (H&H) helpful in trying to understand Trump’s nomination and election. More implicitly, it may also help understand Trump’s base of support.
H&H base their paper on Theodor Adorno’s (1903 – 1969) analysis of a 1930s preacher in California, Martin Luther Thomas.* Based on Thomas’ radio addresses, Adorno identified 33 rhetorical devices that characterized Thomas’s speeches. The paper uses three of these devices (1) lone wolf, (2) movement, and (3) exactitude of error to analyze 16 Trump speeches. The speeches cover June 16, 2015 (Trump’s presidential announcement speech) to January 2017 (Trump’s Inaugural Address).… Read the rest
Communication Style in the Republican Primaries
Several posts on this blog discuss the topic of leadership, Trump, and rhetoric. I will add to this set of posts an article by three Canadian psychologists. Ahmadian et al. discuss Trump’s communication style. The article is based on research that compares Trump with his main opponents in the Republican primaries. The authors wrote the article prior to Trump’s general election win. They examined 27 speeches each of which involved 30 minutes or more of continuous speech not prompted by a question. The speeches averaged about 38.5 minutes. All the speeches were early speeches (each candidate’s announcement speech and two other early speeches).… Read the rest
Political Polarization and COVID-19 Avoidance (1B)
The first post in this series on political polarization and the COVID-19 pandemic. It focused on the reactions of right-wing populism toward public health guidelines that recommended various ways to combat the spread of the coronavirus. I then noted that I thought the research did not pay enough attention to the communication and information ecology played in explaining the behavior of right-wing populists. Since that post, several very recent papers deal with issues related to the first paper. I highlight three papers that flesh out the analysis contained in the first post.
What masks social conservatism’s reluctance to adhere to pandemic guidelines?
… Read the restTrump as a Caring Leader? (3B)
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted me to delve deeper into care ethics. I wanted to understand the extent to which our society was a caring society and if we as a nation could become a more caring country. Consequently, I started this series of blog posts. More basic, I started this blog to help me determine how and why Donald Trump was elected president. Also, I wanted to understand how he would perform as a leader, how he would govern our country. I now turn to this point by asking how Gabriel’s paper may be applicable to Trump.
It is impossible for me to see Trump as a caring leader.… Read the rest
COVID-19: “A Blessing from God”
President Trump on Wednesday, October 7 released a direct-to-camera video address to the nation in which he called getting the coronavirus “a blessing from God.” His comment coincided with my reading a paper by Ceri Hughes. Hughes analyzed 175 Trump speeches and about 30,000 Trump tweets for use of religious language. Hughes surprised me when I learned that his earlier research determined that Trump used both general religious terms and “God terms” at a significantly higher rate than all his predecessors from and including Franklin Roosevelt.
In his current paper, Hughes suggests that “Trump appears to use religious language in a strategic manner in two central ways.… Read the rest
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