Umair Haque Reflects on JD Vance's Negative Charisma
here's part of Haque's bio on Amazon, which described him as one of the world's leading thinkers. A member of the Thinkers50, the authoritative ranking of the globe's top management experts, he has published books through Harvard Business Publishing, and authored Harvard Business Review's top blog for several years before falling out with the Harvard set. He rebuilt a following on medium.com and more recently established his own site The Issue,
extracts below are from his latest essay published Sunday on The Issue and entitled "The Negative Charisma of JD Vance."
UMAIR HAQUE:
"It's been a breakneck few weeks in politics. Trump, Biden, Kamala. And by now, a weird and funny thing’s begun to happen. Trump chose JD Vance as his VP pick. And somehow, it turned out to be a great stroke of fortune for a newly ascendant Kamala, the Democrats, and democracy itself.
"Because Vance has this rarest of qualities, seldom seen, in public life. Negative charisma. A quality that’s so rare and singular that we don’t even have a word for it, which points to how funny and strange it really is. He opens his mouth, and people are just jaw-droopingly creeped out.
"And then he adds fuel to the weird inside out fire of negative charisma, doubling down on comments about “cat ladies.” We’re going to discuss what it all means in just a second, because it does have a kind of deep meaning, in the evolution of fascism, and democratic collapse, make no mistake. But first, we’re going to discuss the…human end.
"How many celebrities do you see, after all, with negative charisma? Not just no charisma, but a sort of black hole that sucks all the energy from the room? Funny.
[Haque then describes how spin meisters, global publishers and even Hollywood unsuccessfully attempted to reshape Vance's image and create mythology.)
"The idea was manifold. He was a rebel, a genius, an intellectual, a man of the people, authentic, noble, wise, a kind of long-suffering almost Socratic figure in the wilderness of American politics, or maybe something like a JFK of the right.
"And then America met JD Vance.
"Hilarity ensued, because it turned out, he was none of the above. He was just something like a…creep. The weirdo at work, who’s always making off comments. The angry dad at the soccer park. The guy at the lonely end of the bar, muttering into his beer.
"Things got very weird, very fast, because Vance kept on making them weirder and weirder.Awkward. Uncomfortable. Tense.
......
"Positive and Negative Charisma, Or, Kamala vs Vance"
"So what does this all mean?
"Obviously, it’s a huge boon to Kamala, who, it turns out, has a great deal of actual charisma. Much more so than even Joe Biden, and we can see that in the explosive wake of her rise to nominee. It didn’t have to be that way. Charisma is what made that happen, a base uniting behind her, donors pouring money in, and there’s a lesson there, even beyond the obvious one, which is this sort of hilarious juxtaposition of Kamala’s charisma, laughing, fierce, tender, warm, versus Vance’s anti-charisma, which is…
......
"Where does that negative charisma come from, anyways? Think about how remarkable it is that even after Big Publishing and Hollywood try to make an entire mythology for you…people still don’t like you. That’s so remarkable I don’t think we’ve ever really seen it before.
When the machinery of celebrity starts to work, by and large, people believe it, and there’s almost nothing that can discredit or pierce it. Once you’re famous, you stay famous. Once the machine tells people to like and respect someone, by and large, they do.
"So this is how deep negative charisma really goes. Even all the PR and institutional power in the world hasn’t been a match for Vance’s natural negative charisma.
"That comes from a certain place, if you ask me. A sort of deadness in the eyes. You get the sense that here’s a person who isn’t there in some sense. There’s a lack of empathy, honesty, truth, the qualities of a great soul. You get the sense that suffering—which is what the mythology was about in this case—hasn’t, somehow, led to wisdom, grace, decency, kindness, married with the toughness to persevere in the names of goodness.
"And that’s bewildering, because once you realize that, the mythology soon enough falls apart. Suffer that much? You’re supposed to mature. Not end up this weird dead-eyed man-child hurling insults at, of all things, “cat ladies.”"
