Oprah and Trump, two sides of the same coin?

Natasha Zaretsky, The Odd Couple: Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey, and Contemporary Charisma, The Hedgehog Review, Spring 2020:

How, then, do we explain the respective charismas of Oprah Winfrey and Donald Trump? I propose that their charismatic powers make sense only in light of the dramatic shift in authority relations that has been underway since the 1970s. During the last five decades, traditional racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies have toppled as women, people of color, and sexual minorities have gained greater visibility in public life. At the same time, economic and social inequality has sharpened while the distribution of wealth has become precariously asymmetrical, workers’ rights have been obliterated, and public goods like health care, education, and housing have been degraded. We thus find ourselves moving simultaneously forward and backward in time: forward into a public sphere that is more gender egalitarian, more multiracial, and more sexually capacious; and backward into a winner-take-all economy and culture that is often described as a new Gilded Age. This backward-forward motion is the product of a comprehensive shift in authority relations. Some, such as those within the traditional family, have loosened, while others, such as those that revolve around property, have tightened. This is what we might call the neoliberal paradox, and it is a defining feature of our time.

On the surface, it appears that Winfrey and Trump reflect the two sides of this paradox, with Winfrey capturing the dissolution of traditional gender and racial hierarchies and Trump symbolizing the boss’s ever-tightening grip. But Winfrey and Trump are not oppositional figures. Rather, each signals the simultaneously occurring breakdown of patriarchal authority and consolidation of market forces throughout the society. Consequently, Winfrey and Trump work with rather than against each other by accelerating a historical transition underway in the late capitalist family and workplace.

Winfrey and Trump harnessed the energies unleashed by the gender revolution of the late twentieth century to consolidate their charismatic authority. Over the course of their careers, they have used the medium of television to translate these energies into lessons for their followers about how to navigate life in workplaces that are at once more meritocratic and more predatory. Ultimately, as contemporary charismatic leaders par excellence, Winfrey and Trump fulfill a crucial need among their devotees: They guide them as they live through the dissolution of patriarchy and the intensification of market fundamentalism and economic inequality.

At the end of the article:

If we take seriously Weber’s insights about charismatic authority, the two charismas of Winfrey and Trump track both the breakdown of patriarchal authority and the consolidation of market domination in contemporary life. This tale of two charismas reveals that twenty-first-century capitalism legitimates itself in the midst of so much predation by manipulating and exploiting the antiauthoritarian energies unleashed by the gender revolution, harnessing those energies rather than suppressing them. Even as Winfrey and Trump appeared estranged from the social movements that took off in the 1960s, both drew on those movements without realizing that that was what they were doing. And both relied on the intimate, pervasive medium of television to reroute the energies of those movements in ways that have ended up strengthening the winner-take-all ethos of market fundamentalism in our social and cultural imaginary.

It may be tempting to see Winfrey as the embodiment of everything good about our age and Trump as the embodiment of everything bad. But in the end, both endorse the same belief: that there are only winners and losers. Winfrey’s cruelty is shrouded in therapeutic language, while Trump is bald-faced about the brute forces that pervade society. The world according to Trump is one of tough operators and cutthroat financial killers, “the kind of people who leave blood all over the boardroom table.”26 While most American workers today do not move in Trump’s circles, they do inhabit workplaces where, no matter how hard they work, their fates are determined by forces beyond their control, and they experience life as largely a series of accidents, contingencies, lucky breaks, and sudden reversals of fortune.

Winfrey rejects this grim take on the winner-take-all society. While she rose to fame by tearing back the curtain on the ugly side of heterosexual relations, she has gone on to cultivate a self-help philosophy that insists that people create their own realities. Winfrey hates the concept of luck and considers herself in touch with the divine. “Luck is a matter of preparation,” she has said. “I am highly attuned to my divine self.” The callousness of this perspective came into sharp relief when she once suggested to Elie Wiesel that his survival at Auschwitz constituted a direct miracle from God. “If a miracle of God to spare me, why?” he countered. “There were people much better than me…. No, it was an accident.”

In Winfrey’s world there are no accidents; everything happens for a reason. In Trump’s world, might makes right and coercion rules. Trump’s worldview resonates with the lived experiences of workers, while also trafficking in the seductive fantasy that a baby can become the boss. Winfrey also offers a fantasy figure: a guardian angel with whose help working people imagine they might escape. But neither a dealmaker nor a fairy godmother offers us a way out of our new Gilded Age.