From Tycoon to Buffoon-Divinised King
Photo credits: the Guardian. Trump rudely walks away without clear reason from former Argentinian president Mauricio Macri in Argentina during G8 conference in 2018
By Iacopo Nassigh
You know when an old man that you could easily picture drinking coffee and reading a newspaper at a café instead roams onto the dance floor attracting all the attention? Think about a character like Jep Gambardella (the 65-year-old Roman socialite), portrayed by Toni Servillo in Sorrentino’s film ‘The Great Beauty’. What I want to write about is exactly this sort of paradox of how people who do not behave like stereotypical leaders end up being in charge. This paradox of authority (like Jep being a Roman nightlife star), where leaders explicitly break the rules that position seems to entail (for Jep; his being young and beautiful) yet remain authoritative and popular as a leader, seems clearly applicable in contemporary politics. Yet arguably this is a historical phenomenon and could actually be a key part in maintaining the mystery and separateness that maintains leadership.
David Graeber (2017) writes about sovereignty in an attempt to deconstruct it to original ‘types’ embodying sovereign power and its paradoxes. He finds that the figure of the buffoon is a common archetype for a leader, and this archetype has existed extra-temporally. Graeber describes this type as first emerging in Native North American societies on the West Coast where ‘the buffoon’ played an important ritual role and was uniquely unbounded by rules but simultaneously able to enforce them, like a modern-day police officer acting unpunished. This exemption from the behavioural rules that guide daily life, Graeber argues, is one of two key features of authority. The other, he suggests, is the principle of divine kingship.
The figure of the buffoon features frequently today, and as Graeber argues, is often combined with divine kinship such as in the figures of Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump (1). This seems to make a lot of sense. Indeed, both have proved their ‘buffoon’-like characters, refusing to embody a traditional presidential behaviour during their time in charge. This is clearly visible if we just look at a couple of their past statements and actions: Berlusconi doing the cuckoo to former German chancellor Angela Merkel in 2008 (2). Trump calling a group of African countries, Haiti, and El Salvador at a meeting for immigration at the Oval Office in 2018 ‘shithole countries’ (3). At the same time, one could argue that both have been divinised by their followers since they had the capacity to mobilise adoring masses of supporters, filling them with enthusiasm in a short time (4). However, an essential aspect that they share seems to me the most fundamental in establishing them both as buffoons and divinised kings: they are tycoons.
Modern day tycoons are one of a kind. Their hideous wealth seems to posit them on another level than the platform occupied by ‘common’ people in the neoliberal pyramid, at the pinnacle of the ones who ‘made’ it. This gives rise to a twofold phenomenon. On one side, they are constantly celebrated by the media as otherworldly, self-made geniuses. At the same time, these people feel free to break social and legal rules that apply to the common person. This ranges from dressing etiquette (you are thinking about Zuckerberg in sliders as well, right?) to tax payment (when did Elon Musk last pay his fair share of taxes?). However, it would be misleading to say that they behave merely without caring about legal or ethical frameworks. The reality is that we allow them to do so without much popular outrage. These two aspects of the tycoon: genius and outlaw, embody two of our secret, impossible dreams. First, to be intelligent enough not to work, in a western context where we are obliged to do ‘bullshit jobs’ as Graeber puts it. Second, not caring about laws and norms, which are ever frequent in our hyper-bureaucratised world; to be able to do whatever we want. That’s why we love them, and continue to accept them.
Photo credits: The telegraph. Berlusconi meets Barack. and Michelle Obama in 2009. Opening his arms he does this extremely misogynist gesture that expresses delight for Michelle Obama.
However, this is not enough to come to rule a country. Normal tycoons are neither buffoon nor divine kings, they are missing something. There is a difference between being considered a genius and being divine. In the same fashion, it's one thing to not care about legal and moral norms but another to deny and enforcing them at the same time, as a ‘buffoon’ does. Tycoons are more like superheroes (a popular superhero, iron-man, embodies this type very well) residing in their tall towers without any actual engagement with the ‘normal world’ around them. They are trying to go to Mars or are implementing the metaverse, dreams too distant for people to relate to. They are actually failed buffoon-divine-kings, their shortcoming being any sort of tie with social reality and real people. To say it in Barthes’ words, they are missing a ‘prosaic incarnation’ that could better raise up the ‘singularity of a vocation’ (2009: 21). What Barthes is talking about is the process through which a sense of proximity and relatedness raises up in our eyes a person that we already find extraordinary, in this case the tycoon. Let’s now see how Trump and Berlusconi instead managed to ultimate a ‘prosaic incarnation’ and transform from tycoons into buffoons and divine kings.
In their buffoon-becoming, the ‘prosaic incarnation’ was achieved through their speaking about topics sensitive for their electorate. For example, they both presented themselves as defenders of Christianity, matching the worries of a large part of their respective electorates scared about a ‘culture war’ with Islam. This is clear in Berlusconi’s and Trump’s racist migration policies and their more covert support of conservative Christian groups. In one of Trump’s many memorable speeches, he stated ‘Christians will have power’ (5), in a densely Christian-populated town in Iowa. Berlusconi’s relationships during his period in power with Camillo Ruini, then leader of the episcopal conference of Italy (an influential conference of Italian bishops (6) also highlights this. At the same time, they established themselves as buffoons, dismissing the same rules they proclaimed to defend. While promoting Christian values, didn’t they both break important Christian dictums, both accused of rape and statutory rape (7) by several different women?
The same process is at work in similar ways for Berlusconi and Trump’s acclamation as divinised kings. This time, the illusion of proximity to the electorate is created through a myth: that everyone can make it. Trump and Berlusconi have perpetuated a narrative of them as self-made men who achieved their status through hard work. This closes the gap between them and the average citizen, who see in their positions a possible future for themselves. This makes them appear not just as genius, like many tycoons, but divine as they seem attainable and relatable. They thus transcend onto another qualitative level to the tycoon.
That said, it could be argued that figures like Berlusconi and Trump may have manipulated the minds of their electorate of their supposed ‘prosaic incarnation’. However, as Bloch (1986) argues regarding the leadership of Elders in the Malagasy circumcision ritual, it's highly unlikely that this is the whole truth. Instead, Bloch finds that Malagasy elders are perceived as related to myths surrounding rituals (he gives the example of circumcision rituals), and as separate from mortal life. In the same fashion, Berlusconi and Trump are themselves products of the ideology that has led them to power: neoliberal entrepreneurial success, as their validity as leaders is maintained because of their proximity to this myth. In Madagascar, the only viable way to perpetuate the ideological myths in the circumcision ritual is, according to Bloch, conducting violence against all that opposes the myth, namely the earthly world. In our contemporary western case, the same could be said for the governments perpetuated by the divinised buffoons, violently attacking all that opposes the neoliberal myth.
Indeed, violence has been used by Trump and Berlusconi against many adversaries of the neoliberal myth. Behind the myth that ‘everyone can make it’ lies the exclusion of many groups that are ‘othered’: women, the working-class, migrant labourers, and indigenous communities among others. Women’s rights have been attacked by Berlusconi and Trump, arguable due to their position as outsiders of the chauvinist neoliberal project, with attempts to take away a powerful right fought for and achieved: the abortion right (8). Many working-class people who still symbolize an antagonism of the neoliberal project have been subjected to increased precarity with new liberalisation of employment (9). Migrant labourers, attacked as a menace to neoliberal nation-state sovereignty, have been prevented citizenship and belonging from the countries they form the hidden labour force for, with a drastic diminution of their rights and a parallel increase in their exploitation (10). As regards to indigenous communities, many persist to be an enemy of neoliberal neo-colonialism. Much has been said about Trump’s attempts to destroy Native American ways of life, especially with regards to the Dakota Access Pipeline (11).
This violence not only attacks those who oppose the neoliberal project (directly or through their mere existence) but is also committed against the people who form the backbone of the economy through invisible and informal work. Their continued invisibilisation and exploitation is necessary to prop up neoliberalism and maintains its myths, and these are indeed myths. Our buffoon-divine-king leaders are not self-made; they have always been rich (12).
Notes
1. Graeber mentions Mbembe’s (1992) study of African kleptocrats as another example of a buffoon-divinised king kind of authority. This article will deal with western versions of this concept, focusing on how this intersects with western neoliberalism rather than how in Africa this intersects with postcolonialism as showed by Mbembe.
2. https://video.repubblica.it/cronaca/e-berlusconi-fa-cucu-alla-merkel/26451/27104?video
3. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/shithole-countries/580054/
4. 3 months for Berlusconi, little more than one year for Trump
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/us/evangelicals-trump-christianity.html
6. a word was created for these state-church relationships in Italian: Ruinismo
7. Silvio Berlusconi’s most memorable accusation was when he was accused of having paid for sex an underaged girl in 2011. Trump has been accused several times of rape and sexual assault.
8. in the case of Trump this has happened through the pro-life Supreme Court judges he expressly selected. In the case of Berlusconi, a member of his party has just presented some days ago a proposal of a law to make the embryo a legal subject from conception and not from birth, fact that would dramatically undermine the right to abortion.
9. The century foundation made a report on how Trump policies damaged, instead of favouring as promised by Trump during his campaign, manufacturing workers, especially in the Midwest. Berlusconi numerous labour liberalisations, one among many the decreet named ‘liberalisations in the job market’ in 2008, have devastated Italian working classes, rising informal work and precarity.
10. Trump policies against migrants are notorious. Berlusconi anti-immigration policies have flourished through his agreements with former Libyan dictator Gaddafi, stipulated to render way more difficult and perilous the passage of immigrants across the two countries.
11. For example, Schnepf (2019).
12. Trump: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/trump-self-made-man-myth_n_5bb46528e4b028e1fe38ebaf Berlusconi was not as rich as Trump when he started his business career. Nonetheless, he received the capital to start his enterprise thanks to his dad’s job as a high bank officer.
Bibliography
• Barthes, Roland (2009) ‘The writer on holiday’ in Mythologies. London: Vintage
• Bloch, Maurice (1986) From blessing to violence: history and ideology in the circumcision ritual of the Merina of Madagascar. New York: Cambridge University Press
• Graeber, David (2017) ‘Notes on the politics of divine kingship’, Sahlins, Marshall, Graeber, David (ed.), On kings. Chicago: HAU books