Perhaps the Democratic Party needs to become a personality cult to win. If so they will need the perfect leader. By Hal M. Brown

I was struck by one sentence in the excellent conversation Chauncey DeVega had with M. Steven Fish,  professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His new book is “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nationand Restoring Democracy's Edge.”

Here's the entire Salon column:

The path forward for progressives is a return to PR basics: Put personality before policy

This was in answer to the question "If you were to build a Democrat or other pro-democracy candidate in a laboratory who could defeat Trump and the MAGA movement and his successors, what attributes would he or she have?"

I've highlighted the sentence that prompted me to write this blog below:

Above all, she or he would own the flag and be very confident and bold in how they present themselves and live. They would project sincerity and confidence in their beliefs and values. Everything grows from there. If you can’t even offer straight answers to straightforward questions — and Harris, as it turned out, refused to do so — many voters will perceive you as a poll-driven, craven, conniving politician who isn’t up to the job of protecting them and their interests. And most people also gravitate toward leaders who seem to love the country best and associate themselves with its exceptional attributes and boundless promise.

Democrats should also embrace charisma and search for a leader who’s got it. Liberals dislike personalism, preferring to place policies before personalities. To some extent, that’s healthy. But we’ve got to recognize that Obama had a lot more to do with Obama’s election and reelection than Obamacare did.

In fact, even liberals like having a main man or woman — most people naturally seek the person in charge. His or her personal appeal and mode of messaging has an enormous bearing on the morale of the party and shapes how the party and its causes are perceived by the electorate. That decidedly does not mean turning the party into a personality cult. That’s what the Republicans have done with Trump and what India’s Hindu-chauvinist BJP party has done with Narendra Modi. Nor does it mean that the leader has to be intolerant of differences within the party. FDR, JFK and Bill Clinton had enormous authority in the party and in America as a whole, but they didn’t seek to monopolize power and glory and their party wouldn’t have stood for it if they did. The same is true for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, as it was for Margaret Thatcher in the UK in the 1980s and Jawaharlal Nehru in India during the 1940s-1960s.

What, I pondered, would happen if the Democrats could find their own version of Donald Trump? What if they had more charisma than any of the other leaders referred to above? What if they turned the party into a personality cult?

What if they found a leader who exuded charisma through their pores? What if they walked and talked as if they had the glow of charisma surrounding them the way Christ is depicted in drawings and paintings, only in addition to appearing compassionate they would have rippling muscles?

I am not saying they should personally distribute trading cards the way Trump did with his face on muscle bound bodies, but perhaps people would use images like the one I used AI to create to make fantasy images with the face of the new Democratic leader as a superman or Rambo. These wouldn't be official but they could make their way into public consciousness through social media.

Assuming we even have an election in four years there may be only two ways for the Democrats to beat the presumed Republican/MAGA candidate J.D. Vance. Vance of course has the charisma of a cockroach. But the only way we can be assured of a Democratic win for both the presidency and Congress is for Trump to have turned the country into such hellhole that the gullible people who bought his lies and voted for him see their everyday lives turn to crap. They would have to be convinced this was Trump and the Republicans fault to the point that they vote for a Democratic Homer Simpson to be president.

The other way is for the Democrats to have their own cult leader who comes across like Christ with muscles. This probably means that they will be a man, probably but not necessarily White. Somebody like Denzel Washington could fit the bill:

Consider the actors on this list 30 Manly Actors With Dazzling Charisma That Turned Our Hearts to Mush. Are there any Democrats qualifed to be president who could convey the masculine charisma that these actors do in their movies?

If the overweight fat faced Trump could do it it seems that a Democrat that was actually handsome, physically fit, and 20 years younger could easily accomplish this.

Yesterday's blog (here) is related to this.

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New: You can read all the coments I post to articles in RasStory here

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