Wagner, R. (2017) - Politics As A Vacation

Original Article
Politics as a vacation
Robin Wagner-Pacificia,* and Iddo Tavoryb
a
Department of Sociology, The New School for Social Research, 79 Fifth Avenue,
9th Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA.
E-mail: wagnerpr@newschool.edu
b
Department of Sociology, New York University, Puck Building, Room 4116, 295
Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012, USA.
E-mail: iddo.tavory@nyu.edu
*Corresponding author.
Abstract This paper analyzes the electoral campaign and election of Donald Trump
as an ongoing event – a rupture of known trajectories and narratives. The ‘‘eventness’’ of
the election was both orchestrated by the Trump campaign, and desired by parts of the
electorate precisely as a rupture in the predictable trajectories of political life. We
locate this form of rupture in the tension Weber described between charisma and
rational-legal authority, as a tear in the mutual implication of these forms of authority
in the ordinary business of politics. We then show how such an analysis of rupture
problematizes the usual ways sociologists attempt to understand actors, using Weber’s
notion of ‘‘verstehen’’ that focuses on understanding individuals’ alternative motiva-
tions, meanings, and alternative trajectories of means and ends. We argue that we must
position rupture – the suspension and even rejection of such narratives – as an
important aspect of our understanding of action in this case.
American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2017) 5, 307–321.
doi:10.1057/s41290-017-0036-8; published online 9 August 2017
Keywords: charisma; event; politics; rupture; temporality; Trump
Introduction
The election of Donald Trump to the American presidency is an ongoing

event (Sewell, 2005; Wagner-Pacifici, 2010, 2017). It is eventful in its
rupture, surprise, and disorientation. It holds the possibility of transforming
the structures and practices of the political and social institutions – if it has
not already done so. It is also ‘‘restless’’ (Wagner-Pacifici, 2010, 2017) in its
mobility, appearing in different guises and taking on new meanings.
2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology Vol. 5, 3, 307–321
www.palgrave.com/journals
Wagner-Pacifici and Tavory
Although we cannot yet know whether it augurs a historically significant

transformation,1 both the primaries and the results in the election of Donald
Trump continue to rupture and transform forms and structures of the political.
Of course, as Tocqueville (1863) noted nearly two centuries ago, all American
presidential elections are disruptive, ‘‘a crisis in the affairs of the nation,’’ and
nearly all candidates for the office promise a break of some kind as they
campaign. But such breaks are usually positioned within the historically familiar
framework of an institutionally embedded political system. Their eventfulness is
carefully circumscribed so that after the election, ‘‘this ardor is dispelled; the
calm returns; and the river, which had nearly broken its banks sinks to its usual
level: but who can refrain from astonishment that such a storm should have
arisen?’’ (ibid, 170–171).
In the campaign of Donald Trump, it often seemed as if the political system
was being upended in a more radical fashion. Instead of a well-choreographed
and delimited event promising disruption within the contours of the familiar, a
more radical eventfulness has been enacted, and currently unfolds. Even with
the demonstrative reversion back to a superseded historical epoch, viz. ‘‘Make
America Great Again,’’ the temporal, spatial, and geo-political indexical
confusions that characterized Trump’s campaign and continue to rock his
administration elongate the rupture phase of this event. Political narratives and
trajectories are in a state of flux, and well-rehearsed modes of the political are
suspended, to the horror or glee of the electorate.
Our argument in this paper is threefold. First, we argue that Trump’s election
is not simply an ‘‘event’’ but that it was predicated on creating an event. That is,
the disruption of narrative was not an effect of the campaign and election, but
an important characteristic of the campaign itself. Perhaps more importantly,
we argue that part of Trump’s allure for many voters was precisely the promise
of an event. Being thrown into the unknown was a compelling, seductive, and
energizing prospect. Second, and drawing more explicitly on the work of Max
Weber, we see the election as buckling an unspoken expectation for a careful
balancing of charismatic and bureaucratic authority. Although all elections have
a charismatic quality, charisma in modern democratic elections is assumed to
have bureaucratic institutional foundations and trajectories underlie it. Trump
almost completely breached this expectation – something that was met with
scorn from pundits but that was, once again, part of the élan of the election for
many voters.
Finally, in the third section, we ask what thinking about the election as an
ongoing event means for our attempt to understand it. Rather than invoke a
method of ‘‘verstehen’’ that focuses on understanding individuals’ alternative
1
As Sewell (2005, p. 228) put it ‘‘Ruptures spiral into transformative historical events when a
sequence of interrelated ruptures disarticulates the previous structural network, makes repair
difficult, and makes a novel rearticulation possible.’’
308 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology Vol. 5, 3, 307–321
motivations, meanings, and alternative trajectories of means and ends, we argue

that we must position rupture – the suspensions and even rejection of such
narratives – as an important aspect of our understanding of action. This, we
argue, problematizes some of the most basic assumptions about a sociology of
empathy, requiring us to incorporate different experiential frames and accents
of reality and temporality into our attempt to understand eventful times.
The title of this paper, then, is not simply a play on Weber’s title. In an
important sense, Trump’s election is a ‘‘vacation’’ from political narratives and
temporality, as it is from bureaucratic rule. Weber’s version of the successful
politics of responsibility melded the charismatic and the bureaucratic, the
possibility of a break from the past being coordinated with predictable,
predetermined trajectories. Weber’s famous phrase, ‘sine ira et studiuum,’ for
his ideal politician combined passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of
proportion. While actively disdaining measured tones and rhythms, Donald
Trump’s rhetoric and even physical style seemed to emanate from and solicited
the political passions. But the campaign and election of Donald Trump was also
a clear rupture in its very nature – not a vacation from politics by any means, it
was a politics of rupture, politics as a vacation.
First Move: Temporality, Rupture, and Rapture
As a way into the enactment of rupture in the election, it is useful to begin with
a minor moment. A few days after Trump’s victory, a note appeared on a
friend’s door. A colleague, a Filipino-American professor of sociology in a
public university, came to his office to find a post-it waiting for him. A one
word message. ‘‘Trump!’’ This was not an isolated incident. A couple of days
earlier, ‘‘Trump’’ was also scrawled on New York University’s prayer hall, used
mainly by Muslim students on campus. How can we understand these notes? To
use J. L. Austin’s (1975) terms, the note holds little locutionary content. It is the
name of the president elect, and, felicitously, also signifies a winning hand, ‘‘a
decisive overriding factor or final resource’’ (Merriam Webster Dictionary
2016). But the note has no set meaning beyond that. It also has little
illocutionary content, though it may be a warning or a declaration or an
exultation. There is no speech act directly evident, and despite the exclamation
mark, no call to action is apparent (Figure 1).
What it has in abundance, however, is perlocutionary force. For the Muslim
graduate student sobbing in the halls at NYU, the emotional resonance of the
scrawled name was unmistakable, as it was for the faculty member who found it
on his door. But what precisely is its emotional valence? There is surely some
gloating here, but mostly dread. Both for a Muslim student and for a gay
professor of color, there was a diffuse and murky threat afoot. Was it that the
perceived era of intellectual elites – especially of color – is past? Is it that
2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2049-7113 American Journal of Cultural Sociology Vol. 5, 3, 307–321 309
Figure 1: Trump.
Photo: Anthony Ocampo.
Muslims are no longer welcome in Trump’s America? Perhaps. But the sign is
also an ambiguous marker of a future. It is one in which Muslims and liberal
gay professors should be wary, but not a clearly described one. As opposed to a
burning cross or a swastika – the semiotic cousins of the ‘‘Trump!’’ scrawl –
there is no explicit violent past being evoked, like the era of lynching in the US
or the Holocaust. The dread produced by the scrawls is built of possibility and
rupture.
As numerous Trump supporters and pundits alike agreed, potential voters’
disgust of ‘‘politics as usual,’’ always simmering in parts of the electorate, was
galvanized by Trump. In the words of Michael Moore, Trump served ‘‘as the
human Molotov cocktail that they get to toss into the system’’ (Wang, 2016).
And, part of what made this Molotov cocktail so incendiary was how it bucked
the usual political structures of historical, linear temporality and narrative.
Rather than an emplotment of political process and policy, backed up by
ideologically distinct values and positions, Trump’s campaign ran on what
many pundits saw as vague, half-thought out promises of generalized victory

and success, promises made real through the mere repetition of the word ‘‘win’’:
‘‘We are gonna win, win, win. We’re going to win with military, we’re
going to win at the borders, we’re going to win with trade, we’re going to
win at everything. And some of you are friends and you’re going to call,
and you’re going to say, ‘Mr. President, please, we can’t take it anymore,
we can’t win anymore like this, Mr. President, you’re driving us crazy,
you’re winning too much, please Mr. President, not so much, and I’m
going to say I’m sorry, we’re going to keep winning because we are going
to make America great again.’’ (quoted in Bedard, 2016).
These rhetorical theatrics remind us of the important background context of

entertainment for this election. The former star of a reality show, Trump
expertly managed the tempos and gestures of television and social media,
turning twitter into a political tool as none had successfully done before him.
Whatever the content of the new trajectories and narratives a Trump presidency
may bring, the promise of rupture was coupled with a sense of rapture. Like the
wall on the Mexican border that Mexico would mysteriously be made to pay
for, performance did not have to be coupled by a trajectory connecting events.
Like the divine, realities were conjured by the word.
This titillation of such experiences and forms of rupture was not confined to
those who saw themselves as having nothing to lose. The excitement of not
knowing what will happen next, and how, sometimes bridged even strong
political ideological difference. As one reporter at a Bernie Sanders rally noted:
‘‘Victor Vizcarra, 48, of Los Angeles, said he would much prefer Mr.
Trump to Mrs. Clinton. Though he said he disagreed with some of Mr.
Trump’s policies, he added that he had watched ‘‘The Apprentice’’ and
expected that a Trump presidency would be more exciting than a ‘‘boring’’
Clinton administration. ‘‘A dark side of me wants to see what happens if
Trump is in,’’ said Mr. Vizcarra, who works in information technology.
‘‘There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type
change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen.
It’s like reality TV. You don’t want to just see everybody be happy with
each other. You want to see someone fighting somebody.’’ (Alcindor,
2016).
What is striking in this quote, of course, is precisely the way in which the
seductive quality of ‘‘change’’ wins over moral valence. Even as this specific
voter explicitly posits the valence of a Trump victory at the darkest point of the
moral spectrum – ‘‘Nazi-type change’’ – the interest this possibility holds is
seductive and exciting. And, where that valence was not an obstacle, and where
economic hardship and poverty exacerbated voters’ disgust of the political, the
excitement over a Trump victory was colored in more optimistic anticipation.
As one ardent Trump supporter reiterated a couple of weeks after the election,
‘‘I hope our new president is going to make a change for us. We need a change.
It’s just been a nightmare’’ (Kruse, 2016).
Second Move: The Contradictions of Bureaucracy and Charisma
But ‘‘the dark side’’ the potential voter above alluded to is no trivial matter in
another way. With the desire to be rid of boredom (with all of its disciplining
force) the relief and release of charisma is all the more welcome. Charismatic
authority is described by Weber as necessarily rupturing, breaking with the past
and jettisoning all into a radically different future. In its purest moments, it is
literally unhinged, and thus holds both promise and peril – whether it appears in
the realm of politics, war, or religion.
There is a clear connection in Weber’s account between the powerful and
mobilizing passion of the charismatic leader and the occult, violent means by
which politics naturally operates. These violent means are only tempered,
socialized as it were, by both character and process. That is why Weber insists in
an existentially fatalistic way at the end of ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ that the only
politician he can look on with approbation is one who exemplifies the ethic of
responsibility, one who is not a saint only interested in absolute ends, but rather
able to make a certain grudging peace with the violent means of the state and
compromise for the sake of earthly consequences. Such a politician would seem
to embody both the legal-rational strengths of bureaucratic authority and the
visionary qualities of the charismatic authority. But Weber is not sanguine
about the possibilities of such combining and ends the speech with, literally, icy
darkness.
As Weber understood, alongside diverse political theorists and philosophers
such as Schmidt, Shils, Agamben, and Derrida, underneath the law and legal-
rational bureaucracy lies power. There is a charismatic moment of unfettered
possibility underlying the greyest of trajectories. What these thinkers appreci-
ated less, however, is a version of Toqueville’s point with which we have started
this article: that, at least in democratic systems, the promise of charisma also
hides well-grooved bureaucratic institutions and trajectories. The relationship
between charisma and legal-rational authority in modern, highly expert-
dependent and heavily bureaucratic democracies, is structured more like a series
of figures in a Russian Matryoshka doll. While political candidates need to be
‘‘touched by grace,’’ and thus position themselves beyond and outside
bureaucratic authority as they court rupture and trade in ambiguity, they need
to simultaneously exhibit their understanding that this charismatic moment is a
passing one. That at the end of the charismatic moment, and undergirding it, is
bureaucratic assurance, the rule of law, and the longevity of institutions.2
The image of bureaucracy, in this sense, has changed since Weber’s times. In
Prussia-cum-Germany, bureaucracy was an elite and highly respected profes-
sion. Over the course of the 19th into the 20th century, officials and the
bureaucratic systems they developed required rigorous educational training and
credentials and entry to the profession was based upon merit – a ‘‘noble-
bourgeois aristocracy of office’’ (Gillis, 1968: 108). As Weber outlined it, it was
a profession and a set of practices that did not inspire; that did not provide the
goals or ends of politics and political movements, but rather trafficked (only) in
means. Still, however, it had the image of an elite that is hard to grasp today.
Our contemporary understanding of bureaucracy is considerably less exalted
than that of Weber’s and his contemporaries. While bureaucracies have become
entrenched, and as the ‘‘rule by experts’’ that they represent had become more
and more deeply etched into the modern state, their image is even less
commanding. We view bureaucrats as ‘‘petty,’’ as grudging agents in processing
requests or as deniers of them or as demanding of forms and fees. There is a kind
of pathos surrounding the figure of the bureaucrat – a disliked figure whose
power is impersonal and limited, but nonetheless consequential.
In this regard, the juxtaposition of Trump’s rhetoric to Clinton’s is striking.
Where Trump’s rhetoric reveled in talk of the destruction of institutions and
institutionalized modalities of action, Clinton’s was painstakingly specific
precisely about the challenges of bureaucracy and the institutional order. Thus,
for example, when asked about Veterans waiting for their benefits, in a military
forum, Clinton answered that:
I’m going to do everything I can – I’m going to have a meeting every week
in the Oval Office. We’re going to bring the V.A. people, we’re going to
bring the DOD people, because we’ve got to have a better fit between
getting mustered out and getting into the V.A. system, sometimes – and
you probably know this, Sergeant – I’ve met so many vets who get
mustered out, who leave the service, they can’t find their records from
DOD, and those records never make it to the V.A. They feel like they’re
living in a funhouse. They have to go over the same things over and over.
We’re living in a technological world. You cannot tell me we can’t do a
better job getting that information. And so I’m going to focus on this. I’m
going to work with everybody. I’m going to make them work together.
2
Eisenstadt (1968, p. 19) describes Weber’s contradictory compound concept of the ‘‘charisma of
office’’ in which a charismatic figure has the, ‘‘ability to (…) transform any given institutional setting
by infusing into it some of his charismatic vision, by investing the regular, orderly offices, or aspects
of social organization with some of his charismatic qualities and aura.’’ Nevertheless, even here, the
contradictions reappear as ‘‘charismatic activities and orientations…contain strong tendencies
toward the destruction and decomposition of institutions’’ (ibid, p. 21).
As opposed to the break in temporality of narrative trajectory in Trump’s rhetoric,

here the political trajectory is mapped in minutiae. The coordination of different
government bodies and organizations, with their bureaucracies and mundane, but
obstinate, challenges, is the material from which the narrative is constructed.
Who, though, will look in awe and amazement upon the identification of unshared
files between one agency and another? Who will find their passions satisfied with
weekly executive meetings between bureaucrats from two offices? In fact, one
‘‘dark side’’ theory, that Trump and his supporters within the FBI were
manipulating the FBI director’s investigation of Clinton, was denied by Trump
spokes-person Kellyanne Conway precisely because it would have been too
enmeshed in bureaucracy: ‘‘Given Mr. Trump’s preference for Twitter, Ms.
Conway joked, using the FBI [for partisan political purposes] would be ‘‘so last
century - it’s so bureaucratic and paperwork laden’’ (Rutenberg, 2017).
Whereas pundits saw the specific knowledge of bureaucratic details as a
(slightly boring) virtue when put in the service of melioration or a vice (when put
to nefarious purposes), what they have missed was that the break in temporality,
the vertigo, the relative lack of a trajectory leading through a narrative is itself a
structure – the structure of an event. Clinton’s mode of the political, even where
she attempted to soar above the specifics (‘‘Stronger Together’’), was meliorative
and process oriented, an exemplary practitioner of Weber’s description of
politics as ‘‘a strong and slow boring of hard boards’’ (Weber, 1946, p. 128). This
way of being a politician emphasized the bureaucratic competencies over
charismatic heroism – a politics of coordination rather than a politics of rupture.
Third Move: Verstehen, Sympathy, and the Challenges of Rupture
Following the 2016 US Presidential election, supporters of Hillary Clinton as

well as many who chose not to vote, were shocked by its results. In this
aftermath, perhaps surprising in its own turn, many of these individuals began to
consider their own inadequacies. Part of their sense of inadequacy involved the
cognitive disconnect between electoral polls and predictions that put the election
in Clinton’s pocket, and the actual results, particularly in some swing states.
Another part of the sense of inadequacy involved the moral or emotional
disconnect suddenly recognized between largely liberal-minded denizens of cities
and coastal states who could not imagine the billionaire entertainer and real-
estate magnate as President of the United States, and Trump supporters who saw
in him an energizing savior, a way out of a national and personal ennui.
Suddenly the question of ‘‘understanding’’ was in the air and liberals were
admonished to activate their empathetic muscles. They were admonished to
recognize the underappreciated Trump constituency, largely understood to
comprise white, working, and middle-class rural American men – those featured
in Arlie Hochschild’s (2016) ethnographic work on Louisiana and J.D. Vance’s
(2016) autobiographical foray into the Appalachian hill country of eastern

Kentucky.
Sociologists, it may seem, are particularly well equipped ‘‘to try to scale the
empathy wall’’ (Hochschild, 2016, p. 10). After all, Weber’s method of
Verstehen, one of the pillars of any sociology of meaning, urges us to
methodically interrogate seemingly foreign worlds – whether in time or social
space – and extract the way in which means and ultimate ends are connected, so
that we can understand the meaningful action of the these ‘‘others.’’ As Weber
forcefully argued, sociology is and should be concerned with the subjective
meaning of action, and the act of ‘‘verstehen’’ – empathetic understanding –
might allow for sociological ‘‘imaginative participation’’ in the actions of others
who live in differing circumstances or different times. In this way, the subjective
meaning of those actions becomes available to the sociological analyst.
This is no easy task. It requires both hard work in following modes of action
and narrative of people enmeshed in quite different life-worlds, attempting to
distill both what means and ends are in each case, and how they are connected
as a narrative. And, as Weber also saw well, the larger the social distance
between researcher and subjects, the harder this exercise becomes, as ‘‘many
ultimate ends or values toward which experience shows that human action may
be oriented, often cannot be understood completely (…) The more radically they
differ from our own ultimate values, however, the more difficult it is for us to
make them understandable by imaginatively participating in them’’ (Weber,
1978, pp. 6–7).
Withal the challenge, as many seem to see it in this case, is to avoid the
paternalistic view that the ‘‘rural white’’ voted irrationally. For both existential
and strategic reasons, an empathetic understanding of people who gave rise to the
event seems necessary. And yet, if the analysis presented in the last two sections
provides any insight into an aspect of the election, then such understanding needs
to be treated carefully. For, if he seems acutely aware of the problem of an overly
cognitive means-ends modality of explanation at one moment, in the next Weber
defined ‘‘meaningful action’’ precisely as a means-ends structure of action. And so,
as Verstehen became a staple of social science explanation, it proceeded to identify
alternative narrative trajectories that connect means and ends. To return to the
current predicament, sociologists are thus called to construct a narrative – even if it
is a semi-conscious ‘‘deep story’’ (Hochschild, 2016) – within which the Trump
vote is located for those who voted for him.
And whereas this is important, this mode of verstehen-sociology may also
miss important aspects of the election. As rupture is precisely the suspension and
even violent rejection of narrative trajectories, how can we construct a good
account of it? How does one employ a method that assumes a clear imaginative
trajectory between means and ends, a linear temporality of causal action, to
analyze a moment of rupture? Is our usual understanding of empathetic
understanding tone-death to the seduction of swirling possibility?
In thinking about these challenges, we should be wary of easy theoretical

‘‘ways out.’’ Thus, a quick way to save verstehen sociology in this instant is to
treat ‘‘rupture’’ as the ends of action. In this vision, although it may seem to be a
paradoxical end, rupture does not disrupt the narrative structure of explanation.
What we would need to understand is why some voters wanted an end to
narrative in the first place, perhaps outlining their sense of betrayal, isolation,
and political resentment against a neo-liberal order that has left them out
economically and socially. But, having done so, we can keep the structure of our
empathetic explanation intact.
And yet, this theoretical solution is too simple. As we have argued, disruption
was not just an end of action, but a mode of the political in Trump’s electoral
campaign. Trump supporters could experience rupture not as an endpoint, but
throughout the political process – some of them, indeed, in the vague expectation
that disruption would end when Trump is elected and turn into a ‘‘normal’’
president. Importantly, this does not mean we can thus re-cast rupture as a means
either. Rupture does not follow the temporality of trajectories flowing from
means to ends. It is a disorienting, often exhilarating process, in which the ‘‘ends’’
and the ‘‘means’’ can only be artificially separated.3 In this sense, there is a
collapse of means and ends. To use a different vocabulary, the political rupture in
the Trump campaign afforded a different ‘‘accent of reality’’ (Schutz, 1962; see
also Goffman, 1974) with a temporality and causal structure that does not
follow the rules of the drab and disciplining world of the everyday life.
To understand such an event, then, requires us to better theorize empathetic
understanding in charismatic moments, especially when the event gives rise to the
kind of radical charisma that truly bucks the structure of narrative trajectories,
rather than being content to stay in an assigned slot within it. Weber’s great insight
about secular charisma was that it promises a release, a break, a way out of history
but that charismatic individuals and movements could be discovered in the this-
worldly realm of politics, not just religion. The secular forms deployed by
politicians deemed ‘‘charismatic’’ are powerful and effective even as they are often
disorienting. Their temporality is that of the moment, torn out of historical or
bureaucratic narratives of coordination, accommodation, gradualism, or
progress. Thus, the punctuated, martial, synchronous forms deployed by Donald
Trump were precisely those that prolonged the excitement and undifferentiated
promise of rupture. And the success of his campaign was amplified by the dual
quality of his disruption, a disruption of both political character and political
3
It is important to note that the emotional valences and political attitudes attached to such heightened
moments that break away from narratives of cause and effect may be quite varied. Abbott (2007)
writes about what he terms specifically localized lyrical moments of social and cultural apperception
that share some structural similarities with the ruptures we are analyzing here but that are radically
different in mood and tone. Describing the kind of sociology he associates with the lyrical, Abbott
(ibid: 73) notes that ‘‘its ultimate framing structure should not be the telling of a story…but rather
the use of a single image to communicate a mood, an emotional sense of social reality.’’
process. Rather than assuming a verstehen of means and ends, a more expansive
vocabulary is necessary, one that accommodates different experiential frames as
these pulsate through eventful times.
Conclusions
Like all historical transformations, Trump’s election can only be understood

from multiple points at once. Accounting for it in its fullness would require far
more than this paper can offer. We would need to take into account the White
racial resentment following the Obama years; the many who voted for Trump
because they calculated that even if he was ideologically labile, ambiguous, or
morally suspect, he would put clear ‘‘conservatives’’ in power, and those who
thought that ‘‘the event’’ was a bluff that will be exposed when he will be elected;
we would need to think about the role of the media and Clinton scandals that
were fueled by a new medium of communication and manipulated by both
Trump and Russia; We would need to interrogate leftist ‘‘purity politics,’’ as well
as the scorn that neo-liberal urban elites heaped on those left behind in the rust
belt; we would need to understand the image of ‘‘the billionaire’’ as a cultural
fantasy, and the role of misogyny and masculinity in typecasting the candidates.
But locating these pieces of the puzzle should not lead us to forget that
Trump’s success owed much to the draw of rupture. Time after time, pundits
noted that one or another of his actions or pronouncements would spell his
demise, that he could not, possibly, get elected after he said this or did that. But
the narrative trajectories, and even the basic accent of reality that we associate
with political action, may not have been the right guide.
Especially where he was overwhelmingly voted for, journalists have
documented palpable charismatic excitement. Trump offered his supporters
multiple points of rupture and rapture. For some voters, Trump afforded a
rupture from their life trajectories and the temporal landscape such trajectories
were placed upon (Tavory and Eliasoph, 2013); a vacation from a politics of
bureaucratic rules, forms, and policies that promised melioration but were often
experienced as obstacles; a break from what many saw as America’s
inevitable movement towards a more diverse, more liberal future, and a
concomitant vacation from the political culture of political correctness. And, as
often occurs in the swaying between rupture and rapture, his election was both
accompanied by a repeated promise of American greatness and success that
would alchemically reappear upon Trump’s election, as well as the hints of this
rapture – already-realized – in the very process of the electoral campaign. In this
configuration of elements, we also see the energizing quality of traditional
authority, reaching out to and from the past with promises every bit as dramatic
in their way as charismatic promises are for an unbound future.
As we have argued here, and as becomes clearer in the weeks and months
since the election, those who asked for rupture shall indeed receive it.
Disoriented, some liberals have resorted to posting the ongoing ruptures on
their Facebook page, just so they can keep track. These include ruptures in
decorum, ruptures in civility, ruptures in institutional conventions of the politics
of democratic transition, among others. The event seems to be hurtling forward,
melding an expected rise of conservative power with continued rupture of
American political forms and narratives.
Without the anchoring of legal-rational authority, Charisma as a perpetual
motion deconstruction machine recalls Hannah Arendt’s (1951, p. 306)
characterization of such motion as the hidden secret of totalitarian movements,
‘‘which can remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set
everything around them in motion…extraordinary adaptability and absence of
continuity are no doubt its outstanding characteristics.’’
Having invoked Arendt and raised the specter of totalitarianism here makes it all
the more important to provide a framework to both analyze and evaluate the
contours and flows of this current American political moment, this prolonged
rupture-event, and its deinstitutionalizing ethos. It is also imperative to ask how it is
possible to think politically and sociologically about good government in this context.
We have an image in mind. Counter-posed to the ‘‘Trump!’’ post-it thrust
onto the door with which we began this article, we introduce here, at the end,
the fourteenth century Sienese fresco series painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti
titled The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, drawing attention to one
fresco in particular, ‘‘The Effect of Good Government.’’ This fresco, along with
the others, adorns the walls of Siena’s Town Hall, and has been on view to the
public since they were painted some seven centuries ago (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effects of Good government in the city and the country, Siena c. 1337–40,
Palazzo pubblico, Siena.
Source Wikipedia.
All sorts of civic virtues are on display in this fresco – artisans at work,
merchants and customers involved in transactions of goods, traders leading their
goods-laden horses, builders repairing houses, a school master lecturing his
students. A peaceable world reflecting, as the title names it, the effects of good
government. Somewhat surprisingly, a group of ten women dance in the
foreground, in what seems to be the focal point of the painting. What are they
doing there, and why would they be frolicking at the very center of this
beautifully organized and coordinated municipal scene of quotidian life?
The women are sometimes interpreted as representing rituals of renewal in
springtime, and other times the images of Venus and the nine muses, daughters
of Zeus who inspire the arts, literature, and science. Here then, in the midst of
the well-run life of the city embedded within the institutions of the market and
education and kinship, is a moment and opening for inspiration; for poetry, for
history, for astronomy, for dance and, even, for comedy. This scene, the effect
of good government, is thus paradoxically beautiful and boring at the same
time. Predictability and accountability go hand in hand with inspiration.
This confluence of worlds in ‘‘good governance,’’ however, is all too rare.
Even in the original fresco, there is something off about it – the perspective of
city is not quite right. It only aligns when seen from a specific perspective, a
point on the other wall where the figure of justice is drawn on a sister fresco,
which allows us to see the city as it should be. True, we cannot imagine rational-
legal authority without a kernel of charisma, and it is equally true that even the
most rupturing of governments that Trump may come to enact will still be a
largely bureaucratic structure. But at certain junctures, and perhaps especially
where the scales of justice do not offer perspective, the tension between rupture
and bureaucratic temporality comes to the fore.
How are we to understand this element of rupture? Do we even need to
understand it, or should we relegate it to the sidelines and get to the serious
business of verstehen? We believe that for both strategic and existential reasons
it is crucial to understand the politics of rupture and its allure as ‘‘irrational.’’ In
order to do so, we must rework the assumptions implicit in our method of
empathy, thinking critically about the relationship between means and ends,
and the implicit temporality we are driven to impute. Whether in order to
construct better dialogue, or in order to better fight it, we must not shrug off
such politics of vacation, nor treat it simply as ends for the disaffected.
About the Authors
Robin Wagner-Pacifici is University in Exile Professor of Sociology at the New

School. She has written on social, political, and violent conflict and its termi-
nation. She is the author of The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at
Conflict’s End, Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action (winner of the
ASA Culture Section best book award), Discourse and Destruction: The City of
Philadelphia vs MOVE, and The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social
Drama, and most recently, What is an Event?. A collaboration analyzing na-
tional security language has generated several publications, including ‘‘Graphing
the Grammar of Motives in U.S. National Security Strategies: Cultural Inter-
pretation, Automated Text Analysis and the Drama of Global Politics,’’ with
John W. Mohr, Ronald L. Breiger, and Petko Bogdanov.
Iddo Tavory is an Associate Professor of sociology at NYU. His book Abductive

Analysis (with Stefan Timmermans) provides a pragmatist account of the
relationship among theory, observations, and method in qualitative research.
His second book, Summoned, is an ethnography of a Jewish neighborhood in
Los Angeles as well as a treatise on the co-constitution of interaction, identity,
and social worlds. He is currently conducting an ethnography of knowledge
production in an advertising agency in New York. Iddo has received the Clifford
Geertz and the Susanne Langer awards for his work in the sociology of culture,
and the Lewis A. Coser Award for theoretical agenda setting in sociology.
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Original Article

The election of Donald Trump to the American presidency is an ongoing

Although we cannot yet know whether it augurs a historically significant

motivations, meanings, and alternative trajectories of means and ends, we argue

First Move: Temporality, Rupture, and Rapture

many pundits saw as vague, half-thought out promises of generalized victory

These rhetorical theatrics remind us of the important background context of

Second Move: The Contradictions of Bureaucracy and Charisma

As opposed to the break in temporality of narrative trajectory in Trump’s rhetoric,

Third Move: Verstehen, Sympathy, and the Challenges of Rupture

Following the 2016 US Presidential election, supporters of Hillary Clinton as

(2016) autobiographical foray into the Appalachian hill country of eastern

In thinking about these challenges, we should be wary of easy theoretical

Like all historical transformations, Trump’s election can only be understood

About the Authors

Robin Wagner-Pacifici is University in Exile Professor of Sociology at the New

Iddo Tavory is an Associate Professor of sociology at NYU. His book Abductive

Abbott, Andrew. (2007) Against narrative: a preface to lyrical sociology. Sociological

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