Gillian Tett
Last week, as Washington buzzed with (yet more) rumours about turmoil in the White House, I travelled to the Alps for a vacation, and visited an aunt who had married into a family rooted in a Swiss mountain village.
Like many non-Americans, my Swiss relatives were both horrified and mesmerised by the media tales of Donald Trump. Over dinner, they fired questions at me: was it really true that Trump was calling for teachers to carry guns? (Answer: yes.) Is the White House really as chaotic and conflict-prone as the journalist Michael Wolff describes in his fly-on-the-wall book Fire and Fury? (Yes; based on my own visits there, Wolff’s portrait is very accurate in spirit, even if some details can be challenged.)
Then I changed the subject, and asked my Swiss relatives if they could imagine their own political leaders tweeting. “Actually, who is the Swiss president these days?” I inquired as a preamble, feeling embarrassed that I had absolutely no idea of the answer.
Eventually Marco, my Swiss uncle, admitted that he was “not sure”.
“It used to be a woman — Doris something,” Katherine, my aunt, muttered. “But now? Er…”
Suddenly, it was my turn to experience culture shock. My Swiss relatives are well travelled, fluent in five languages and exceedingly knowledgeable about global affairs. But, they explained, nobody in their part of the Graubünden region worries much about their national president, let alone what he or she may have said on Twitter.
That is partly because Switzerland has a federal power structure whereby many political decisions — and tax-raising powers — are devolved to the cantons and municipalities. Moreover, one quirk of this structure is that the presidency rotates between the seven members of the country’s federal council. Thus the president changes each year: last year it was Doris Leuthard; now it is Alain Berset.
But there is a bigger cultural issue here: in Switzerland, voters tend to see politics as being about functions and institutions, not about personalities. Yes, there are political extremes, ranging from socialists (who want to raise taxes on the rich) to far-right groups (who want to cut immigration). But the party system is fragmented, and politicians are judged above all on their ability to forge consensus and execute decisions. “Nobody really cares that much about the president,” explained a friend in Zurich, who also struggled to remember Berset’s name.
Is this a good or bad thing? That’s a thought-provoking question, particularly in Washington at the moment. As any historian might point out, the US has always been shaped to some degree by personality-driven politics: bookshop shelves are loaded with biographies of the founding fathers (such as George Washington and Alexander Hamilton) and more recent presidents (John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan); many of America’s unifying national myths are based on political heroes.
But in the past decade,personality-led politics has been given a new twist. As Wolff’s Fire and Fury explains, one of the best ways — if not the only way — to understand Trump’s rise is that he and his family have spent years crafting their name into “a multifaceted, multiproduct brand” that sells itself not on the basis of product details (ie policies) but rather through emotion and image.
Of course, Trump is not the first president to do this: as Naomi Klein points out in her book No Is Not Enough, western consumer culture has become brand-saturated in recent years.
However, Trump has used social media to turn his commercial brand into a political one, with such extraordinary skill that it is almost impossible to imagine US politics operating without a similar injection of celebrity in future. It is little surprise that some Democrats are wondering if they should field Oprah Winfrey as their presidential candidate in 2020: in a political culture that is addicted to celebrity brands, it is easy to assume that the only thing that can counter one powerful “name” is another.
Might this ever change? Some Democrats – and mainstream Republicans – desperately hope so. History suggests that cultural trends in the US tend to go in pendulum swings, and that voters often pick presidents who are the opposite of the previous candidate. If so, it is entirely possible that less flamboyant presidential campaigns will succeed in future – precisely because Trump has taken the concept of the brand to such extremes; or so the argument goes.
But unless, or until, that moment occurs, Switzerland stands out as a fascinating cultural counterpoint, and a reminder that modern democracies do not always have to be dominated by personal brands. Political brands-cum-celebrities certainly help to sell books and newspapers. They also make politics entertaining. But a world where nobody can quite remember the president’s name feels like a refreshingly sane place; or at least less crazy than the Fire and Fury Washington.
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