Join us on Thursday 4th June for the Second installment of TASA's Social Theory Thematic Group Webinar Series, "Donald Trump and the Less Agreeable Side of Charisma: Incredulous Onlooking and Anti-structural Power," which will be presented by Paul Joosse.
Observational and interview data reveal that “incredulous onlookers” have played a key role in buoying and propelling Trumpian charisma. Charisma is often theorized in terms of “bonds” of inward-intimacy between leaders and followers. Its world-historical significance, however, stems from its aggressive outward posture, occasionally destabilizing and overturning traditional and/or rational-legal social orders.
This presentation focalizes charisma’s consumptive leading edge by theorizing the “incredulous onlooker”—a type of non-believing institutional elite at the interface of the charismatic community and wider society. Incredulous onlookers intend to quash charismatic movements, but their interventions counterintuitively (to them) work to augment charismatic potency and proliferate charismatic rupture. First, their shock, exasperation, and moral outrage lend a sense of gleeful wonder (even “miraculousness”) to the incipient leader’s early successes, even minor ones. Second, as institutional-organizational mouthpieces, incredulous onlookers widen the aperture for extraordinary expression within the institutional spheres they represent, bringing their full interlocutory capacity within reach of the charismatic leader. Together, these factors account for charisma’s revolutionary potential, and the “Trump phenomenon”.
Event Details:
Date: Thursday 4th June 2026
Time: 12:30pm - 13:30pm (AEST)
Format: Zoom Webinar
Webinar
Cost: complimentary
Your Speaker
Paul Joosse, University of Hong Kong
Paul Joosse is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. His work on Max Weber, political legitimation, and gender has been published in Social Forces, Sociological Theory, and Theory and Society, among others. He is the recipient of the ASA’s Junior Theorist Award, the International Sociological Association’s Junior Theorist Prize, and the ASA’s Clifford Geertz Prize for best article in cultural sociology. He is also currently secretary-treasurer of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Sociological Theory (RC16).