‘Unlocking Us’: Analyzing the US election and its aftermath

Introduction

‘Leadership’ as an area of inquiry is by nature an interdisciplinary endeavor. The approach employed by Critical Leadership Theory (CLT) provides a way into this inquiry across disciplines and world events. The notion of how power is used or misused is a common theme, one that was vividly on display both during and after the American presidential election of 2020. To understand the nature of this clash of forces that culminated in the insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January 2021, I employ the term ‘unlocking us’ (originated by Brown, 2020) as it seems to both articulate and embody three diagnostic lenses of analysis. First, I use Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shift, initially articulated in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962/2012). Second, I employ Wilfred Bion's (1961) construct of basic assumptions, manifestations of ‘work avoidance’ mentalities which drive groups to eschew a given (or even hidden) task. Finally, I apply DW Winnicott's (1960) notion of the ‘holding environment’, first proposed as a term to describe the climate in which an infant is raised or ‘held’. Of these three proposed diagnostic lenses, the first resides in the realm of philosophy, while the second and third emerge from depth psychology. In grouping these three lenses together, I seek to create a CLT interpretation of the 2020 election and its aftermath.

Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts and the crises that attend them emerges from a philosophical approach borne out of the study of scientific revolutions, but it may be applied more broadly to society at large. First proposed as a series of anomalies that nudged scientists away from accepted truths (cf. Hacking, 2012: xxxiv; Kuhn, 1962/2012), such shifts may also be conceived of as shifts in the ‘visual gestalt’: ‘The marks on the paper that were first seen as a bird are now seen as an antelope, or vice versa’ (Hanson, 1958: 99–105, as cited in Kuhn, 1962/2012: 85). In the case of the forces that spawned Trump as the leader of the Republican party—when, in fact, much of what he said and did went against the grain of traditional Republican values (cf. Chace et al., 2021)—the gestalt that has rearranged itself before our eyes is that of an orderly world in which truth is a commonly agreed-upon consensus, accompanied by authority figures who have guided that consensus (Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Tom Brokaw come to mind). With the arrival of the internet and social media, truth has become supremely subjective and malleable (cf. Foroughi et al., 2019).

Thus, the way is paved for the state of our (dis) union at the close of 2020 and the dawning of 2021. America, at one time seen as the paragon of a successful democracy, is riven by competing claims of democracy being overturned. Numerous Trump voters have inhaled the lies perpetrated by the former president that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’, despite a wave of mainstream media and court cases moving in opposition to this claim. It is my contention that such dissembling is strengthened by the confluence of multiple paradigm shifts coming together. The paradigm of America as an unquestionable superpower and world leader in which economic security was there to be had if you were a white man is crumbling, and the reaction has been as savage as the coronavirus. For decades, the ‘American Dream’ has been in demise, with incomes stagnated and bitterness engendered. Trump’s lies and sedition in the aftermath of the election may be seen as proportionate to the sense of crisis that prevails amongst his supporters. Those who breached the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the working of democracy were those for who the paradigm shift is most disturbing: They were apparently largely white, male, and middle-aged (Farivar, 2021).

These shifts and their attendant consequences may be explored through ideas emanating from psychology. Bion’s basic assumption of group dynamics and Winnicott’s notion of the holding environment have their roots in depth psychology, which deals with the psychology of the unconscious. The sharp anxiety that arises in the face of the work of learning how to cope with a paradigm shift may also be seen as manifesting two of the three types of work avoidance articulated by Bion: Dependency (D) and Fight/Flight (FF). ¹ Complementarily, DW Winnicott’s ‘holding environment’ provides a potential remedy for such anxiety. The group behaviors of Trump’s fans—at rallies throughout his candidacies and presidency, and at the Capitol—are vivid examples of Dependency on an authority figure as well as engagement with adversaries through the Fight/Flight dynamic. Both of these mentalities are products of a group’s sense of anxiety about addressing the actual work—in this case, that work would be to confront the paradigm shifts of a changing world. Conversely, a holding environment contains anxiety while fostering growth. This can mean anything from creating a nurturing environment for a child in which healthy dependencies are formed to the establishment of cultural traditions within a society. The distress caused by a death in the family, for example, is ‘held’ by the accompanying funeral rites. The reestablishment of order following the insurrection of 1/6, where lawmakers convened as soon as the Capitol was cleared in order to continue counting the votes cast in the Electoral College, according to tradition and the Constitution, is a vivid example of a holding environment reasserting itself. In the analysis below, I provide a closer look at each of these lenses of interpretation.

Kuhn’s paradigm shifts

‘All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm’ (Kuhn, 1962/2012: 84). Stated another way, this sort of blurring spawns crises. Examples are numerous throughout history.

In the West, there is a sense of political crisis that has been smoldering for decades (cf. Drury, 1992/3; Menand, 2018). In the 21st century alone, warfare has undergone a massive paradigm change, from one of geographic borders and rules of engagement to one of geographically borderless ‘wars on terror’. The United States, once considered a singular global superpower, has undergone massive paradigm shifts in terms of its invulnerability (9/11); its economic dominance (the Great Recession of 2008); and its aspirational notions of ‘all [human beings] … created equal’ (#BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo). The confluence of this collective ‘blurring’ has generated fertile ground into which the seeds of populism in the form of charismatic authority figures may be sown (Heifetz, 1994; Weber, 1947). In the best of times, women and men may often search for meaning (Frankl, 2006). In the worst of times, they are simply trying to make sense of things (Snook, 2000; Weick et al., 2005). Meaning- or sensemaking, however, may arrive as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as it has for millions of voters in the US presidential election, who make meaning of Trump’s loss by clinging, like Trump himself, to the fiction that the election was ‘stolen’. Many of these people also voted for him in 2016, a few months after he stated at the Republican National Convention: ‘I am your voice’. To cheers, and with cult-like repetitive messaging, he also said, ‘I alone can fix it’ (Appelbaum, 2016, italics mine).

Into the current triptych of paradigm shift-engendered crises—climate change; financial instability; and racial and gender equality—all of which have been present in the American political psyche for at least the last 50 years—arrives the specter of a solution in the form of authoritarian leadership. And, while this essay is concerned mainly with the United States, it is by now, to echo Rodgers & Hammerstein, not unusual to assert that ‘authoritarianism is a bustin’ out all over…’ One need look no further than Eastern Europe and Eurasia to consider the truth of this statement. This sort of ‘democratic backsliding’ has been in play since the early part of the 21st century, roughly a dozen years after the Soviet Union dissolved and America claimed a victory in the Cold War, ‘with more authoritarian-style leaders consolidating power’ (Marantz, 2020). Democratic movements are put down forcefully (Hong Kong; Myanmar; and Russia), while at the same time, worldwide protests occur in the face of naked injustices (the Women’s March and BLM protests).

The question is what explains such events, and what do they have to do with leadership? Bion’s lenses of group dynamics provide keys to understanding the global ‘backsliding’ into authoritarianism, as well as the felt urgency to break free from the bonds of oppressive authority figures. Interpreting events through the basic assumptions of Bion, we may conclude that the real work of leadership is to redirect the group to its actual (as opposed to its quasi) work. In this brief reflection on the 2020 presidential election, whose aftermath produced a history-making insurrection, I propose that the proper gestalt through which to analyze recent events is the pattern of group dynamics proposed by Bion and the remedy of the holding environment proposed by Winnicott.

Bion’s basic assumptions (ba's)

Wilfred Bion (1897–1979) propounded the theory of basic assumptions—what he termed ‘ba's’— when studying small groups of soldiers discharged for psychiatric reasons (Lipgar and Pines, 2003). The ba's are not only dispositions of a group but a ‘mentality’ (cf. French and Simpson, 2010), thus, an unconscious driving force. Bion developed three categories for the ba's: Dependency (‘baD’); Pairing (‘baP’); and Fight/Flight (‘baF’). For the purposes of this discussion, I will concentrate primarily on Dependency and secondarily on Fight/Flight. While these patterns were developed in the bounded setting of a hospital and the laboratory-like setting of a group relations study venue at The Tavistock Institute (n.d.) of Human Relations in the United Kingdom, they may be extrapolated to larger settings (cf. French & Simpson, op. cit; The Tavistock Institute, n.d.). The patterns of what Bion deemed work avoidance are, it should be noted, considered unhealthy for groups as they lead to self-destructive behavior and task avoidance. On the global scale, this can be catastrophic. (Consider humanity’s inability to engage in the work of addressing climate change.) The work of leadership is to redirect the group toward its actual ‘work’—and become what Bion refers to as the capital-W ‘work group’.

Authoritarian leaders such as Trump sense the tendency to avoid the real work of a group: In the case here, to accept the results of the election. Difficult work provokes anxiety in a group, and groups are generally fraught with anxiety (cf. Smith and Berg, 1987). Leaders wishing to foster unhealthy dependencies are, therefore, committed to the creation of anxiety in order to sustain power—it is the urge on the part of the group to contain its anxiety that provides the kindling for the wildfire of a leader such as Trump. The sense of crisis engendered by the broader paradigm changes mentioned above—not to mention the lesser ones spawned by them as their everyday offspring such as job loss, wage stagnation, and a shifting of sexual and gender mores—have heightened anxiety across the board. Thus, the baD mentality is sustained in a poisonous dynamic of anxiety fomented and ostensibly quelled by a leader masquerading as a strong (wo)man but who is, in reality, merely using authoritarian, strongman tactics to ensure support.

Dependency

Bion has defined the ba of Dependency (‘baD’) as the inappropriate and unhealthy dependency on an individual or entity to undertake the work of progress (however so conceived). Although the ba’s have their origins in psychoanalysis (cf. Bion, 1961; Lipgar and Pines, 2003), they may be extrapolated to describe the inappropriate dependency of a group upon an authority figure to take them in the direction in which they wish to go. At an extreme, a sadistic authoritarian figure, for example, a cult leader, engages their followers in this kind of unhealthy dependency dynamic. Interestingly, former Republican Governor Christine Todd Whitman made just such an analogy in the aftermath of the election. ‘I keep comparing [the Republican party’s going along with Trump’s refusal to concede Biden’s victory] somewhat to Jonestown…they’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid, it just hasn’t killed them yet’ (Rutenberg and Corasaniti, 2020). It is worth noting that this statement was made in December 2020, prior to the assault on the Capitol, when every member of Congress was in mortal danger.

Trump’s strongman tactics are well documented, and he exhibits all the signs of a sadistic authoritarian leader. The seminal propaganda film for Hitler and the Nazi party created by Leni Riefenstahl in 1934 has been extolled as a masterful display of adoration of the leader, or ‘fuehrer’, in ways that are frighteningly comparable to Trump’s control of the crowd (cf. Kellerman, 2018). The visuals with which he announced his presidency resembled Riefenstahl’s images of Hitler descending from the sky. As Ben-Ghiat has written in her treatment of Strongmen, Hitler’s tropes endure into the present day: ‘Triumph of the Will depicted the leader descending from the sky in an airplane to receive his fans, an image Mobuto adapted: Zairian television news opened with his face hovering in the clouds’ (Ben-Ghiat, 2020: 104). Trump descended an escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to receive his. In short order, he disparaged immigrants, the failings of the liberal project, and the ‘swamp’ of Washington. His tendency to belittle people who disagreed with him and to own his followers is part of his lore: The mocking of a reporter with disabilities; the public disparagement and frequent dismissal of appointees who came to displease him; his overt misogyny—all this aligns with Fromm’s three definitions of sadistic authoritarianism: To have complete power over others; to exploit them; and to make others suffer so as to see them suffer (Fromm, 1941/1961: 143–144). The Trump brand of a dependency dynamic was on full display when he said of his supporters, ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible’. He was, in the words of one reporter, uttering ‘one of the most famous and insightful lines’ of his 2016 campaign (Bump, 2019).

Fight/Flight

Trump was also drawing instinctively on a subfaction’s desire to engage with his adversaries via the FF dynamic. According to Bion, this tendency manifests itself as a group engaging in unproductive conflict—conflict for the sake of conflict, as it were. ‘A feeling of vitality’, Bion asserts, ‘could only be achieved by the dominance of the basic assumption [ba], notably the baF’ (Bion, 1961: 130). One could plausibly propose that the Trump machine has always run on the engine of FF, even before he became a politician, when one considers the numerous lawsuits he has engaged in, dodged, or settled out of court. The trajectory of his political career encompasses baF—from the announcement of his candidacy to his defiant solo performance in the White House Briefing Room two days after the 2020 election, when he claimed fraud so baselessly that a number of major television networks cut away (Grynbaum and Hsu, 2020). Hassan's (2019) example of encounters with Kim Jong-un early in Trump’s presidency also comes to mind:

In January 2018, as North Korea was ramping up its nuclear program and threatening to unleash a missile on the United States, Trump threatened back verbally, saying that he could destroy Kim and his country with ‘fire and fury’. Kim said he had a nuclear button on his desk. Trump told Kim that his button was bigger than Kim’s button, and that his nuclear arsenal actually worked. (Hassan, 2019: 106–7.)

Subsequent to this dangerously bombastic rhetoric, Trump arranged a summit with Kim, one that ultimately yielded nothing substantive in terms of agreements, ‘but it gave Trump temporary bragging rights: he could say he averted a nuclear showdown’ (Hassan, 2019: 107). Polling of Republicans showed strong support for Trump’s handling of North Korea and nearly triple the normal support he received from Democrats following the June 2018 summit (Milliken and Kahn, 2018). In this way, Trump, the master illusionist, gave the impression of actually engaging in the real work of diplomacy. In reality, he fled it.

It is ironical, however, that his FF dynamic ultimately worked less well with a group of his supporters following the Capitol insurrection. The far-right nationalist group the Proud Boys—a group that Trump specifically addressed during a presidential debate two months prior to the election, telling them to ‘Stand back and stand by’ (McCammon, 2020)—was disappointed when the tables were turned and the president’s modus operandi was used to their disadvantage.

Some Proud Boys became furious that Mr Trump, who was impeached for inciting the insurrection, did not appear interested in issuing presidential pardons for their members who were arrested [following the insurrection]. In a Telegram post on [15 January 2021], they accused Mr Trump of ‘instigating’ the events at the Capitol, adding that he then ‘washed his hands of it’ (Frenkel and Feuer, 2020).

Tightening of boundaries and dissolution of groups

Lafarge (1990/1995) has written intelligently about the tendency of groups to tighten their boundaries when they are on the verge of dissolution. The anxiety provoked by the dissolution of a group leads to a yearning for some kind of resolution. (Consider the imminent dissolution of a high school graduating class, and the overwrought feelings that ensue—either in a yearning to stay together ‘forever’ or to disrupt the arrival of such a milestone by acting out in destructive ways.). In the case of the dénouement of the election, the boundary tightening cuts both ways.

On the one hand, the branch of the judiciary tightened up its boundaries for what was admissible in terms of the many lawsuits Trump and his associates attempted to pursue in battling the results of the election. To date, most of them were thrown out. A terse statement from the Supreme Court on 8 December 2020 discarding a lawsuit brought by the Trump campaign that sought to reject the electoral votes won by Biden in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania was a tightening of the boundaries in just 18 words: ‘The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied’ (Liptak, 2020). The court tightened the boundaries of what was admissible as a lawsuit and, thusly, the institutions of our fragile democracy. The results of this coalescence around what many have called ‘the big lie’ erupted in a boundary-breaking episode (the assault on the Capitol)—one which also masqueraded as a resolution of sorts. ‘January 6th’ had been touted for weeks by the former president as a day of reckoning and a last stand (Inskeep, 2021). In another effort at boundary tightening during a time of dissolution, Trump met with close associates to consider declaring martial law (Pengelly, 2020). All of these actions describe efforts at resolution so as to eschew the ambiguity of loss. ‘With resolution’, LaFarge writes, ‘the group hopes to achieve a comfort and oneness that will help its members, and perhaps the group itself, survive the separation and isolation inherent in termination’ (Lafarge, 1990: 180). The events at the Capitol on 6 January provided a vivid real-time diptych of boundary tightening: The Trump supporters in the mob tightened their boundaries as one in a howl of enraged conviction that they were acting patriotically to prevent an election from being stolen—in their minds, perhaps, maintaining the boundaries of the Republic while chanting ‘1776’—while the current Senate, mere hours after the attack, reconvened to count the Electoral College votes undeterred.

Holding environments and the ‘good-enough’ leader

While the tightening of boundaries in an effort at resolution may plausibly be seen as a kind of containment, the child psychologist DW Winnicott arrived at a definition for a particular kind of containment, also having to do with the management of anxiety. A pioneer of the term holding environment in the mid 20th century, Winnicott offered the notion that an infant’s well-being was dependent upon the variable of the environment in which it was held. The primary function, he wrote, was ‘the reduction to a minimum of impingement to which the infant must react’ (Winnicott, 1960: 591). Just as a ‘nursery’ might serve this function for an infant or toddler, the broader surround might serve such a function geographically. If the physical boundaries of a country are secure, a country might mature more easily, Winnicott has stated. These geographic boundaries, depending on the proximity to hostile neighbors, either force an adaptation based on fear and, therefore, less maturity, or, conversely, reinforce a responsible maturity. ‘The United States’, he wrote in 1950, ‘…did not till recently need to start to feel to the full the internal struggles of a closed community, united in spite of hate as well as because of love’ (Winnicott, 1950: 184).

When discussing the idea originating with Winnicott that a holding environment’s basic function is to protect and perhaps even extend the beingness of an infant or a people, we may assume that the authority figure or the leader has engaged in extending the beingness or the well-being of the polity. If there is sufficient immaturity in the polity, they will draw to themselves ‘immature leaders … who [are welcomed] as their natural masters…’ (178). Devoid of a healthy set of boundaries, the immature factions in a society will overtake the society, making it a less fertile ground for democracy.

Winnicott’s notion of the holding environment has been extrapolated from the literature of psychology to the literature of leadership and organizational studies (cf. Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz and Linsky, 2002; Kahn, 2001; Kegan, 1994; Petriglieri, 2020a, 2020b). Kahn (2001) has used the term to describe the environment of the workplace, and Petriglieri has expanded on Kahn’s thinking largely along the lines of organizational psychology. In a recent thought piece, Petriglieri (2020b) proposed that Biden will emerge as the ‘good-enough’ authority figure who may provide leadership as opposed to sham images of ‘leaderism’—‘the belief that leaders are a cure for every ill’ (Petriglieri, 2020b, n.p.)—shorthand, perhaps, for Bion’s baD. Petriglieri proposes that instead we must turn to the actual leadership of Biden, which is predicated on sharing power with others—from his vice president, who challenged him sharply in the 2019 debates, to experts upon whose knowledge and wisdom he intends to rely. It is notable that his first meeting in the Oval Office with lawmakers from Congress was with a group of Republicans. ‘Biden’, writes Petriglieri, has ‘offered a good example of how to counter [leaderism] if not transcend it entirely. He [has] anchored his leadership not to passion or disruption but on strength of character and institutional stewardship’ (Petriglieri, 2020b). As we have seen in Biden’s opening gambit for a COVID relief package, he has indicated that he was willing to negotiate with Congress from the get-go.

If Biden is the ‘good-enough’ authority figure for our country (Petriglieri has invoked Winnicott’s notion of the ‘good-enough’ mother with this phrase), the resilience of institutions may be the optimal ‘nursery’ for what may still be viewed as an immature democracy. If the polity can trust in its institutions to manage the disequilibrium of an unexpected virus or a contested election, it will, paradoxically, be less in need of dominant authority figures to fill the void created by a primal sense of anxiety. Trump, of course, gave the impression that he would allay this anxiety (‘I alone can fix it’), while at the same time generating anxiety at every turn (viz., his 2017 Inauguration speech whose theme was ‘American carnage’).

The ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu avers that that a great leader is one who allows the people to say ‘we did it ourselves’. In the current moment, what we as a country have done, however divisively, is allow the sensemaking of our contested election to articulate itself through the judicial branch of our governmental structure. ² An apt metaphor in the circumstance is that of the ecosystem (cf. Foroughi et al., 2019), which, though ravaged, contains within it a resilience strong enough for our democratic norms to endure; out of the ashes of a wildfire, seeds are scattered and take root. Battered though our institutional norms may be—from blatant cronyism in the Justice Department and a slew of unsavory pardons to the stunning collusion in both the House and the Senate with Trump’s claims that the election was stolen—the institutions from which they sprang have survived. All three of the Supreme Court justices appointed during the Trump administration signed on to the Court’s unanimous rejection of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits. Albeit under heavy security, the transition of power occurred without incident on 20 January. The US democracy may yet grow under the principle of Nietzsche’s maxim: ‘Out of life’s school of war—what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’.

Conclusion

This essay has explored the events of the last several months in America through the kaleidoscopic lenses of philosophy and psychology in order to make sense of the unprecedented chaos of the 2020 election. Beginning with the notion of Kuhn’s paradigm shifts as the unsettling force that generates crisis among people, I then moved on to employ the complementary notions of Bion’s basic assumptions and Winnicott’s holding environment, both of which consider anxiety in groups to be the key to the understanding of them. I end with the metaphor of the wildfire as a potentially cleansing event in which new seeds may take root when the dust has cleared.

To extend that metaphor, however, it is important to note that not all wildfires are salutary. ‘Fires are only good if they serve a specific purpose,’ writes Supriya (2017). Ecosystems can also be ‘wiped out’ (Supriya, 2017). If we regard the insurrectionists at the Capitol on 6 January as ‘barbarians’, we are missing the point. That event contained the culmination of grievances and a sense of score-settling by Trump voters who took their feelings and their actions to an extreme, goaded on by their previously legitimately elected (i.e., in 2016) president. The wildfire of their rage became a kind of holding environment in and of itself, but a negative one in which the opposite of growth began to occur—that is, corrosive destruction. This destruction was not only to life and limb but also to our idea of ourselves as a people and as a nation. To call them ‘barbarians’ or to refer to them as freakish outliers is a form of work avoidance in and of itself.

America has been engaged in work avoidance on multiple levels for decades—whether with regard to climate change, economic inequity, or a racial reckoning. Were it not for a pandemic and the cell phone cameras that tore back the curtain on the starkness and the immediacy of these challenges, and were it not for Trump’s egregious mishandling of them, we would likely be seeing a Trump second term. The resistance to the Biden/Harris triumph—which promises, at least in theory, to confront the actual work of our time—is a resistance to uncomfortable truths that must be faced. The flip side of work avoidance is a breakthrough in understanding and consensus of what is true. The interconnections of our world must, in leadership terms, be reflected in the interrelatedness of leadership. The relational aspects of Biden’s presidency (which, in its early days, appears to be simultaneously power-sharing and authoritative) have the potential to transform our tribalism into partnerships, where opposing sides of an argument can be in dialogue instead of dichotomization. In this way, Critical Leadership Studies may model the way forward for leadership.