Max Weber defined “authority” as the ability to convince people to follow your lead, which was different from its companion concept, ”power”, which is the ability to get people to do what you want even if they don’t want to. One of the main and perhaps original sources of that thing he called “power” was what Weber labelled as “charisma”, which meant the ability of a person to be so compelling a figure that people would do what he said, they somehow mesmerized because of that person’s personal appeal. And so Hitler was charismatic, even while FDR, however charming, was also the bearer of the TR-Wilsonian ideology, somewhat modified, that the purpose of government was to make the lives of people better and so to expand the role of government to accomplish that end, a principle Democrats come back to even if not in so many words, it certainly different from the alternative principle, which is that the purpose of government is not to make things better but to put as many brakes as possible on progressive impulses so as to further feather the nests of already rich people.
The basis for authority is usually institutional. That means that candidates ride on the backs of the institutions that impacted on them and which support them. These include the military, the Church, and the monarchy, monarchists still wondering how people can have a stable line of succession without the institution of monarchy. The Founding Fathers were breathtakingly revolutionary in thinking that they could do without a monarchy, substituting instead a President who would not even be greeted with an exalted title, that issue settled early in George Washington’s first term. But Presidents have indeed used some of the other institutions of authority as the basis for their own authority, both to help gain them the office and also to supplement the immense authority of the office itself. Most notably, being a successful general has in American history, as it has in European history, been a road to the power of the Presidency. Washington himself, and after that Harrison, Grant, TR, and Eisenhower, turned military power into a persuasive appeal to the public. Another institutional source of authority has been the law. Lincoln got his authority that way. It established credibility as a serious person of someone who still reeked of the backwoods, notwithstanding his eloquence and political smarts. And many lawmakers and politicians point to a legal background as the reason that they can think in as careful a fashion as they believe they do about policy issues. Religion, for its part, has not made priests or preachers credible as politicians, perhaps because the American people still take seriously the admonition of the Deist Founding Fathers to separate church from state, however much they seemed to approve, until recently, of a candidate acknowledging his allegiance to a deity, however much religion was not central to his character. Carter may have been the last President who took religion all that seriously, Obama joining the Black Church in Chicago because he knew he was going to engage in a political career.
And so, even though we are deep into Trump’s term as President, and he relies only on his own “stable genius” as his North Star, and so requires no authority other than the support of his voters, it is still possible to ask what are the bases of authority for the Democratic primary candidates because they seem to be operating under the same set of political laws that usually govern, upended ast those are, from time to time, by upstart politicians who spew forth know-nothing sentiments, as has been the case ever since, in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Jake Cade led a rebellion in which he said “The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers”, a nihilistic sentiment of impatience with authority if there ever was one.
The institutional authority of the Democratic Presidential candidates is somewhat attenuated because it is treated as part of their biography and so a matter of personality rather than of the institution from which it arises, but it is easy enough to see how an institution’s aura pervades a candidacy. Most obvious is the case of Elizabeth Warren, who established her reputation as a Harvard Law School professor and seems very professorial, that combined with a personal charm that makes the rigors of the law all the more pleasing. She has a plan for everything because she has thought everything through, as suits a professor of law. So if she says a wealth tax is constitutional, then it must be so, and a bankruptcy lawyer, up to her eyebrows in the details of various lawsuits and judicial determinations, must have figured out a plan to pay for Medicare for All that makes sense whether or not a given voter has followed the details of her plan. She conveys her authority and so she can be taken as truthful as a matter of confidence in the fact that high quality lawyers can get to the bottom of things.
Bernie Sanders, the other “progressive” candidate, receives his bona fides from a very different source. He was and is a “New Lefty” which was a term used in the sixties to differentiate the flower power generation of radical politicians who were still of a Marxist cast of mind, from the “Old Lefties’ who were those who spent some time in thrall to the Communist Party. Bernie was always on the left fringe of politics and so was anti-war, an environmentalist, a feminist, a civil rights advocate, and a believer in marches and demonstrations and people power to change the political climate. So, as he has said, he has nothing in common with the pajama clad people of North Korea. But he does have a party line that gets trotted out, as when he does not like foreign wars because they have the aura of imperialism about them. So Bernie is consistent with his ideology and so is like Nelson Mandula who upon taking power said that he was not worried about the responsibilities of office because he had the wisdom of the party to back him up. In that case, it was the Communist Party of South Africa; in Bernie’s case, it is the collective wisdom of the Port Huron Statement and the other leading pronouncements of the Sixties, stretching back even to “The Invisible Poor”, Michael Harrington’s mid Fifties book on how the poor are still among us in the inner cities and in Appalachia and among the elderly. That is still right about the first two groups. So you know Sanders’ priorities if not the details of his proposals. He thinks big capitalism has to be broken up and could probably give general reasons far better then can Warren, who wants to break it up for practical reasons because anti-monopoly legislation is more effective than is government regulation because big business always finds a way around regulation-- even if it does not, given that emission standards can indeed be enforced and that most drugs are safe because of the FDA even if they are expensive.
Pete Buttigieg would seem not to have a clear line of authority, merely claiming that he is not one of the Progressives. In fact, though, he claims allegiance to two institutions. First of all, he is a devout Catholic who would be perfectly willing to confront Vice-President Pence on the relation of religion to homosexuality and, second, as the son of two Notre Dame professors, he feels comfortable with the academic world and its reliance on cumulative studies to lay the groundwork for policy. He sounds like a policy wonk because he is one, having served his time as a Rhodes Scholar, a hot-shot at McKinsey and a short term (seven months) intelligence officer in Afghanistan. That makes him a bit glib and he relies a lot on his being a fast learner without also providing the sense that he is seasoned enough to second guess his own judgments, a charge made against many a McKinsey alumnus. But you know where he is from and what he relies on. That wouldn’t change even though if he came into the White House it might take him time to adjust to the overwhelming demands of the office.
Two other Democratic candidates rely on politics itself as their source of authority. Joe Biden is running on the theme that he will know what to do the first day he is in the White House. He has been in politics since he was in his twenties and served eight years as Vice President, an office with considerable responsibilities ever since Jimmy Carter gave some to Walter Mondale in 1976. Michael Bloomberg, although he is a billionaire who used his money to get elected mayor of New York City, is not advertising his being a billionaire as the reason to vote for him, nor is Tom Speyer, the other billionaire in the Democratic race. Only Trump suggested that his ability to make a real estate deal was what qualified him to be President. Rather, Bloomberg will argue that his experience as an office holder gives him his authority. Being Mayor of New York City, as the slogan has it, is the second toughest job in America and probably as good preparation as there is (other than leading D-Day) for the job, even though American voters have not looked kindly at New York Mayors as Presidential candidates. (Indeed, Rham Emmanuel has a similar vita, including a run as a Chief of Staff to President Obama, even if for what is now only the third largest city in the United States, and might have launched a Presidential bid if he had been able to serve a third term as Mayor of Chicago.)
So experience with the political institution, knowing the ropes, is a source of authority, perhaps you have been around long enough to become familiar with what it looks like to face crises and the risks of appointing a lot of people to their jobs, to know how these things look from the inside rather than as a bystander and so will be able to process what is happening to you when a new crisis emerges or when a routine appointment comes across your desk.
Max Weber, in his essay “Politics as a Vocation” acknowledged the political institution itself as a source of authority. It would season politicians to engage in the politics of responsibility, which meant trying to find compromises between contending constituencies, rather than the politics of ultimate ends, whereby one has a set of ideas one wants to implement when in office rather than the sense that governing is a difficult process. Certainly, in our time, Warren and Sanders represent the politics of ends rather than the politics of responsibility.
The other candidates in the Democratic race have more personality than authority. The source of Yang’s uncertain authority is that he is a charming computer nerd who concludes that the central problems of our society have to do with automation and other results of the computer economy. The source of Klobecher’s authority is that she is a descendant of the Humphrey-Mondale Minnesota Farmer Labor Party and so has a liberal agenda that is continuous with theirs. That is more important than that she has what I think of as a charming personality. So aside from their individual virtues, look at the candidates in terms of their sources of authority and decide which of these you prefer.