Dominance Does Not Equal Competence
And Democrats need to stop buying into that message—it’s how bullies like Trump and Cuomo elbow their way into power.
For most of the reality-based community, seeing Donald Trump and JD Vance gaslight Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for being insufficiently grateful to the United States felt like we were bursting an aneurysm. But for champions of cartoonish masculinity like the disgraced Australian American city councilor–cum–Trump-approved hype boy Nick Adams, it was deeply gratifying. As Adams wrote on Substack:
What we saw was a glimpse of robust masculine diplomacy on display before the world. For decades, our weak and feminized leaders have talked in robotic and bureaucratic tones that might get you invited to a baby shower in Santa Monica but do not achieve the laying down of arms on the field of battle.
The decades-long partisan gender gap has left Democrats vulnerable to this kind of sexist backlash. Not unrelatedly, Adams’s comments typify the attitude of the ballooning manosphere, now embodied by the 19-year-old Musk protégé Edward Coristine, aka “Big Balls,” who is running what’s left of the government. It’s outrageous, and deadly serious: As of November, almost half of Republican men agreed that women should return to their traditional roles in society, up from 28 percent in 2022.
Democrats look completely lost by comparison, with a congressional rapid response team dominated by senior citizens and accepting the gutless censure of Representative Al Green. James Carville’s delusional advice in The New York Times to do nothing seems predicated on the false assumption that when voters wake up to the fact that Republicans have shit the bed, they’ll fall into the Democrats’ waiting arms. That might’ve worked 30 years ago, when podcasters didn’t command million-dollar salaries and more attention than the nightly news. Young men in particular are, like Adams, mainlining the false narrative that dominance equals competence, despite the fact that planes—plural—are literally falling out of the sky.
It’s not just a problem among red-pilled voters with daddy issues: Dominance is a Trojan horse that disguises abuse as confidence, and it’s one of the most successful cons in human history. We have an actual confidence man in the White House as a result.
Average voters—and leading Democrats—fall for it all the time.
“The two most important things we need are competence and courage,” state Representative Ritchie Torres declared recently in endorsing Andrew Cuomo for mayor of New York City. “We don’t need a Mr. Nice Guy. We need a Mr. Tough Guy.”
Don’t be taken in. During the pandemic, Cuomo’s “competence” led to 15,000 nursing-home-related deaths in New York, higher than any other state, thanks to a directive of his that protected his donors. His legacy also includes an anemic and mismanaged public transit system, slashed state funding for homeless services and psychiatric beds (mental health crisis, anyone?), and the repeated sexual harassment of his staff, as confirmed by the New York attorney general and the US Department of Justice—for which he has charged taxpayers $17.9 million in legal fees and subpoenaed the gynecological records of one victim, among other nonsense. Not to mention the Moreland scandal 12 years ago, in which Cuomo sought to interfere with a state ethics investigation that ultimately landed several of his closest associates in jail, thanks to former US attorney Preet Bharara, whom Trump fired during his first administration when he refused to pervert justice. Mind you, this is a short list.
If it sounds like déjà vu all over again, that’s because it is.
Corruption is itself a form of incompetence, because it puts the individual interests of one person or group ahead of the public good and diverts resources and policy accordingly. In the simplest terms, it’s putting yourself before the job, and it’s the exact playbook of the man Cuomo hopes to replace: Eric Adams.
Basic competence in democratic governance is being able to deliver necessary services and build consensus support for policies that will benefit the most people. Single-minded dominance precludes cooperation. The dominance mindset is leading to crushing tariffs on Canada and Mexico, abandoning our allies like Zelensky, and siding with actual autocrats. To dominate something is to make it smaller. Leaders who think they’re larger than the institution they’re running can never be competent because their true desire is control and applause no matter what the cost. It makes them thin-skinned and susceptible to flattery, which is why candidate Cuomo strokes Trump’s ego as a fellow “Queens boy,” lest anyone think they’re at odds. As one former Cuomo staffer put it: “Yeah, he’ll look tough on TV. Will that make you safer from Medicaid cuts? Probably not. Voters will have to decide between the feeling of strength versus actual creative policymaking and governing that fundamentally protects the things that Trump is attacking.”
That feeling is unreliable. Gavin Kilduff, a professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, has studied the relationship between dominance and competence and how we assess a person’s abilities. “On average [displays of dominance] can facilitate quick assessments with moderate accuracy, but there are scenarios in which it backfires in a big way,” he says. Kilduff and his coauthor, Cameron Anderson, published a 2009 study that found that “more assertive individuals might sometimes gain influence above and beyond what their actual competence warrants, and skilled members who are low in trait dominance might be unjustifiably ignored.” It doesn’t help when way too many New York Democrats who called for Cuomo to resign four years ago can’t seem to find their voices now.
Voters who abhor Trump but find themselves seeking comfort in Cuomo should think twice before they make a man who once said “I am the government” the next mayor. Corruption is more than just incompetence: It’s costly and cowardly.
The daylight gets very narrow between Democrats who fail to grasp that and the people they detest on the other side.
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