NYT: ‘This Is What’s Behind Trump’s Relentlessness’

Randall Collins gives the structural account that Jackson Lears reaches for and never quite specifies.
Lears treats animal spirits as a vital current, a metaphysical-cultural inheritance running from camp meeting to Wall Street. The phrase names something real but explains nothing. In his book Interaction Ritual Chains (IRC), Collins specifies the structure that produces the felt vitality. Successful interaction rituals require bodily co-presence, mutual focus of attention, shared emotional mood, and a barrier to outsiders. They generate emotional energy (EE), group solidarity, sacred symbols, and standards of morality. Failed or absent rituals drain emotional energy. People circulate through chains of rituals, accumulating or losing charge.
Trump rallies are textbook IRC events. The red hat is a sacred symbol. Call-and-response chants produce rhythmic entrainment. The press pen and the protesters outside supply the barrier. Trump operates as an EE entrepreneur, extracting charge from the crowd and projecting it back amplified. His relentlessness looks different through Collins than through Lears. The scatter Lears notes, energies flung in a hundred directions, is the structural requirement of a man whose authority rests on accumulated EE rather than institutional legitimacy. Each charge fades. The next rally, the next Truth Social storm, the next strike on a fishing boat or an ancient civilization keeps the chain alive.
Collins also handles the financial half of Lears’s argument better than Lears does. Keynes’s animal spirits in markets is what Collins calls collective effervescence on a trading floor. Investor confidence is EE produced by ritual co-presence, focal attention on price screens, shared emotional mood. Trump’s pre-market tweet about Hormuz is an IRC intervention. He shapes the focus of attention that drives the next round of ritual.
The framework handles the crisis of authority Lears closes on. Credentialed expertise depends on ritual occasions to generate the EE that makes authority feel real. Peer review, the press conference, the medical consultation, the briefing room. When those rituals fail or get publicly disrupted, authority drains. Trump understands this at a practical level. He stages counter-rituals and the old ones cannot compete.
Reagan and Trump look like the same case in IRC terms. Both ran successful ritual chains. Reagan focused crowds on an idealized America. Trump focuses crowds on enemies. The content differs. The structure does not. Lears wants Reagan’s animal spirits to feel different in kind because Reagan’s content was sunnier. Collins says no. The EE flows the same way regardless of whether the focal object is a shining city or a caravan at the border.
What Collins does not give you is Lears’s American genealogy. The vitalist tradition from camp meeting to Wall Street is content the framework processes but does not generate. Collins supplies the engine. Lears supplies the cargo. The two work together.
One small bonus. Lears is a ritual occasion. His op-ed produces EE for educated liberal readers who want a cultural-historical frame for their disgust. Calling Trump an expression of American vitalism flatters the audience by locating, naming, and historicizing him. Collins strips that consolation. The Trump rally and the New York Review of Books symposium are doing the same thing in different registers. The reader who finds that uncomfortable is the reader Collins’s framework is for.