From the archive! The basic content of this post was first put together in election season prior to the 2024 election results

Introduction

In the realm of political leadership and governance, two contrasting approaches have emerged as dominant strategies: soft power and blunt power. Soft power relies on persuasion, subtle manipulation, and the careful use of language to achieve political goals. In contrast, blunt power is characterized by direct, often forceful actions and harsh communication. When these approaches are strategically combined, they create "smart power"—the calculated use of both hard and soft power tools to achieve political objectives while maintaining broader legitimacy.
Understanding these approaches is crucial as they shape the political landscape and have far-reaching implications for how power structures are maintained or challenged.

Soft and Smart Power: Kamala Harris as an Example

Kamala Harris, with her background as a prosecutor, exemplifies smart power in her political approach. While Harris possessed traditional hard power through her prosecutorial authority and in her vice-presidential position, she frequently employs soft power strategies to advance her agenda and build political capital. Her stance on police reform and deployment of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) language serve as calculated examples of this approach in action.

Case Study 1: Police Reform

Harris has advocated for implementing body cameras on police officers, framing it as a measure to increase accountability and transparency. While this sounds progressive, examining the potential consequences reveals a sophisticated soft power strategy.

The approach lies in the framing. Harris presents body cameras as a reform measure beneficial to the public, using progressive language around "accountability" and "transparency" to build consensus and disarm opposition. However, this soft power rhetoric serves to legitimize and expand hard power capabilities. Rather than constraining police authority, this policy could paradoxically reinforce existing power structures through several mechanisms:

First, the expanded surveillance infrastructure created by widespread body camera deployment can be redirected toward monitoring citizens rather than officers. This is seen in cities where body camera footage has been used to identify and prosecute protesters during demonstrations. Second, the cameras provide law enforcement agencies with enhanced evidence-gathering capabilities that disproportionately impact marginalized communities, that are already subject to higher rates of police contact. Third, the reform creates an appearance of accountability while actually strengthening institutional power. Institutions may "sacrifice" a "bad officer" occasionally, while preserving the fundamental power dynamics between police and communities (as the cameras are controlled by the same institutions they purport to monitor).

This exemplifies what we will call "smart power co-optation"—using soft power rhetoric to make hard power expansion more palatable and effective.

Case Study 2: Use of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Language

Harris, like many in the Democratic Party, often employs language centered around diversity, equity, and inclusion. This represents another form of smart power co-optation: the rhetoric sounds progressive and appealing to many voters, especially those concerned with social justice issues, while it potentially serves to maintain existing power structures under the guise of progress.

The strategy involves using appealing rhetoric focused on cultural and identity issues to build broad coalitions, framing policies that might otherwise be seen as maintaining the status quo in terms of progress and inclusivity, and co-opting and watering down radical or transformative ideas to defuse their potential for significant change.

This approach serves hard power interests through the use of specific DEI language and focusing on cultural issues. It potentially distracts from more fundamental economic inequalities that might threaten existing power structures. Examples include supporting corporate diversity initiatives that don't address wider issues of economic inequality, emphasizing diverse representation in leadership roles without changing underlying systems, and promoting diversity in higher education without addressing educational inequality in general.

This demonstrates smart power in action: the soft power rhetoric helps maintain support from both progressive voters and more conservative donors, as it appears to address social issues without challenging economic hierarchies that represent the foundation of hard power.

Blunt Power: Donald Trump as an Example

In contrast, Donald Trump's approach to governance more often exemplifies "blunt power"—direct applications of authority and coercive measures that prioritize immediate impact over long-term consequences or public perception. His handling of immigration policy and support for criminal justice reform provide illuminating case studies that reveal both the consistency and complexity of this approach.

Case Study 1: Immigration Policy

Immigration enforcement inherently involves hard power—deportations, detention, and border controls are fundamental tools of state authority that all administrations must deploy to some degree. However, Trump's implementation of the "zero tolerance" policy represents a stark example of his blunt power approach through its deliberate escalation and expansion of these existing coercive mechanisms.

Under this policy, implemented in 2018, all adults caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally were criminally prosecuted—a significant departure from previous approaches which generally kept families together during immigration proceedings and often used civil rather than criminal processes for first-time border crossers. The policy led to the systematic separation of thousands of children from their parents in just a few months, transforming family detention from an exception into standard practice.

What distinguishes this as "blunt power" is not simply the use of hard power tools—which are unavoidable in immigration enforcement—but rather the deliberate ratcheting up of severity, the willingness to accept highly visible humanitarian costs, and the prioritization of immediate deterrent effect over long-term consequences or public perception. After widespread public outcry and legal challenges, the administration ended the policy in June 2018, though reunification efforts continued long after and some families remained separated.

This represents Trump's blunt power strategy through its prioritization of maximum hard power application over incremental approaches, its acceptance of immediate reputational costs, and its communication style that often contained a mix of harsh rhetoric and strategic ambiguity. Despite the harsh language, Trump often deflected responsibility for the policy, blaming both Democrats and Obama—demonstrating how even "blunt" power involves calculated messaging strategies.

Case Study 2: Criminal Justice Reform (First Step Act)

Trump's support for the First Step Act, which led to the release of thousands of low-level drug offenders, demonstrates the complexity that defies easy categorization. What makes Trump's flexibility particularly noteworthy is that it defies the conventional expectation that politicians who employ harsh rhetoric and polarizing tactics are ideologically rigid. His support for criminal justice reform, typically championed by Democrats, shows that even his blunt power approach allows for pragmatic policy decisions. These decisions can cross traditional partisan lines.

Despite decades of bipartisan discussions, the First Step Act marked a rare consensus, overcoming previous legislative impasses related to sentencing reforms. This action shows that Trump's approach, while often direct and polarizing, could sometimes result in significant policy changes in response to long-standing issues. It serves as a reminder that political strategies and their outcomes are often more complex than they might initially appear.

Comparison and Contrast of Approaches

Having examined examples of both Harris's and Trump's tactics, we can now analyze how these contrasting approaches operate and their broader implications.

Short-term vs Long-term Effects

Harris's smart power approach tends to focus on maintaining stability through gradual changes that keep various stakeholders satisfied. However, this stability could entrench existing power structures for the longer term. When smart power strategies successfully co-opt progressive movements without delivering substantive change, they create widespread disillusionment and political alienation. Citizens who expected meaningful reform may become cynical about traditional political processes entirely, manifesting as support for outsider candidates who promise to disrupt the system—even through destructive means. The very stability that smart power seeks to maintain can become a source of popular resentment when it fails to address underlying systemic problems.

Trump's blunt power approach creates immediate and visible impacts, quickly mobilizing supporters and achieving short-term goals, often at the cost of increased polarization. While some actions are harsh, they may destabilize entrenched dynamics in ways that could lead to unforeseen political changes over the longer term.

Communication Styles

Harris employs careful, planned messaging that builds consensus around potentially coercive policies through progressive rhetoric. This strategy maintains institutional stability and implements gradual changes, though it may sometimes obscure the real impacts of policies.

Trump's communication style, contrary to initial appearances, employs strategic ambiguity rather than simple directness. While his language often seems blunt or unfiltered, there's frequently a calculated vagueness that allows for multiple interpretations. This serves several purposes: creating a sense of "pulling back the curtain" on political processes, challenging political norms and conventional discourse, allowing for plausible deniability, and fostering a stronger personal connection with his base who feel they understand his "true meaning" beyond his words.

This style reshapes the relationship between political figures and supporters, increasing political engagement but often at the cost of increased polarization and weakening trust in traditional political institutions.

Engagement in Culture Wars

The contrasting communication styles reflect participation in the 'culture war'—the ongoing political struggle over social values, identity issues, and cultural norms. Democrats use inclusive, progressive-sounding language to frame their positions, while Republicans often react against this language, framing it as excessive or threatening.

This dynamic keeps citizens engaged in debates over cultural issues at the expense of developing critical thinking about broader systemic questions and the general public interest. Rather than fostering citizens who engage with fundamental questions about how power operates, educational institutions and media outlets increasingly emphasize cultural positioning and identity-based thinking. University curricula and mainstream media discussions often center on questions of representation and cultural sensitivity while spending less time developing analytical frameworks for understanding institutional power, economic structures, or how policy decisions affect the broader public good.

Impact on Power Structures

Decades of Democratic smart power strategies may have inadvertently created the conditions for Trump's political success. By consistently using progressive rhetoric while maintaining fundamental power arrangements, the Democratic establishment potentially fostered the very anti-establishment sentiment that Trump exploited. When soft power co-optation prevents genuine systemic change, it generates a backlash that seeks change through blunt, disruptive means instead.

Trump's blunt power strategy operates through a fundamentally different mechanism. Rather than entrenching structures through co-optation, it actively disrupts established political norms and conventions, creating a new dynamic that erodes trust in political institutions and fosters more personalized political loyalty aligned with individuals rather than broader ideologies or institutions. This personalization can lead to a restructuring of power where traditional political gatekeepers lose influence, making the system more volatile but not necessarily more equitable.

However, both approaches ultimately serve to maintain existing power structures, albeit through different means—smart power through gradual co-option, blunt power through polarization and distraction.

Critical Analysis

It's crucial to avoid viewing these approaches as mutually exclusive. Some policies championed by Harris might still pass under Trump, and vice versa. The key difference lies in the framing, implementation, and communication of these policies.

Complicating the matter for voters is the impossibility to reliably prove the effects of their vote or what "could have been" had another candidate won, particularly when it comes to the long term. For this reason epistemic humility directs us to question whether one election result is inherently better or worse than another.

At the same time, understanding the contrasting styles of wielding political power is crucial if we want to understand our political world. It's important to look beyond surface-level messaging and consider the long-term implications of each approach on power dynamics, institutional legitimacy, and the ability of citizens to resist or protest against policies they disagree with.

Conclusion

The contrast between Harris's "smart power" and Trump's "blunt power" reflects a broader divide in American politics. A critical examination reveals that both approaches may serve more to maintain existing power structures than to challenge them, albeit through different means—smart power through gradual co-option using soft power rhetoric to legitimize hard power policies, while blunt power does so through polarization and distraction.

We should remain vigilant and look beyond rhetoric to examine the concrete effects of policies and their impact on existing power structures. Only by understanding these dynamics can citizens make informed decisions and work towards meaningful change in the political system.

*Article contains AI generated content. All articles undergo thorough personal curation and review*

Twitter/X Kamala Harris on bodycams
prismreports article on bodycams
American Progress Article on Trump Family Separation Policy
The Sentencing Project Article on The First Step Act