What kind of future are we headed towards? Increasingly, it looks like a place where politics is dominated by egomaniacs with scant regard for realpolitik or any other kind of political reality, while academia is populated by Walter Mitty characters who fantasize they’ve completed Nobel Prize-winning research and rate themselves in the same league as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx or John Maynard Keynes. Politics and academia, as recent events show, now harbor a certain kind of operator — the blagger.
The art of the blag
US President Donald Trump is in a league of his own when it comes to using persuasion and guile. He is, of course, American through-and-through. Yet he’s demonstrated mastery of a distinctly British art form: the blag.
The word itself is cheerfully colloquial. Let me explain: To blag is to obtain something through nerve, persuasion, charm or sheer audacity. It’s what someone does when they talk their way into a nightclub (and I own up to a lifetime of this practice), persuade someone to provide information they shouldn’t have shared or somehow acquire something they were never supposed to get near.
The blag is not quite a lie. Nor quite a subterfuge. And not quite a con, although it often has elements of all these. It’s something softer, more subtle: the ability to create an impression that one belongs somewhere and to persuade others, sometimes forcefully, more often gently, to accept that impression. The great blaggers don’t make claims: They demonstrate certainty. And certainty, however fragile, when well-performed, is convincing.
The modern world increasingly rewards self-confidence. There’s no area of society where a consummate belief in oneself is not useful. Anyone who hesitates, prevaricates, qualifies and shows indecision appears less impressive than the person who announces, with absolute conviction, that they have all the answers, even if they have none (and even if they don’t know the right questions). In politics, business, entertainment and even academia, confidence is often mistaken for competence. This is where bravado comes in.
Bravado
Bravado is conventionally understood as a display of boldness intended to impress or intimidate. It is. But it’s not a quality that exists independently of groups. It requires an audience. The same swagger that looks like leadership in one setting can look like embarrassing self-delusion in another. The blagger succeeds because their audience is receptive. The skilled blagger knows how to choose the right audience.
So, the question, “What qualities does the blagger possess?” doesn’t actually tell us much. More meaningfully, what we need to know is: What qualities are others prepared to believe the blagger possesses?
The audience creates the superstar, the champion and the hero as well as the nincompoop. Identities and statuses never materialize in isolation; we all perform versions of ourselves for the delectation of others we want or need to impress; and others participate in confirming — or repudiating — those performances.
The sociologist Erving Goffman famously explored this “ritual” of performances in his studies of social interaction, which he conceived as a kind of theater. People present themselves on an invisible stage, managing impressions and attempting to influence how they’re seen and thought about by others. Sometimes they pull it off; other times, they look foolish. Everything depends on the context.
The performance only succeeds when the audience accepts the role. Had Trump surfaced in the 1990s and promulgated his wish to be president, how would he have been answered? Probably with derision: “Come back when you’ve won an election and done eight or ten years in politics, pal!”
Some displays of confidence elicit admiration while others occasion only ridicule; it all depends on the audience. The same behavior can be interpreted as arrogance or comedy… or charisma.
Another sociologist, Max Weber, understood this when he analyzed charismatic authority. A leader doesn’t possess charisma in the same way someone possesses a Ferrari or a Rolex watch. Or even charm, looks, magnetism, talent or personality gifts. Charisma exists because followers recognize it. They attribute exceptional qualities to someone and, by doing so, help create the very authority they believe the leader already holds.
Charisma, in other words, is endowed by others. Like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder.
Audience cooperation
So, the trick for the blagger is not to produce perfect performances that suggest they have extraordinary qualities. It’s to find people who are willing, ready and able to believe that they do. And this helps explain the appeal of Trump. His political success didn’t come from pretending to have held public office. In fact, his outlier status was central to his appeal. His message was essentially that conventional politicians had failed and that an outsider with determination and fresh ideas was precisely what America required. He persuaded the electorate that his lack of experience was a positive, not a negative.
Trump has refined the blag and taken it to vertiginous levels. When he started strikes on Iran in February, he sounded unshakeable in assuring the world the conflict would be over “soon.” Since then, he has made dozens of similar assurances, most of them premised on the illusory “deal” Iran is supposed to seek. On every occasion, Tehran denies such a deal and the conflict continues. As does Trump’s blag. Why? Because there remains a (perhaps dwindling) preparedness to believe him.
Trump, like any other blagger, can’t operate alone, at least not successfully. The audience always, always needs to cooperate in the transaction. And this is why the blag is necessarily conditional: The transaction is never complete and always needs sustaining.
The academic world might appear to be the opposite of politics — a place supposedly governed by evidence, verification, peer review and skeptical inquiry. Yet it also relies on human judgments. Universities must decide whom to trust. They examine qualifications, publications, references and reputations. These processes are designed to filter credible substance from appearance.
The tragic case of Jason Arday raises uncomfortable questions about the effectiveness of those processes. How do elite institutions evaluate achievement? How do they distinguish genuine accomplishment from what we might call the performative aspects of accomplishment?
The unsettling possibility is that modern institutions — even top universities — may sometimes be vulnerable. Arday was appointed professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge in 2023, becoming the university’s youngest black professor at the age of 37. It was an appointment thrumming with narrative and symbolism at a time when cultural diversity was valued. He resigned from Cambridge in early August and died on August 14, aged 41; police have described the death as unexpected and not suspicious, with the coroner’s process pending.
I should perhaps declare a personal experience. Last year, before the Cambridge controversy erupted, I heard Arday speak at a conference. I was unimpressed and recorded my judgment for posterity. Cambridge, it seems, drew a different conclusion. How receptive does an institution have to be before confidence begins to look like evidence?
You can fool the people all the time
“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” — Abraham Lincoln (supposedly)
The blagger’s greatest achievement is not fooling people once, but creating a continuous narrative that becomes increasingly difficult to challenge because so many people have invested in believing it. Which brings us to Walter Mitty, the famous fictional character created by James Thurber. Mitty retreats into elaborate fantasies in which he becomes a heroic figure: a fearless pilot, a brilliant surgeon, a courageous adventurer. His imagined self is magnificent; his real self is ordinary. But there’s a crucial difference between Mitty and today’s blagger. Mitty knows deep down that he’s fantasizing.
What happens when the distinction between the person one is and the person one presents to others becomes blurred? Trump shows no signs of doubting whatever he says and, while his audience remains willing to believe him, will continue telling his stories. Trump is the blagger par excellence, his finest achievement being that refutation no longer seems capable of puncturing the blag.
The age of the blag is not simply an age of deception. It’s an age in which confidence, plausibility and performance have become currencies in their own right. Perhaps the best blaggers are like the best white collar criminals: They’re the ones who never get found out. Their blag is convincing the world that their performance, impressive as it may be, is actually not a performance at all — it’s real.
[Ellis Cashmore is the author of Celebrity Culture]
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
