The contrasting modus operandi in each case reveals a deeper struggle over how public life itself should be ordered. Should government comprise a named leader, clear hierarchies and acceptance that the final recourse for power is physical force? Or should it be softer and more collegiate, with a focus on consensus-formation rather than chains of command, and a more indirect means of dealing with enemies? If you believe the former, so the theory goes, you’re probably more Right-wing; if you believe the latter, likely more Left-wing. Both sides, meanwhile, increasingly map these sensibilities onto an emergent sex disparity in political affiliation, in which the Right is increasingly masculine-coded, and the Left feminine-coded.

The attacks on Trump and Biden correspond to this divide, too. What Trump faced on Saturday was a straightforward attempt at assassination in the masculine key, which is to say direct, violent and focused on a prominent individual. By contrast, the attacks on Biden since his poor performance in that debate two weeks ago constitute female-coded aggression at its most refined: whisper campaigns, anonymous character attacks, efforts at draining away social support and rendering someone a pariah.

But lapsing into this well-worn “gender-war” groove would mean missing the deeper disagreement, between individual agency and collective forms — and, also, the ways the two poles are more complementary than they think.

There really are well-documented differences between the way men and women approach social organisation that map crudely onto Republican and Democratic sensibilities. Though there are of course plenty of outliers, men are more likely to prioritise in-group cohesion, clear hierarchy and competition with out-groups; women, by contrast, are less violent, more cooperative and less committed to a defined in-group. The sexes also manage conflict differently: where female-typical disagreement often happens obliquely, for example via whisper campaigns or social ostracism, male-typical conflict is much more likely to be direct, confrontational and sometimes violent.

Trumpian Republicanism places more emphasis on hierarchy, open confrontation and prioritising the interests of the in-group — America — against competing out-groups, while setting great stock in a charismatic leader. The Left, by contrast, treats overt hierarchy with suspicion, often conflating it with “systems of oppression”, and prefers to emphasise “inclusivity”. The Democrats also evidently place considerably less stock in individual leadership. Otherwise they would not have devoted so much effort to denying Biden’s increasingly obvious frailty, maintaining an illusion of him being in charge sustained only by tight choreography and well-rehearsed lines plus a conspiracy of silence.

Suggested reading

The shot that created a martyr

By Lionel Shriver

As their ostensible leader became an ever emptier vessel, who did the Democrats imagine was running the show? The question is perhaps more: does anyone have to? This debate, over how much (if at all) individual leadership counts, has emerged as one of today’s core political divides. On the Democratic side, the choreography around Biden suggests many didn’t believe it mattered much: after all, much of the machinery of state is on autopilot most of the time anyway. In this view, presidential decline is less significant than it might appear, not least because the permanent bureaucracy has plenty of ways of thwarting a president who makes poor decisions. So it wouldn’t be such a big deal if Biden had dementia or some other impairment, because the self-driving machine is there: a benign exoskeleton, with the power to sustain even a faltering leader at something like his once-formidable best.

This form of anonymous, procedural power, which I’ve characterised elsewhere as “swarmism”, has emerged as a central feature of post-liberal governance. To supporters, it’s innocuous: just well-designed institutions functioning as they should. Opponents, though, have less complimentary names for it. The Trumpist firebrand Steve Bannon, for example, denounced its structures at the beginning of Trump’s first term, as “the deep state”, while the neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin calls its organs of communication “the Cathedral”. But wherever you stand on its merits, perhaps its most salient characteristic is — as one critic put it recently — “power without responsibility”. The swarm is, by definition, a system in which processes, groups, institutions, guidelines, committees and so on proliferate, without the buck ever stopping anywhere or with anyone.

In its wake, many of the bitterest disputes today concern how far one can really extend such unaccountable power. How far should leaders (or indeed anyone at all) have freedom to act, and corresponding responsibility for their decisions? It’s ultimately a metaphysical question, with implications for everything from prison policy to the battle between Great Man Theorists and structuralists in historiography — and one in which the trend, for some decades now, has been away from the individual.

Even Left-wingers who dislike the utopianism and moral stridency that often accompanies this have found themselves increasingly marginalised in progressive circles. Meanwhile, many on the Right have begun to link the idea of the swarm with feminisation of the public sphere. For proponents, the implicit (and sometimes explicit) argument then follows that we need only expunge femininity — or perhaps, quite literally, women — from public office, and all will be right with the world again.

Is this right? Well, there is some correlation between women’s entry into the workforce, and the emergence of swarmist politics. But I don’t think this is as direct as proponents of “repealing the 19th” like to imagine. After all, the reputation “assassination” by gossip, smear and ostracism now being waged against Biden may be feminine-coded in its methods. But are we seriously arguing that such political takedowns were unheard-of until women entered public life? Millennia of court politics would suggest otherwise.

When much of this supposed “feminisation” cashes out as technologies that level the employment playing-field between the sexes, anyone who was really serious about re-masculinising the West would be campaigning for a large-scale return to subsistence farming. Nothing separates the sexes like manual labour. Oddly enough, though, most prefer to blame those features of high-tech society they dislike on women. Accordingly, resistance to the technocratic governance of today’s increasingly networked and functionally gender-neutral society is now coded masculine and Right-wing, with Trump as its figurehead: sworn enemy of the swarmist order. Should he be elected again, analysts report, he will prioritise gutting the “deep state”, which is to say all those self-driving bureaucracies. At a rally last year in Texas, he confirmed this in apocalyptic terms, saying: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.”

This aspiration is denounced, in turn, by swarmists as not just mistaken but evil: tantamount to fascism. From this perspective, anyone trying to reclaim individual leadership from the self-driving machinery of state is by definition a malign would-be dictator. And while the screeching about Literally Hitler is surely overdone, we might ask as well: are the swarmists really as hostile as they make out, to the authoritarianism they condemn?

To my eye, the fixation on incipient totalitarian Trumpism betrays as much desire as fear: a thirst for precisely the kind of power Trump is accused of seeking — just qualified by the caveat that its exercise should be faceless and procedural, rather than indexed to one capricious individual. Meanwhile, among more pragmatic technocrats, the turn against Biden serves as tacit admission that an explicitly self-driving administration remains politically unacceptable — emphatically so to the American electorate, but also to many within the Democrat camp. Some form of leadership figure is still required, even if this is mostly theatre.

On the other side, meanwhile, after the weekend’s events, Trump is being hailed as avatar for all those who still resist the faceless swarm. He has emerged from this attack as a one-man embodiment of Great Man Theory, baptised in his own blood by an assassination attempt not of the figurative, collectivist, indirect sort but the old-fashioned, violent, individualist kind.

And yet we might ask his supporters: be honest, how much of this so-called “feminisation” should be rolled back? I suspect even the most ardent opponents of swarmism would choose an “assassination” attempt in the feminine key now faced by Joe Biden, over the one Donald Trump just survived. The former might threaten your self-esteem, your social circle, or your reputation; the latter is more terminal. I dare say few want sexed polarity enough to swap desk work for manual labour. And this goes, too, for a great many features of 21st-century civilisation that rely for normal functioning on institutions, processes and bureaucracies. Only the most unhinged swarm-hater would seriously seek to gut them all.

It’s doubly fitting, then, that the half-senile avatar of faceless managerialism should himself face a swarmist political attack from his own side. Fitting, too, that his individualist opponent should be attacked the old-fashioned way: as an individual, by an individual. But if history is any guide, we won’t need to choose between these two modes of political assassination: both have always played a role in the cut and thrust of politics.

And by the same token, too, the swarm and the Great Man continue to need one another. The former may seem unstoppable; but without a head it’s blind and chaotic. And even the greatest of Great Men needs a team; needs bureaucrats, even. The struggle now convulsing America may look dramatic, but the two sides are far closer than they imagine.