The summer of 2018 was both great and terrible for the late Steve Jobs. His baby, Apple, became the world’s first trillion-dollar company, while his child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, promoted , a stinging memoir about her relationship with her father that was released Tuesday.

The broad outlines of Brennan-Jobs's relationship with her father were widely known before his death. He denied paternity for much of her early years and forced Lisa's mother to support the child with the aid of welfare. Though he was a multi-millionaire, he refused to pay her Harvard tuition, allowing generous neighbors to fund her education and waiting years to reimburse them.

Previews of Brennan-Jobs’s book are littered with accounts of her father’s less well-known cruelties. According to The New York Times, when Lisa's mother, Chrisann Brennan, asked that Jobs buy a home for her and Lisa, Jobs allegedly instead purchased the house in question for himself and his wife. Brennan-Jobs writes that her father bullied and insulted her, and used money to manipulate and intimidate her, pulling stunts like walking out of restaurants to avoid paying the bill. On his death bed, Brennan-Jobs writes, her father apologized to her for his cruelty.

Other members of Jobs's family, including his widow Laurene Powell Jobs, released a statement contesting Lisa's account and saying, in part, that her memoir "differs dramatically from our memories of those times." But others who knew Jobs have also spoken of his callousness. He has been accused of harassing would-be employees, asking job candidates when they lost their virginities. His desire to flout convention veered from the essentially harmless, like famously leasing a new Mercedes-Benz every six months to avoid getting a license plate, to the willfully boorish, like his habit of parking in handicapped spots, to the deliberately unkind, like bullying employees and even cheating his friend Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Yet because we love the gadgets that he helped make and market, Steve Jobs holds—now as he did in life—a loftier position in our cultural imagination than do his peers Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. His death sparked an outpouring of grief usually reserved for beloved rockstars. Apple fans left flowers outside the company's stores; Jobs was turned into an action figure and inspired regrettable tattoos. Instead of taking a measured appraisal of a man with a mixed legacy, we turned him into an icon. Jobs's sins didn’t warrant expulsion from the public stage, but there is something vaguely pathological about such a man earning makeshift memorial-levels of personal adoration.

A 2011 memorial to Steve Jobs, outside a California Apple store. Kevork Djansezian Getty Images

From the Trump Presidency to #MeToo to Steve Jobs’s legacy, much of our cultural energy is now spent reckoning with the sins of powerful men. And while there is plenty of trenchant analysis of the mechanisms through which they exploit their power—rape and sexual harassment for Harvey Weinstein, sexual assault and racism for Trump, interpersonal cruelty for Steve Jobs—their ascents were only possible in a culture that not only tolerates misogyny, racism, and unkindness, but one that sees progress as enacted by series of powerful individuals, each shaping the world by bending it to their will.

Though it’s fallen out of favor among historians, the Great Man theory still reigns in the popular consciousness. It’s entertaining to consider history as a series of singular personalities, invariably male, striding across the world stage to enact tectonic changes through sheer force, as opposed to the gradual shifts in culture and politics that come from the small actions of many. As historian David A. Bell wrote in Foreign Policy last year:

Americans have a particular weakness for this way of understanding historical change. They have a boundless appetite for books that celebrate the Founding Fathers. They like to see George Washington’s steadfastness as the reason for the success of the American Revolution and Abraham Lincoln’s courage and vision as the key factor ensuring the North’s victory in the Civil War.

Apple masterfully capitalized upon this view of progress in its famous 1997 "Think Different" ad. The clip consisted of a montage of icons, from Albert Einstein to Muhammad Ali to Amelia Earhart. (If a similar collection of idols were assembled today, Steve Jobs would certainly be among their number.) Over the footage, actor Richard Dreyfuss intoned:

Here's to the crazy ones.

The misfits.

The rebels.

The troublemakers.

The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.

And they have no respect for the status quo.

In 2018, this speech summons drearier images of our Misfit, Troublemaker, and Rule-Breaker in-Chief. For Trump’s election struck at the problem with Great Man-ism. If progress hinges on powerful individuals, then punishing the powerful stops that progress. For years, Hollywood overlooked Weinstein’s assaults, because who else could produce Pulp Fiction? Trump has played directly into this narrative, declaring during the election that “[he] alone can fix” what ails the nation. His opposition rightly pointed out the ridiculousness of that statement, but it would be hard to blame Trump’s supporters for being taken in by the idea that one man could solve all all the nation’s real and perceived problems, primed as we are by American historiography. As one Trump supporter put it last year, "He was the hope we were all waiting on, the guy riding up on the white horse."

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At the root of much conservative regard for Trump and Apple-fanboy love of Jobs is a cultural tendency to take a break-a-few eggs approach to progress, a willingness to overlook moral bankruptcy in the face of sheer efficacious might. That may sit with us well enough in the case of Jobs, who gave the world expensive tools (that include the laptop on which I write this essay) in exchange for a tolerance of his interpersonal cruelty and some far-away sweatshops. But the deal we made with Jobs—the willingness to elevate a strongman, so long as he proves to be an effective strongman—is also the deal members of the right made with Trump.

Though Trump certainly has admirers who love him because of his out-and-out racism and boundless vulgarity, plenty of Republicans entered the 2016 campaign season as supporters of standard conservatives like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. They’d undoubtedly prefer he confine himself to the more polite bigotries of the mainstream Republican party line, that he be a president who not insult war heroes, one whose pursuit of conservative policy goals wouldn’t be disrupted by his old hook-ups. Their willingness to overlook these and so many other of Trump’s flaws speak not solely to deep-seated bigotries, but an unwillingness to check the power of Great Men in any regard.

Instead of taking a measured appraisal of a man with a mixed legacy, we turned him into an icon.

This isn’t the only way to look at history. Each different-thinking rebel rides the crest of a slow-building cultural wave. Edison’s initial light bulb patent was rejected for being too similar to a design registered 30 years prior. Apple’s success can’t be solely credited to Jobs, when Wozniak built the early products on which the company staked its name. In other words, no "Great Man" is indispensable.

Earlier this month, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced her Accountable Capitalism Act. If adopted, it would force corporations to allow employees to elect 40 percent of their board members, echoing policies common in European democracies like Germany. In The National Review, Samuel Hammond decried Warren's act as one that would stop the ascent of leaders like Steve Jobs.

When Steve Jobs took over Apple in 1996, for instance, he famously forced the resignation of most of its board of directors, installing close friends who would be loyal to his vision. He then proceeded to lay off 3,000 workers and shuttered a number of the company’s biggest boondoggles. This earned him a reputation for ruthlessness, but it also set Apple on the path to become America’s first trillion-dollar company. It’s simply impossible to imagine Jobs’s unilateral vision succeeding in an environment of constant stakeholder management and worker negotiation.

When you’re functioning from a Great Man view of progress, any attempt to reign in power seekers is potentially catastrophic. Perhaps Hammond's right—an America in which bullies aren't allowed and even encouraged to operate unencumbered is likely one in which Steve Jobs may not have found such boundless success. Maybe Apple would have been forced to settle for being a multi-billion dollar company. But that America may not have elected Donald Trump.

Gabrielle Bruney Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.

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