Donald Trump and the problem of leadership
by Professor John Kane
Can you lose three presidential debates, be revealed as a compulsive groper, fall manifestly behind in crucial battleground states, suggest you might not honour the results of an American election and still hope to be president?
It seems not even Trump hopes that any longer, otherwise why rehearse his “I wuz robbed” routine. He knew before the third debate that he had already lost intellectual conservatives. Several of these signed a letter arguing that stopping Hillary Clinton from appointing Justice Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court was insufficient reason to vote for a man who could not be trusted with the Constitution. And Trump surely noted, post-debate, the instant evaporation of his remaining support among a reluctant Republican establishment. Dismayed Republicans (who must be getting used to dismay by now) headed for the lifeboats, hoping not to be sucked down in the wake of the great empty vessel’s submergence.
All ‘the Donald’ had left was his basket of deplorables, who will never forsake him no matter what, and maybe people whose hatred of Hillary (or the Clintons, or Obama, or liberal Democrats or whoever) overwhelms their distaste for the orange one.
Meanwhile Hillary for her part had been steadied and solidified, if not quite elevated, by her increasingly confident performances over the three debates. In the third she gave a forthright and robust defence of liberal values, adroitly parried thrusts directed her way (emails) and managed Trump in a manner skilfully calculated to fan the flames of his self-immolation. She even mentioned having worked successfully with Bernie Sanders, a sidelong signal to Democrats still ‘feeling the Bern.’ Even with a few weeks of the campaign remaining, surely it was game over. Surely. And yet, and yet.
Can one be really sure of anything in the present political climate, not just in the US but anywhere? The lesson of recent history seems to be that anything can happen so expect the unexpected, even the deeply unexpected. Donald’s very ascent falls within this category, as does Brexit.
What is it about the contemporary world that makes this so? We must first acknowledge that political science has a dismal record in managing the unexpected even in ‘normal’ times, generally failing to predict significant political developments (e.g. the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Arab Spring). But under current conditions it hardly feels confident in forecasting even an apparently sure thing, like a Hillary win. Whatever the shifting sands of international politics, we might have expected the ground of domestic politics to stay boringly stable and more or less predictable.
No longer.
This is particularly the case in the matter of leadership. Consider our own bizarre Australian experience over recent years. Whatever one thought of John Howard’s politics, his eleven years in office seem in retrospect a golden era of leadership stability. When Kevin Rudd came to power in a landslide in 2007, political pundits confidently anticipated he would lead the Labor Party in office for at least two, probably three terms. But before the end of his first term he was toppled by his own, leading to the farcical drama of a Julia Gillard government hamstrung by a hung parliament, undermined by the Rudd faction from within, and ruthlessly hammered by a Tony Abbott-led opposition from without. The only surprise about Julia’s leadership was how long and valiantly she managed to retain it in the light of serial gaffes, declining polls, an impending election and the (ultimately successful) Rudd insurgency.
Then came Abbott. Oh dear. The sense of national relief was palpable when he in turn was toppled by someone promising to provide the mature, confident, intelligent and secure leadership Australians longed for. Oh dear.
The Australian case might be regarded as just a local anomaly if conditions in comparable post-Global Financial Crisis liberal democracies did not suggest otherwise. Australian leadership turmoil was anomalous only in occurring against a backdrop of relative economic prosperity, thanks to Chinese spending on minerals. But the strong sense abroad is that the whole world has shifted, lost its old bearings and found no new ones it can securely hold to.
Certainly, confidence in national leaders is at an all-time low. This is because none has found a convincing response to pressing contemporary problems, which are various and interacting. There is the continuing mayhem in the Middle East and Africa, breeding terror both locally and globally and propelling a refugee crisis in Europe. This is overlaid on the problem of a stagnant international economy, the long-term result of the 2008 financial crisis that has put the whole brave experiment of European post-war integration in jeopardy and fostered the rise of extreme rightist political movements everywhere. There is the resurgence of a prickly, belligerent, opportunist Russia, raising the spectre of old threats to Europe and to American supremacy.
A consequence of all this has been the revival of petty nationalisms and mutual distrust, along with a popular reaction against the alleged glories of globalisation. It is now generally admitted that globalisation produces losers as well as winners in developed economies (never mind developing ones). Globalisation has proved to be compatible with stagnant or declining middle class incomes even as, especially in its financial form, it fosters obscene levels of wealth among a small elite. This same elite, whose risk-taking quest for ever-diminishing ‘yield’ brought the whole world to its knees, notoriously benefited from tax-payer bail-outs and paid little in the way of financial penalty, almost nothing in the way of legal penalty for its actions. The stage was clearly set for political reaction at street level.
It has rapidly become a commonplace that Trump’s demagoguery and Sanders’ economic populism in America, the British Labour Party’s reversion to old-fashioned leftism in the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, David Cameron’s fall after the Brexit vote, the challenge of extremist parties to François Hollande in France and Angela Merkel in Germany, the rise to office of the authoritarian Law and Justice Party in Poland, and the failure to elect any government at all in Spain for nine months are, along with many other examples, all symptoms of the general malaise.
Undoubtedly true, but at the heart of this malaise is the failure of Western leaders convincingly to diagnose its causes and to prescribe believable liberal-democratic remedies. They seem stuck between adherence to the shibboleths of an apparently-failed neoliberalism and resurrection of out-of-date solutions either of the left or right. The result is loss of the crucial middle ground.
Successful democratic leadership must resolutely occupy a broad middle ground in politics and act to isolate and nullify the extremes of either wing. Failure to do this will eventually produce the destructively uncompromising hyper-partisanship that is such a feature of contemporary politics. But to succeed leaders must first identify, and in effect rhetorically create, the necessary middle ground. This is, initially, an intellectual challenge, one that has hardly been attempted by the current generation of leaders. The success of New Labour and the New Democrats and their ilk in the last part of the twentieth century was based on a calculated move to the right and premised on the political failure of ‘socialism’ globally. But the crowding to the right reduced the left to a small unreconstructed rump (there was really no left left) and opened a gaping hole in the political centre. This was not readily apparent so long as easy credit masked the decline of middle class incomes and the steep rise in inequality, but became an urgent problem when exposed by financial crisis and economic stagnation.
This basic economic quandary is of course exacerbated and complicated by factors such terrorism, resurgent racism and anti-immigrant nationalism, but it is the one that must be solved in order to sensibly address the others. Absent that, anything may happen in a volatile political environment. Trump can make his appeal from the (semi-crazy) right, Sanders his from the social-democratic left, while Hillary tries to occupy a middle ground that no longer exists and suffers because of it. Indeed Clinton’s problem is not that she is particularly dishonest but that she belongs to an ‘establishment’ that has manifestly failed and is widely resented.
Trump may hope, must hope, that in this topsy-turvy environment something, anything may occur (to Hillary) that will once again put him in contention. It seems unlikely but no one is yet quite willing to say it’s impossible. And Hillary, if and when she succeeds to the highest office in the land, will still be faced with the problem of leadership here outlined, with little evidence that she possesses the intellectual and political resources needed to deal with it.
PROFESSOR JOHN KANE
John Kane attained his PhD at the London School of Economics and is now Professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University.
John teaches in political theory, political leadership and US foreign policy and is a researcher in Griffith’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy.
He has published widely, been awarded numerous research grants, and four times been Visiting Professor to Yale University. He is the author of The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge UP) and Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of US Foreign Policy (Yale UP). He is also co-author (with H. Patapan) of The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP).
