On Leadership
In business versus politics
by Professor John Kane
Good leadership is frequently identified as a necessary requisite for effective governance, while lack of leadership is portrayed as responsible for a multitude of ills. It is a theme that plays volubly in business circles, where groaning shelves of books purport to teach CEOs valuable lessons in personal and company success. Meanwhile prominent heads of business and financial firms are lauded in the press (or were up until the global financial crisis) as paragons of astute and forceful leadership.
In contrast, modern political studies have only recently taken up the issue of leadership in any serious way. The ancient theme of political leadership fell out of fashion among scholars obsessed with discovering ‘scientific’ general laws of politics, to the consequent neglect of individual actors. But many political scientists now admit that political action is inevitably the action of particular individuals, albeit within more or less constraining historical, institutional, social and economic conditions. They have accepted, in other words, that it really matters for the fate of the world who is sitting in what leadership chair at any significant moment.
But what, if any, is the difference between leadership in business and leadership in politics? It’s a question made acutely relevant by the startling ascendancy of Donald Trump, a businessman elevated to the highest office in America, arguably the world. Famously or notoriously, Trump’s whole campaign rested on his claim that he was an effective and successful business leader. Let’s leave aside the veracity of this claim (veracity not being, after all, an essential Trumpian value). Let us ignore such questions as the extent of his inheritance from his father, his various bankruptcies, his sharp practices with subcontractors and tenants, the failure of his ‘university’. Let us take at face value his assertion of good business leadership and think what it implies about political leadership.
The implication is, of course, that political leadership in the United States is, and has long been, miserably poor. America’s political leaders have failed Americans by not having sufficient regard for their central interests and by allowing America’s formerly super-bright national star to dim on the world stage. Trump sells himself as a hard-headed businessman able to hammer out deals with various protagonists for the benefit of himself and his shareholders, only now his shareholders will be the American people. His negotiating skills will be employed with manufacturing firms and with foreign governments to ensure that Americans (‘real’ Americans) are never short-changed, that their interests are paramount and that, as a consequence, America will be ‘great again’.
Trump’s essential case is that political leadership is not just a different kind of leadership, but an inferior kind. It is always fatally compromised by cross-cutting political demands, by partisan loyalties and enmities, and by dependency on external financial resources. It is thus incapable of true decisiveness. Whatever decisions get made are never truly in the national interest but only in the service of some particular section or sections. What Trump offers is clarity and genuine decisiveness. As an (allegedly) self-made billionaire he has only to heed his own views of what the national interest requires and act accordingly. He owes nothing to anyone. Except of course to the people who elected him. And there’s the rub.
If Trump is a new kind of leader, one who brings business skills and sensibilities to the political realm, who really are his followers? Over half of voters in November did not vote for Donald Trump which, given the vagaries of the electoral college system, did not matter a jot for his gaining office but left an awful lot of people proclaiming that ‘he is not our president’.
Nor did ‘the Donald’ make any attempt, either in his inaugural address or thereafter, to reach out to the dismayed multitude and offer to lead for all citizens. Rather he doubled down on the divisiveness that had marked his campaign and in the process provoked a storm of liberal protest such as the United States has not seen in many a year.
But what of those who did vote for him? How many of them can be described as true followers? Voting figures suggest that party identification played its usual major role at the last minute, meaning many habitual Republican voters, whatever they personally thought of Trump, could not bring themselves to vote for a Democrat (maybe especially that Democrat). A thin layer of disenchanted, mainly white working-class voters in crucial rust-belt states tilted the balance Donald’s way, and perhaps these are his true and only real followers. They are his ‘deplorables’ and proud of it, his ‘forgotten people’, the narrow base on which he (and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon) seek to rebuild an archaic version of American, quasi-racialist nationalism.
But even here we should be cautious. Many reports advised that a good proportion of these voters believed less in Trump and his promises than in his capacity to stick it to Washington and the ruling ‘elites’ of both parties. Trump was not wrong in diagnosing a perceived failure of real political leadership as a cause of public dissatisfaction. He is an improvised explosive device that a crucial wedge of supporters has lobbed into ‘the establishment’, and they surely are not disappointed in the explosive effects of his first fortnight in power. But their purpose is less to destroy the political power structure than to get its attention and hopefully tip policy meaningfully in their direction. Suicide bombers are by definition disposable, and if Trump wishes to survive his havoc-making he must convince his ‘deplorables’ that he can and will make a noticeable difference to their lives and fortunes. If he does not their support will melt like snow on a warm day and he will have no other base to fall back on except the executive office itself.
That is, to be sure, a powerful resource, but also a more vulnerable one than Trump perhaps realises absent some secure and reliable constituency. The Republicans in Congress are certainly not that. They belong to a party wrong-footed by an upstart showman who nevertheless delivered to them both houses of Congress and the presidency. They would like to make the most of their opportunity but are not sure they can control the agenda with such an unpredictable tenant in the Oval Office, one whose ear is more acutely tuned to the murmurings of the would-be Darth Vader of this administration, Steve Bannon, than to them.
Presidential and congressional agendas may overlap here and there but are certainly not identical. Congressional Republicans dare not, for the moment, openly oppose ‘their’ president but his first fortnight has shown what an uncomfortable position he can put them in with his executive decision-making. A subterranean contest for control between White House and Congress has begun, with the outcome radically uncertain.
And here we return to the question of leadership style, and of business versus political leadership. Trump vaunts his capacity as negotiator and deal-maker, and deal-making both within Congress and between Congress and White House is (or used to be, pre-Obama) of the essence of American politics. But there is a critical difference between business leadership and political leadership in such a complex environment.
CEOs of business firms are like monarchs whose writ runs large within their organisations. They decide on strategy, promulgate it and order that it be followed. The important negotiations they must pursue to gain some advantage are undertaken with external firms and agencies, in the way monarchs deal with other independent monarchs.
The president can similarly, through executive orders, command that certain things be done but there is a limit to what can be achieved in this way, and orders are vulnerable to overthrow by succeeding administrations (as Trump is proving with regard to Obama). Any truly lasting legacy must be secured by legislation and the president cannot, assuredly, order Congress to do anything. He cannot even command his own party. The American system was designed precisely to prevent such monarchical behaviour. Nothing can be achieved legislatively without considerable and persistent negotiation, deal-making and horse-trading. Trump’s CEO style will avail him nothing in this scenario. Undertaking presidential leadership usually means learning severe lessons in humility, and humility does not noticeably figure in the Trump lexicon.
The opposition of Democrats can be taken for granted but, with no truly secure base, it is the potential opposition of professional bureaucrats and of Republicans that Trump must fear. The raucous first fortnight of his administration seems to portend a very bumpy ride, and doubts have already been raised about whether and how long he can survive in the role. His identification as a business leader has become precisely part of the problem, for he has been immensely reluctant to sever any and all ties with his business empire. Indeed in some of his moods he seems to regard the presidency as a part-time job. A group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has already commenced a civil action against ‘DONALD J. TRUMP, in his official capacity as President of the United States of America’ alleging that his foreign business interests produce numerous conflicts of interest and violate the ‘Foreign Emoluments Clause’ of the Constitution which aims at preventing threats to the Republic through insidious foreign entanglements.
This challenge may come to nothing but, given Trump’s cavalier attitude to law and ethical propriety, we may anticipate more and more serious ones to come. The only way that a leader lacking a significant base but with their hands on the levers of power can ensure longevity is the authoritarian route of engineering a real or virtual coup (it is not for nothing that Trump admires Putin). But though the fragmented US political system may accommodate this to a limited extent it is extremely unlikely, for all of its manifest faults, to succumb entirely. In the meantime uncertainty reigns and the possibility of impeachment looms.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROFESSOR JOHN KANE
John Kane attained his PhD at the London School of Economics and is Professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Brisbane.
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 Haig Patapan) of The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP).
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