By P.K.Balachandran
Colombo, March 5 – The Trump-Zelensky spat at the White House last week may not be a one-off event. It could set a new norm for political leaders across the world with unpredictable and possibly disastrous consequences.
There is a danger of leaders taking the cue from Donald Trump and using the sledgehammer to have their way. The Trumpian tactic becoming a contagion cannot be ruled out.
Till recently, the brand of “strongmen” was associated with Third World and Communist countries. But that is no longer exclusive to them. Right wing leaders with illiberal policies have arrived in the democratic West and electoral democracies also. There is a class of “elected autocrats”.
These leaders may not be as brazen as Donald Trump but they could ride roughshod over established social and stylistic norms in the belief that they have the support of a section of voters called the “aspirational classes” thirsting for what they consider change from a stodgy or a debilitating past. This approach could become universal because its brand Ambassador is the President of the most powerful country in the world, the United States.
The head on clash of strongmen with the established democratic order could lead to national and international disruptions. It could lead to the break-up of countries and interminable wars seen as a n “zero sum game” with colossal loses in men and material.
Michael Blake, Professor of Philosophy, Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington, had written an essay in Conversation in February 1919, in which he said that there have been two kinds of political leaders in history – the moral and immoral.
According to Blake, US Presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and George Washington stood out not only as good leaders, but as good men too. They embodied not just political skill, but personal virtue, he points out. Blake then asks, “Should one expect a President to demonstrate virtue? If someone is good at the difficult job of political leadership, must they also demonstrate exceptional moral character?”
The answer varies, Blake says. Those who insist that the President must be virtuous, begin with the thought that a person in that office will face new and unanticipated problems, and to solve them, the approach to decision-making should be informed by a “consistent character”. The President should rely on the lessons that have built that consistency. An erratic and unpredictable character could have devastating effects Blake submits.
“Abraham Lincoln, for instance, consistently and publicly referred to the same set of moral values throughout his life – values centred on a deep (though imperfect) belief in the moral equality of people. These principles provided him with guidance throughout the horrors of the Civil War.”
“A President whose decisions are not grounded in the right sort of ethical values may be less well-equipped to respond well – and, more importantly, might be frighteningly unpredictable in his or her responses,” Blake warns.
Additionally, he points out that institutions can function only when all those who participate in them are capable of compromise. “Rules don’t work unless people governed by those rules care about them and voluntarily choose to abide by them. If this is true of citizens, it is even more true of the President, whose opportunities to damage the system through unprincipled actions are so much greater.”
Compromise and consensus, which are required to run institutions, including the State, are the very anti-thesis of arbitrariness, the Trumpian brand of arbitrariness particularly.
Machiavelli Comes Back
The opposite view is held by political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). He argued that the nature of political life required a willingness to demonstrate habits of character that would ordinarily be understood as vices.
“The good leader”, he said, “is morally right to do what is usually taken as wrong. He or she must be cruel, deceptive and often violent.”
Arthur Applbaum of the Harvard Kennedy School partially goes along with the Machiavillian view and adds that the concept of morality varies from profession to profession. The good lawyer, for instance, may have to bully, browbeat or humiliate hostile witnesses. That is what a zealous defence might require. In the political field, which is hostile and brutal, leaders might have similar reasons to do what is usually forbidden, Applbaum says.
Michael Walzre, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, goes along with Applbaum’s reasoning. If the world is imperfect, and requires a politician to lie, cheat or otherwise do wrong in the name of doing good, then there is sometimes a moral reason for the politician to do that wrong, he says.
Walzer’s view is that a good political leader must not flinch at being a bad person if doing what is ordinarily wrong can make the world better for all.
In an interesting reference to the first US President, George Washington, Blake recalls that the “good man” Washington had also engaged in deception for the sake of the US.
“Washington consistently sought to deceive his adversaries about his intentions and his resources – and, importantly, sought to deceive his own subordinates, reasoning that a lie must be believed at home for it to be useful abroad.”
That’s realpolitik, which is what politics is essentially, no matter what cloak is used is used to cover it up.
In a way, Trump’s browbeating Zelensky could be justified if it would bring an end to the three-year long destructive and fruitless war and begin an era of peace, trade and reconstruction as promised by Trump. Seen in this light, it might not be wrong to end the war without first punishing and defeating “aggressor” Vladimir Putin. The three year-long strategy of first defeating Putin had cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives without yielding the desired result.
However, Blake says that if there is some reason to elect an ethically flawed ruler, it should not follow that all ethical flaws are equally worth defending. If electors totally disregard ethical considerations, the world will pass into the hands of dictators and elected autocrats with disastrous consequences.
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