By John Henwood
IN a recent column I referred to the Lieutenant-Governor’s talk at a Leadership Jersey meeting. He covered a range of topics and, perhaps inevitably, he touched on political leadership (diplomatically avoiding local politics) and there was surprise among his audience when he said that Donald Trump had positive leadership qualities.
It was clear that Vice-Admiral Jerry Kyd was not endorsing Trump, and certainly not offering any judgment on his moral, ethical or intellectual attributes or his politics. Quite simply he was pointing out that Trump had recognisable leadership assets. Well, that is hard to dispute when the 47th President of the United States won not only the electoral college, an arcane system, but also the popular vote. Most voters wanted him and it seems highly unlikely that his scruples, integrity, or intellect were the decisive factors. So, what was it?
Not many recent Republican presidents have won the popular vote. In America, with no tradition of nobility in the European sense, people relate wealth to class. The 19th-century robber barons like Carnegie, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt who amassed huge fortunes became the country’s social elite. Americans admire successful people and perhaps aspire to their wealth, but the majority are cautious about trusting them. According to Gallup, only two per cent of Americans regard themselves as upper class, 16% as upper-middle, 43% as middle class and 39% as working or lower class. Around 80% of Americans are not as well off as they aspire to be, so it is not surprising that, however the electoral college votes, the majority tends to vote Democrat, the party perceived as the one with an agenda to improve their lot. Democrat is as close to Britain’s Labour as America gets; indeed, the Labour Party sent people to help Kamala Harris become the first female president.
Harris lost, badly. Those states which tend to switch between the parties voted for Trump. They did so because they could not stretch their imaginations far enough to see Harris as the leader who would make things better for them. On the other hand, Trump, with his battle cry “Make America Great Again”, was seen as the man who got things done, a strong leader, whether they agreed with his policies or not.
Leaders are not necessarily good people. Among those who lived in my time, Josef Stalin (“Uncle Joe”) was responsible for the deaths of around 50 million of his own people, as was Mao Zedong; others including Pol Pot, Muammar Gaddafi and Francisco Franco had the blood of countless numbers on their hands. None would have been able to do what they did without leadership attributes. Goodness knows how an audience might react if a future speaker was bold enough to describe Adolf Hitler as a leader. Truth can be uncomfortable.
Ideology imposed on the young is dangerous
Stalin’s ideology was Marxism-Leninism, while Franco’s was nationalism-authoritarianism; political opposites, both equally dangerous. One must be very cautious when approaching any form of ideology. It is the beginning of a path that leads to others, often in a minority, seeking to impose their views on the rest of us.
The so-called Unification Church, better known as the “Moonies”, is an example. Olympic gymnast Hiroko Yamasaki was drawn into the sect and got married in a Unification mass wedding. Then she vanished. Six weeks later she reappeared. Apparently reawakened, she explained: “I was in a world of delusion and mind control,” not knowing whether the affection she had felt for the man she married was real.
Less extreme, but potentially equally detrimental, is current ideology around gender. Children as young as primary-school age are encouraged to explore whether the gender with which they were born is the right one for them. What damage might that do to young, impressionable minds?
There is an insidious school of thought that for children the notion of winning and losing should not exist. No one comes last; winners should not celebrate because it may offend the sensibilities of those who do not. Rather than encouraging kids to greater achievement it teaches them that it is OK to fail. If losers are rewarded, why bother to try?
As that great modern philosopher Charlie Brown wrote: “Kids don’t know what it’s like to feel pain when they do something stupid. Stupid should hurt.” There is nothing wrong in a child clambering up a climbing frame; if he or she falls and breaks an arm it will hurt. That is not a reason to close the adventure playground on health-and-safety grounds. They will be more careful next time; it is called learning and not all learning is easy. Nor should it be.
We have already developed a generation that has come to expect that society will support it whatever, will ignore failure, will downplay shows of independence, will devalue success and do everything possible to make everyone equal. It is Kurt Vonnegut’s nightmare, described in his short story Harrison Bergeron, come true: “Everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law; they were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else; nobody was better looking than anybody else; nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.”
So, how to turn things around? It is not going to be easy. At a government level it will require courage and determination such as we seldom see nowadays. Courage to repeal restrictive laws, even those designed to shield us from our own stupidity like some over-protective health-and-safety legislation. Back in the day ladders were perfectly adequate to reach high places, now we must have scaffolding. Why? Where’s the proportionality? And why should we pay people more than the market says their labour is worth? Wouldn’t it be better to encourage and help them to acquire greater skills?
Parents make the decision to bring children into the world; perhaps if they put more emphasis on personal liberty and freedom from controlling rules it would gradually return society to a more confident state. And perhaps if teachers concentrated more on equipping children to succeed in life rather than suggesting failure does not matter and promoting gender neutrality, children would be encouraged to think that it is more stimulating to win than lose and understand that life is not always fair. In short, a society in which children are encouraged to self-determine rather than be carelessly conforming.
If we can produce a generation that thinks for itself, is brought up to make its own decisions, to resist the notion that life can be de-risked, that success will be rewarded, then perhaps one day some of them will become the leaders who unravel the nanny knots with which we have become tied. Until then, a plea to those empowered to make decisions: stop introducing more restrictions on our lives. Let us make our own decisions and, yes, our own mistakes, even if they do hurt.
Born and educated in Jersey, John Henwood MBE had a career in broadcasting before tackling a range of other challenges. In 2016 he was honoured to become the second recipient of the Institute of Directors Lifetime Achievement Award, the only other being the late Colin Powell CBE.
