The Motivations of Leaders

Winston Churchill, in the third volume of The Second World War, offers several brief asides that betray a quizzical fact about his character. Within several pages of one another, Churchill praises the suicide of the Hungarian Count Teleki and of Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis as preserving the honor of their nations. A few pages later Churchill offers the thought that the British and Greek armies could make a heroic stand at Thermopylae, the site of a famous last stand in Ancient Greek history. Churchill’s naive notions of chivalric heroism are apparent in many of his famous speeches to the Houses of Parliament as well. Truly a man for the moment, Churchill wanted desperately to live out his dream of knightly heroism and often saw mass, industrialized slaughter as a worthy opportunity. His desire for an almost literary form of heroism (along with an ample amount of amoral Realpolitik) enabled his ascent to the pinnacle of the history of British leadership.

Vaulting ambition, the insatiable desire for power, is a well-known facet of great political leaders. But it is often this attribute with a mixture of a desire for praise and distinction that creates truly great leaders. John Adams, founding father and second American President, wrote:

“Every personal quality, and every blessing of fortune, is cherished in proportion to its capacity of gratifying this universal affection for the esteem, the sympathy, the admiration and congratulations of the public…”

He goes on to assert that government has the function of regulating these desires. This is important because it helps us to understand the process of government and of those who govern. Legislation passed and actions taken are not necessarily to solve some public issue, but to gain the esteem and adulation of the public. It also helps clarify the ends of different leaders. For instance, President Obama wishes to have a powerful liberal legacy, built on sizable achievements. He is not just seeking the moderate respect of the crowd but lionization in the historical record. That is why he was willing to forgo chances at prolonged cooperation with Republicans on lesser issues and instead focused on tremendous ones, like the Affordable Care Act, and the changes wrought by the stimulus bill.

When we better understand the psychological and emotional motives of or most consequential leaders, it provides a framework for understanding their actions.

Succesful Institutions and the Republican Party

With Ted Cruz dropping out of the Republican race for the President, Donald Trump is left as the only truly viable candidate for the nomination. While this may be the will of the American voter, it is a failure of the Republican Party as an institution.

The Republican Party guides conservative thought into a useful and effective organization which seeks to advance those political interests, or it did at one time. The arc of this presidential election so far has mirrored the destruction of the Republican Party as an effective institution. As the party’s split, largely along racial lines in the 1960’s, as discussed in an earlier post, the GOP became the sole political party advocating conservativism. Since that time they have had an increasingly catastrophic failure in branding and while at the same time becoming sclerotic. While Republicans won national elections 7 times since 1968, they have failed to expand their party, they have stood still while the country has not.

They have failed to counter the argument that they are a party for wealthy white men. The evolution of American demographics have doomed the party due to its lack of foresight. Republicans were going to have a difficult time winning the Presidential election regardless of who there candidate was, simply because homosexuals, young people, women, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans do not vote Republican in large enough numbers.

There other major failure is more recent. In an effort to overcome their demographic challenges the Republican Party co-opted and then ignored grassroots conservatives. The Tea Party was a robust movement with both major funding and an active and motivated core of supporters. Republicans gleefully allowed Tea Party candidates to run on Republican tickets in order to win seats in local and statewide elections and then failed (and over-promised) to enact their reforms. This has led to disillusionment with the Republican “establishment”.

The final major failure of the Republican Party has been cowardice. Key figures in the Party have allowed someone who represents both of their major flaws to become the front runner without disavowing him. Donald Trump has doubled down on their branding failure by representing the GOP’s old base of constituents with xenophobia and racism AND by railing against the Establishnent’s failure to take seriously the reforms demanded by conservative activists.

Some responsibility lies with the Obama administration for failing to take the Republican view into consideration and passing the Stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act without many and any Republican votes, thus alienating the group further. But the majority of the blame falls squarely on the Republican Party for allowing a duplicitous demagogue to hijack their institution.

The GOP is a failed institution, one which now, with the face of their Party as Donald Trump, no longer even supports reasonable conservative values. The real problem here is that it is bad for the nation to not have an organization that can properly harness major political thought but also to not have any counter for the Democratic Party. It is not good to have large swaths of the government controlled by a single party that does not have to refine its message, or moderate its most extreme impulses. Democrats will not win on the strength of their ideals, but on the basis of having no organized opposition. Ted Cruz was a poor candidate in this sense as well, but Donald Trump has signaled the death-knell of the Republican Party, and we will not have to wait until Election Day to discover that.

Privacy and Newsworthiness

New norms of privacy are being developed in our intensely digital society. As people place more of themselves online they open themselves up to ever-greater intrusion from cyber pathways. The current young generation has been accused of narcissism for their desire to document their whole lives on Facebook and Snapchat, but the desire still remains to conceal themselves as well as protect themselves from prying eyes. Attempts to reconcile the increased vulnerability have been highlighted in litigation (the Supreme Court ruled that smartphones are different in kind from items like wallets because of the personal information they contain), by doxxing and other phenomena of mob justice online, by the backlash against NSA spying, and by the increasingly personal approach of the news media.

Recently, a court sided with former wrestler and entertainer Hulk Hogan against Gawker media, a purveyor of serious news and commentary, but also of tabloid-style scandalousness and rumor, because it released a sex tape it had obtained of Hulk Hogan and a friend’s wife. In a deposition a senior editor for Gawker facetiously said that any sex video of a person over the age of 4 was appropriately newsworthy to be published for mass consumption.

The Intercept is an often thought-provoking and bias-challenging read. Glenn Greenwald built his media establishment out of his access to the Snowden leaks and that trove has proved to be an extraordinary resource for him and his company. But the inception has, at times, cast its shadow over the day-to-day operations of the newspaper. Not everything secret or classified is newsworthy. The government conceals itself out of an institutional inertia that seeks to keep everything under its control. That over-classification harms not just the transparency of the government, but the ability to understand what is newsworthy.

The struggle for the newsmedia is two-fold. One, it is difficult to distinguish between what is secret and what is newsworthy. With the increased vulnerability of secrets deposited online and their ability to be rapidly disseminated comes difficult decisions about the information that is actually useful to the public. Two, there is no absolute line demarcating the difference between a person’s private life, especially if they are a public figure, and their public life. If every date and sextape a celebrity makes is also a continuance of their business life as reality stars then it is hard to tell what is sacred.

What all of this amounts to is a breakdown of privacy norms that have been in place for at least hundreds of years. When everyone lived in small groups, villages, or communities, there was a very reduced sense of privacy. A problem or personal issue of any member of the tribe or group was dragged into the light and the community dealt with problems and issues as a whole. But now that tribe or community has expanded to everyone with an internet connection, and people are not used to those stresses and pressures. Strengthening privacy laws is an uphill battle. It seems instead that people should grow more tolerant, and that society should shift their thinking to both expect less privacy and to be more accepting of others’ flaws and secrets.

Shakespeare Quotes and the Bull-Moose Party

On the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death I think it is appropriate to delve into the bard’s almost -sacred texts and present you with some of his finest wisdom: This above all: to thine ownself be true.

The only problem with this quote is that it is intended to show what a hypocritical blowhard Polonius is, as he spouts platitudes to his children and describes values that he clearly does not share. The point is that we forget context. When we reach into the multitudinous past of history and literature we try to find kernels of truth and sage advice that we can apply to the here and now. But often we learn nothing. That short quote, what does it tell you? Not nearly as much as the entire play (“Hamlet” by the way) does, which deeply examines the fundamental lack of knowledge of our world and of others that we face as we try to shape our lives. We cannot separate a part from the whole and gain much insight.

As the United States heads to a possible contested convention for the Republican Party, as well as its splintering, many writers have tried to find an analogy from the past that will inform our view of the present. The most popular, and recent, in “The Atlantic” today, is to look to Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. The admittedly light-hearted article suggests that Trump’s actions and rhetoric and a forcefully contested convention are nothing new and that the United States came through the chaos fine then and so should be ok now. This does not take into account the very different circumstances in play. The political parties have different platforms, Trump’s insurgency has not been outright dismissed by the Republican Party, the structure and concerns of the nation were completely different, and the institutions of the time were constructed differently. There is no precedent for what is happening right now in American politics and attempting to predict the future is risky.

When we do look to the past we can use it to inform our understanding of the present. We do this not by comparing actions directly but seeing their similarities on a fundamental level and using that to make broad conclusions about a current event, not a specific one about a specific instance. Guessing specifics is almost impossible. Saying that this has happened before without taking into account the completely different circumstances surrounding the event in question gleans little insight into what the consequences of a modern-day contested convention will be. I am positive that, in context, it is apparent that this splintered Republican Party and a possible contested convention would have nothing in common with Teddy Roosevelt’s in 1912.

What we can understand from that historical analogy is that political parties are durable institutions and that outsized personalities may inspire unusual loyalty in their followers, besides that we face the same uncertainty that the Prince of Denmark did.

The New American Politics of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have harnessed something greater than demagoguery or populism and are truly our first millennial, tech-savvy presidential candidates. Obama’s campaign was renowned for its ground-game and use of data, but that allowed for targeted messaging to voters, and Bush’s team was known for using wedge-issues and ruthless branding to get out the vote and swing public opinion. Trump and Sanders have done something different, they have harnessed the splintered-media and the social virality of the internet.

Trump has dominated the attention of the media and has used the ubiquity of his presence to generate support and interest, not unlike, say, the Kardashians.

Sanders on the other hand has gotten millions of young people to act as his surrogates, by re-tweeting and posting about him on Facebook and other social media platforms. Sanders has made himself into a kind of social fad. If you are a millennial and you don’t support Sanders, than there is a good chance the wrath of social exclusion will fall on you.

This is a truly modern election cycle where the forces shaping our popular culture have come together to finally effect politics.