Politics
Saving democracy: don’t look for the charismatic “leader”
On last week’s Saturday Extra Geraldine Doogue interviewed Edward Luce of the Financial Times and Sheri Berman of Columbia University: What will it take to reverse the decline of democracy? (16 minutes)
They start with a discussion of Biden’s Summit for Democracy before moving to America’s democratic decline domestically and on the world stage since the postwar years. Then they consider the economic forces leading to polarisation and anti-democratic movements, particularly the hollowing-out of the middle class, the loss of social mobility, and cutbacks in social insurance. The American dream survives, but it is being played out in democracies such as Canada and Germany that have strengthened public expenditure rather than in the USA that has pursued the path of “small government”.
The session concludes with a discussion on leadership, noting that politics in democracies has increasingly focussed on the president or prime minister – the “leader” – rather than on the policies of the political party forming government.
Are our political commentators confusing “leadership” with the person in authority who bears the title “leader”? There is a crucial distinction between “leadership” (a process or a set of activities) and a “leader” (a title given to someone in a position of formal or informal authority), however. This distinction is stressed by Ron Heifetz of the Kennedy School. The person occupying the position of president or prime minister has certain powers and delegations, but he or she also has many constraints, making it difficult for them to raise hard issues. Leadership, however, is about the tough work of raising hard issues that involve adaptive change – change that will be unsettling and take people out of their comfort zone. Climate change, the need for higher taxes, and the challenge of living with Covid-19 as an endemic condition are all such issues, which can be deadly for a prime minister or opposition “leader”. These issues are being raised by people with a public voice who are outside the political authority hierarchy – John Hewson, Zali Steggall, Bridget Archer, and the authors of the Uluru Statement – to name some who are not constrained by the binds of formal authority. We should stop seeking the “leader” who will take us out of the wilderness and support those who are exercising leadership, from whatever position they occupy.
Heifetz summarises his work on leadership in an 8-minute video, in which he stresses that anyone who cares passionately about an issue can exercise leadership. I also have a review of his main works in The Journal of Behavioural Economics and Social Systems.
Geraldine Doogue’s guests have written important works on the decline of democracy. Edward Luce is author of The retreat of western liberalism; Sheri Berman is author of Democracy and dictatorship in Europe.
Remember the Soviet Union?
Anyone interested in the dangerous situation along the Russia-Ukraine border can gain some understanding of its background from Sheila Fitzpatrick of The Australian Catholic University, interviewed by Geraldine Doogue on Saturday Extra: How does an empire collapse?
Fitzpatrick, author of the coming book The shortest history of the Soviet Union, describes the developments of thirty years ago as the Soviet Union collapsed, in spite of Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to hold it together as a federation of republics. It fell apart not from the centre, but from the periphery, particularly from those republics, such as Ukraine, that had been contributing more to the Soviet Union than they had been benefiting from it.
Her description of the Soviet Union’s collapse is somewhat more nuanced than Ronald Reagan’s claim that he brought it down all by his own heroic effort.