David Runciman's Blog, page 3

Stamina, intelligence, ego: which personality traits make the best leaders?

Some say a second-class mind makes for a first-class leader, others that madness is an essential feature of the role. From Trump and Obama, to Blair and Boris Johnson, which personalities are born to rule?

There is a story that often gets told about modern presidents and prime ministers, and sometimes gets told by them as well. The politician spends half a lifetime working tirelessly towards the top job, with the goal of making a real difference once he or she gets there. They issue their instructions. Dutiful officials nod along encouragingly. But nothing really changes. Once the door to the Oval Office or No 10 closes behind them, and they settle their feet under the desk, the new president or prime minister finds out that it’s just another room and just another desk. It feels as if true power is still somewhere out of reach.

In politics you should never assume that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s better to know how little is waiting for you, like a weird inversion of the parable of The Wizard of Oz. In place of the Yellow Brick Road is the greasy pole, which has to be ascended to reach the Emerald City. Yet the successful climber finds that his or her fate is not to encounter a shrunken wizard at the end of it. Instead it is to become that person: the impostor behind the curtain.

Despite her reputation for knowing her own mind, Thatcher was surprisingly fragile in her confidence and scatty in her convictions

While in the White House Trump has been dogged by repeated rumours about his intell­ectual incapacity

Qualities that we once appreciated can become loathed: Blair’s sincerity came to seem like sanctimony, while Obama’s coolness turned into aloofness

If Boris Johnson wants you to do something, he’ll grab you by the arm. He's a charmer, a wheedler, a flatterer, a bully

Related: Dominic Cummings: master of the dark arts handed keys to No 10

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From Hamilton to Thatcher: the best books about divided governments

As Westminster coups simmer and Brexit negotiations come to a head, David Runciman chooses books that explore political division – and why we need it

Most modern politicians are familiar with Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, still the go-to guide for political intrigue more than 500 years after it was written. But Machiavelli’s other great work, The Discourses, is where he spells out the particular perils of governing in the name of the people. Factionalism and in-fighting, he says, are the price we pay for the pursuit of national glory: someone will always think they can do it better than the person in charge. He also devotes a lengthy section to dissecting how political conspiracies work. Long story short: they are easy to start, but very hard to finish.

Another classic account of how to deal with political division is given in The Federalist Papers, by the American founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. Like Machiavelli – whom they had all read – they knew that factionalism was an inevitable feature of any form of popular politics. The question was how to stop it spilling over into total political breakdown. One of their pithier recommendations was that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition”, so that no one gets the final say. They tried to build a constitution for the US on this basis, with the results we see today. The UK doesn’t have that kind of constitution, but the general principle still applies: one way to succeed is to play them off against each other.

Anyone who thinks the Conservative party stands for tradition and continuity over improvisation should read these books

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Warnings of fascism are a distraction from the crisis facing our democracies | David Runciman

Electors are in danger of losing their hard-won voice because the political and social landscape is being torn apart

Who is the most successful elected politician in the world? Purely on the numbers, it has to be Vladimir Putin, who last week was sworn in for his fourth term as Russia’s president. Not only has he never been defeated at the ballot box, his latest victory was his biggest yet: he won nearly 77% of the vote on a turnout of 67%. That means more than one in two eligible Russians gave him their support. Most democratic politicians can barely dream of such astonishing popularity.

For that reason, we take it for granted that Putin is no democrat at all. The margins are too big and the opposition too puny for this to count as real democracy. Yet the Putin model of authoritarianism validated through elections is becoming increasingly widespread. In Hungary last month, the deeply illiberal Viktor Orbán won nearly 50% of the vote. Next month, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan goes to the presidential polls in Turkey. Like Putin, he has never lost an election. He is not about to break the habit of a lifetime now.

Parts of the world experiment with elections without real democracy, but we also see democracy without elections

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Why replacing politicians with experts is a reckless idea

In the age of Trump and Brexit, some people say that democracy is fatally flawed and we should be ruled by ‘those who know best’. Here’s why that’s not very clever. By David Runciman

Democracy is tired, vindictive, self-deceiving, paranoid, clumsy and frequently ineffectual. Much of the time it is living on past glories. This sorry state of affairs reflects what we have become. But current democracy is not who we are. It is just a system of government, which we built, and which we could replace. So why don’t we replace it with something better?

This line of argument has grown louder in recent years, as democratic politics has become more unpredictable and, to many, deeply alarming in its outcomes. First Brexit, then Donald Trump, plus the rise of populism and the spread of division, has started a tentative search for plausible alternatives. But the rival systems we see around us have a very limited appeal. The unlovely forms of 21st-century authoritarianism can at best provide only a partial, pragmatic alternative to democracy. The world’s strongmen still pander to public opinion, and in the case of competitive authoritarian regimes such as the ones in Hungary and Turkey, they persist with the rigmarole of elections. From Trump to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is not much of a leap into a brighter future.

Related: How the education gap is tearing politics apart | David Runciman

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How Democracies Die review – Trump and the shredding of norms

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt look to history to provide a guide for defending democratic systems under threat: it is possible to fight back

What’s the worst thing to happen to US democracy recently? Most answers to that question start and end with Donald Trump. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two Harvard political scientists, though as horrified by Trump as anyone, try to take a wider view. For them the great harbinger of disaster happened during the final year of the Obama presidency. Following the sudden death of the conservative supreme court justice Antonin Scalia in early 2016, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a centrist liberal, to replace him. It was up to the Senate to decide whether to confirm the president’s choice. But the Senate did something it had never done in more than 150 years: it refused even to grant Garland a hearing. This was not about Trump – most Republican senators were at this point deeply alarmed by, if not downright hostile to, the prospect of the Donald in the White House. Instead, it was about their shared view that any Republican supreme court nominee would be better than any Democratic nominee, and any price was worth paying to achieve that. It was scorched earth politics.

This was a preeminent example of what Levitsky and Ziblatt call the erosion of norms, which they consider the greatest threat to contemporary democracy. Norms are the unspoken rules and conventions that hold a democracy together, many of them based on the idea that what’s good for your side in the short term may not do you any good in the long run, because you won’t be in power for ever (if you are, it’s no longer a democracy). When the other side get their turn, your impatience to take advantage will become their licence to exact revenge. It’s a version of the old show business adage: you should be nice to people on your way up so they’ll be nice to you on your way down. Clearly not everyone in showbiz lives by that rule. But in politics, at the moment, almost no one seems to.

Trump treats the presidency as a platform for settling scores; without impulse control there can be no lasting democracy

Related: Democracy is dying – and it’s startling how few people are worried | Paul Mason

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Fire and Fury: could a book bring down a president?

Gossip, plots, revenge ... Michael Wolff’s scandalous White House exposé is just the latest in a long line of political tell-alls

We seem to be living through a golden age for the political tell-all. After all, there is so much to tell! As politics careens from one car wreck to the next, it is irresistible to hear from the people at the wheel how it felt as the next pile-up lurched into view. And they can’t resist explaining to anyone who wants to listen why it was always someone else’s job to slam on the brakes.

Tim Shipman’s All Out War, which spilled the beans on the Brexit campaign and its chaotic aftermath, set a pretty high bar for tales of skulduggery, rage and epic incompetence. The drama is rich, and so too is the comedy: look out Boris, Michael is behind you! Fall Out, Shipman’s follow-up, which takes us inside the botched general election of 2017, has even more spectacular moments of meltdown. Here we are on election night at Tory campaign HQ, just after the exit poll has been announced: “There was incredulity … Shortly afterwards, the deathly stillness was broken by the sound of retching.” Now we have Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which exposes what life is like inside Trump’s White House. Already some of the political world described by Shipman seems to belong to a quainter and gentler time.

The king always eats the same thing, having a terror of anything new. He is not a good husband and avoids his wife

(January 1, 2017)  During the transition

King James is described as “the wisest fool in Christendom”. Trump might just be the dumbest genius in all creation

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How climate change scepticism turned into something more dangerous – podcast

Doubts about the science are being replaced by doubts about the motives of scientists and their political supporters. Once this kind of cynicism takes hold, is there any hope for the truth?

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How climate scepticism turned into something more dangerous

Doubts about the science are being replaced by doubts about the motives of scientists and their political supporters. Once this kind of cynicism takes hold, is there any hope for the truth? By David Runciman

Last month Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. For his supporters, it provided evidence, at last, that the president is a man of his word. He may not have kept many campaign promises, but he kept this one. For his numerous critics it is just another sign of how little Trump cares about evidence of any kind. His decision to junk the Paris accord confirms Trump as the poster politician for the “post-truth” age.

But this is not just about Trump. The motley array of candidates who ran for the Republican presidential nomination was divided on many things, but not on climate change. None of them was willing to take the issue seriously. In a bitterly contentious election, it was a rare instance of unanimity. The consensus that climate is a non-subject was shared by all the candidates who appeared in the first major Republican debate in August 2015 – Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee and Trump. Republican voters were offered 10 shades of denialism.

Related: How climate change scepticism turned into something more dangerous – podcast

Related: The climate change battle dividing Trump’s America

Cynicism is fuelled by the ease with which uncertainty about the science can be spread. All it takes is time and money

Related: Contact the Guardian securely

Related: How the education gap is tearing politics apart | David Runciman

The internet is awash with tales of Al Gore and his monstrous double standards

Related: How technology disrupted the truth | Katharine Viner

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Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin review – the damage done by Silicon Valley

Taplin’s starting point is the music of Levon Helm and the Band, but the fight against the spoiled brats of Google, Amazon and Facebook is much bigger

In 2012, Jonathan Taplin took part in a public debate with Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit, about what the digital economy was doing to the creative arts. Taplin, who had once been manager of the Band, and was the producer of Martin Scorsese’s magnificent film of their farewell concert The Last Waltz, had a particular grievance about the fate of his friend Levon Helm, the Band’s drummer. Helm was suffering from cancer, but had been forced back on the road at the age of 70 to help pay his medical bills because the new culture of “free music and movies” had destroyed his income as a recording artist. Ohanian, clearly a little chastened by this tale, wrote to Taplin offering to help “make right what the music industry did to members of the Band”. He suggested a reunion concert or album, funded by kickstarter, and launched on Reddit.

Taplin’s reply, which he reprints here in all its eviscerating glory, points out that this plan won’t work because in the meantime Helm has died. Moreover, he tells Ohanian, “It wasn’t the music industry that created Levon’s plight; it was people like you.” He concludes: “You are so clueless as to offer to get the Band back together for a charity concert, unaware that three of the five members are dead. Take your charity and shove it. Just let us get paid for our work and stop deciding that you can unilaterally make it free.” Ohanian, unsurprisingly, did not respond.

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