If there is something on which there is rare political consensus it is that Trump's White House is a disaster. It doesn't matter that some of us could have said "I told you so" because, to be honest, it has been worse than almost anything anyone could have imagined. But there is a point to be made that I do think should be shared both loud, and often.
Many Americans chose Trump because he was, supposedly, a successful business person and they thought that was the experience that the incumbent in the White House really needed. On this they were very obviously wrong.
Whether Trump is a successful business person is, of course, open to question in its own right. But that's not my point. The point is that the characteristics that made him the egocentric boss of a property based portfolio, able to hire and fire at will and to use that ability to secure his aims, has been proven to be very different from the ability needed to lead a government and win the support of a legislature for his proposals.
What I sincerely hope is that the lesson of this is noted and learnt. There are several key issues. First, it should now be understood that business leadership is nothing at all like leadership in a democracy. Dictators would be familiar with the style of many business leaders. That skill is wholly unsuited to the leadership of a democracy.
Second, political leadership is a skill to be recognised in its own right. We under-appreciate it. It may well be that done well this is a much more valuable skill than business leadership is.
Third, political leadership may be transferable to business, but it is not at all clear that the opposite is true. The two are simply too different for that to necessarily be the case. In saying so I am not saying that business leadership skill is not useful; I am saying that the skills that the likes of Trump has are of limited use.
Fourth, let's hope that the Trump debacle breaks this belief that politicians must be capitalists because the evidence is that this may very definitely not be true.
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It’s always amazed me how hypocritical free marketers are. They always say that the market is best but then run dictictorial planned economies internal to their own companies. They don’t need to convince people of their plans because they have an indirect threat of death via starvation to get them to do what they want, so its unsupprising that when they no longer have that total power they don’t have the skills to run a participatory system.
Yet there seems to be a hardcore group who adore him. The mid-terms will be interesting.
Indeed, and his supporters claim that the polls – such as his dire (dis)approval ratings – mean nothing. The ballot box for the midterms will be the acid test. What will Trump do if the Republicans lose either chamber of Congress?
The Chief Executive of the company I worked for always paid lip service to the idea of staff participating in decision making but would revert to “This is not a democracy” if his policies were seriously challenged. So to resolve the tension between Capitalism and Democracy we need to begin democratising decision making in the private sector.
Most ‘feel-good’ US films end with the good guys getting rich. The ‘American Dream’ is still alive and well in the hearts of US voters and there’s no evidence of this changing soon.
This BBC4 programme, “The Accidental Anarchist” strikes me as relevant here, with its reference to complexity theory à la Murray Bookchin, and that theory’s understanding of the limitations of top down policy implementation in business, and even more in politics.
With a tin ear for complexity that the businesses approach can engender, no wonder businessman can fail at politics.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08z007p
“What I sincerely hope is that the lesson of this is noted and learnt.” — The lesson Trump learned is that democracy doesn’t work and my fear is that many of his supporters go along with this. (Just another little piece of evidence indicating how much the idea of democracy as the only good (or not bad) form of government is being eroded.)