Alternative Editorial: Authority On Trial
What makes people charismatic? New York Times
These are wild times. In week 28 since UK lock-down, nothing is getting clearer or easier in the public realm. In response to the unrelenting Covid pandemi, parts of Britain and Europe are back in lock down but the rule book is ever more intricate and open to misinterpretation. With hefty – for many, unpayable - fines for getting it wrong.
Looking at the numbers of new cases is confusing as the ability to test is haphazard. Where tests are working there are inevitably more reported; where they’re not, inevitably less. Deaths directly related to COVID seem a better measure – but even then, imperfectly so. In the case of care homes but also for those with underlying conditions, it’s difficult to finally attribute the cause of death. Even so, in the UK, it is registered that the deaths from Covid are back on the rise. From only one, directly related reported death on the 30th August, up to 71 on September 30.
From the evidence of the global Covid tracker India’s deaths are still at over 1000 per day. Mexico is dropping slowly to 500. The United States, from a peak of 2700 per day, is now better, hovering around 1000. But all face the possibility of new waves. The virus is still here, doing its work all over the world. And given the competitive, proprietorial dynamics of our global pharma industry, there is little hope that an effective global response is near at hand.
Even if the very height of human ingenuity could challenge our current understanding of how long it takes to produce a solution, that breakthrough is unlikely to benefit all of us. The ‘winner’ is more likely to sell it to – than share it with - the ‘losers’ and often at punishing prices. But what’s the alternative? Can New Zealand (only 20 deaths over the whole period) ever feel safe while the virus rages around the globe? Unless it closes its doors on the world forever?
Nevertheless, in the ongoing chaos, some patterns are appearing that are hard to ignore. For example, the evidence that where a country’s leader has adopted a dismissive or defiant stance, hubris follows. For example UK’s PM Boris Johnson’s early negligence or belittling of the danger arising from the virus. Or Brazil’s President Bolsonaro, denying the virus as a force beyond our control. And most famously, US President Donald Trump’s consistent refusal to take seriously or personally the pandemic.
In all cases these leaders have caused confusion and chaos in their countries: failing to put in place early restrictions of movement, or to recommend face masks as mutual protection, or to properly invest in medical equipment. As a result these countries had the highest infection and death rates in the world. Whether this in itself registers amongst voters as a failure of the leader is hard to know in the short term.
It’s just as likely that the chaos and anguish engendered in our media will appear as arising from the pandemic itself – not from their handling of it. No doubt, later down the line, the same government will offer to clear up, as if the pandemic was caused by external forces beyond their control. We only need to look at how other leaders managed the same crisis better to know how bogus that is.
Yet when Johnson, Bolsonaro and now Trump contracted the virus themselves, it seemed that another, deeper shift might occur. So much of the power of these men rests on their personalities, their ability to play the public. Their arrogant charm, swagger or buffoonery is a form of charisma – their conceit about their own irresistable attraction. Rather than rely on skills or competence, their success arises more from the performance of their self-belief.
Here’s how Kapil Komireddi in Foreign Policy magazine described the same traits in India’s PM Narenda Modi after he ordered the whole of India into sudden lock-down at the beginning of March 2020 (many of these actions will seem familiar):
How did the blindingly obvious complications of ordering a population of 1.3 billion people to stay at home for three weeks with a four-hour notice escape him?
The most charitable answer is that the prime minister is human and therefore capable of error and oversight. But human fallibility is precisely one of the reasons why India’s founders devised a system of government by cabinet.
Modi, however, cannot be seen to consult or defer to others. To do so would, as the Indian academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta has noted, rupture the myth that he is the “sole vehicle for [India’s] manifest destiny.” The misery that has washed over the country over the past three months is inseparable from the authoritarian and self-mythologizing personality of the prime minister.
He used the pandemic to solicit more than a billion dollars from Indians into a secretive fund that is beyond public scrutiny; indulge his addiction for spectacle (people were instructed to bang their pots and pans and light candles on their balconies, and the Indian Air Force was pressed into service to “salute corona heroes” by showering flower petals from the skies); and gull the public with announcements of grand relief and stimulus packages that, on closer examination, turned out to be a fraction of what the prime minister pledged.
Modi is now seeking to alleviate the social and economic woe aggravated by his own mismanagement of the lockdown by serving up Indians to the virus.
Helicopters showered rose-petals over India to celebrate Covid warriors
India’s big cities abound with horror stories of crowded hospitals turning away critically ill patients, congested wards stacked with dead bodies, and worn-out doctors and paramedics striving to function in unfathomable conditions.
After subjecting people to the most invasive abridgement of liberty in this century, the government is now striking a libertarian pose. It has effectively abdicated its responsibilities. And its energies appear to be channelled not into aiding those desperate for its help—but into silencing and punishing those who dissent from and defy the Modi regime.
Repression is the main feature of the state that has flourished during the pandemic. The pandemic, in fact, was invoked early on to sanctify a brazen attempt by the government to muzzle the press.
A week after imposing the lockdown, Modi sought a directive from the Supreme Court of India requiring the press to self-censor and turn itself into a bulletin board for government propaganda. The court, meeting Modi halfway, directed the media to publish the “official version” of events alongside independent coverage.
However, it is exactly this kind of vainglorious power that is easily jeopardised when the ‘special one’ falls ill. At that point, any claim to be favoured by God or by history, gets called into question.
In the UK, while Johnson survived a close call with the virus, his powers seem dimmed by it. If once it was the spring in his step and the cheeky glint in his eye that kept the voters in thrall, it is precisely those things that seem to have disappeared.
Journalists that once gave him the benefit of the doubt, are withdrawing their camaraderie, no longer wishing to be in his gang. See Toby Young’s piece in the Spectator: “I admit it: I was wrong to back Boris”. Even his own party is shuffling uncomfortably (“Worried Party Want to See the Old Boris”).
President Trump’s admission into hospital exactly one month before the elections has set the scene for unexpected outcomes: yet no one can predict yet in whose favour that will go.
A certain kind of patriarchal authority is being put on trial
What do these top five leaders have in common?
But where does that leave us? This period might well be remembered as a time when a certain style of leadership was highlighted globally and seen to be lacking. Yet it’s too soon to say that it is in the process of being dethroned.
For those heavily invested in the political structure and culture that these men champion – hierarchical, divisive, often underpinned by first-past the post systems – numbers of deaths will be explained away as forces beyond our control.
But for those responsive to the suffering caused and more alert to the ongoing crises that we continue to face, there may be a stronger withdrawal from the empty authority they offer. Some of those will place more trust in their opponents, hoping for longer term changes to the system.
Still others will withdraw still further from this party political system altogether. The spectacle of Trump and Biden shouting at each other in the first Presidential debate left a sour taste for all but the most partisan.
The spectacle of a collapse of trust in the political system sounds dangerous. It conjures up images of lawlessness, anarchy (of the dangerous kind), and mob-rule from a place of high emotion – all of which of course is possible.
At the same time, there’s every evidence that we’ve been in that place of disillusion for a long time. Trust in politicians may be at an all-time low, but it has spent years reaching that point.
And while there are signs of extremists appearing, they are mostly pre-figured by old ideologies – hence, right-wing fascists or supremacists that bear long-term allegiances.
Instead, what appeared spontaneously when governments failed to do the job of protecting its citizens, have been neighbourhood networks such as the Covid mutual-aid groups.
Those small networks are borrowing the tools of other forms of citizens’ self-reliance – ways of decision making and resource sharing. They also spend much time talking and discussion – sharing new stories of Us.
Elections – whether the American Presidential elections in November or the town and parish council elections in May next year – encourage us to think in terms of the transfer of formal power from one body to another. But maybe what we are witnessing is more human and social than party political.
What’s being put on trial is a certain kind of patriarchal authority to which everyone must subject themselves. And what’s coming is the gradual development of a more matriarchal form of networked, distributed authority that each of us will participate in.
Somewhat similar, perhaps, to the way that the next generation of a family slowly becomes independent, taking on responsibility for each other and for the community they live in.
Maybe, as global societies in sight of each other, we are growing up. But if that is so, we will need new structures and agreements to live by. Without them we will continue to be manipulated by the old patriarchs, dividing us to conquer us. With new, co-designed structures, we could be ushering in a new era of shared response-ability.
Where citizens – all the diverse people in citizen action networks world-wide - use their collective human resources not only to house and care for each other better, but to build new economies that pull us back from the edge of destruction and towards better lives.
Of course, between that vision and today lies a lot of patient building. But let’s never say there is no alternative.