by PAUL COLLITS – LEADERSHIP has been in the news this past week or so. Especially in the United States of America.
What do the vastly different characters Donald Trump, Kimberly Cheatle and Dominic Perrottet have in common?
- The deep State still wants Trump dead or, at least, off the scene.
- The inside job theory is so bloody obvious that one is almost tempted to go for the less plausible “incompetence” story.
Answer: They’ve all had big, career defining weeks. For different reasons. And their big weeks throw a light on the question of leadership.
Here, we have contrasting styles of leadership, to say the least. I am pretty sure that Donald Trump, unlike Kimberly, never scurried away to hide from his detractors in a bathroom.
ATTACKER(S)
By way of contrast, Trump (famously, now) jumped to his feet, just having been shot, and defied his attacker(s) to have another crack.
Mind you there are those – hopefully few – who think the whole assassination thingy was a Trump-organised theatric ruse in the manner of the film, Wag the Dog.
Let us set aside that theory, entertaining though it is, and stick to a vaguely plausible narrative.
Yes, there are many, many questions about that Saturday in Butler PA. And yes, a conspiracy theory has been defined as something that is just too hard for people (normies?) to believe.
But they needn’t lead us down the pathway to eternal, unreasoned scepticism.
(I am also pretty sure that Dominic Perrottet never hid in a bathroom to avoid the scrutiny of Michael Photios or any of the other members of the Leftist junta that runs the NSW Liberal Party.)
What defines a leader? This question has launched a gazillion executive courses and a similar number of business books and works of political science.
One definition has it: “The qualities of effective leadership include courage, strength, the ability to communicate effectively, knowledge, judgment, integrity and interpersonal skills. A particularly important quality is vision, along with the power to implement that vision.
As with all definitions of leadership, this one leaves many questions – and gaps.
The most obvious is that this definition confines itself to characteristics of leadership. It ignores the equally important matter of the purposes of leadership.
LEADERS
When we think of leaders, we might think of Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Steve Jobs, Hitler, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Robert Menzies, Thatcher, Reagan, JFK, Rupert Murdoch, Charlemagne, Henry V, Elizabeths I and II.
These few examples suggest something more than attributes. They suggest objectives and achievements. And moments where leadership is needed.
They often relate to national objectives, in the case of (traditional) politics. Or company objectives, in the case of corporates. They step up to the plate, however “plate” is defined.
Often it involves war. Defending national sovereignty. Calling out a national disgrace, like Lincoln and American slavery in the South.
And they immediately provoke controversy and debate. But they all share something recognisable.
It is more than a skillset. You can almost smell leadership. You know it when you see it.
Non-leaders are equally recognisable. John Major, Jimmy Carter, Gordon Brown, Gerald Ford, Scott Morrison.
Back to Trump, Cheatle and Perrottet. In case you don’t know who candidates two and three listed above are, well, in the case of number two, until this week, I didn’t know either. Let’s start with her.
Kimberly Cheatle is the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) “leader” of the US Secret Service. At least she is this week.
Her tenure, certainly beyond January 20 next year, looks far from certain. The sight of her bizarrely turning up at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, then (literally) running way from US Senators demanding answers to their questions about the Trump assassination attempt, will live long in the memory of great non-leadership moments.
Cheatle may or may not be a lesbian, which in some ways is irrelevant. She is, more evidently, a long-time friend of Dr Jill Biden. Now we’re getting warm.
Back in the halcyon days of the 1970s, woke was only just becoming a thing. At least some of the noise this past week has been about Trump being assigned the SS B team.
As noted above, there is no need here to re-record the long shopping list of SS fails at Butler PA. Conspiracy theory has had its best week for decades.
The inside job theory is so bloody obvious that one is almost tempted to go for the less plausible “incompetence” story.
TRICKY
Perhaps Cheatle will head off to consultancy and gigs at executive public sector leadership courses. A bit like Christine Nixon, formerly the Victoria Police Commissioner of the 2000s, who infamously prioritised dinner with friends and hair care over lethal bushfires back in 2009.
Almost unbelievably, Nixon – far worse than her tricky US presidential namesake – has been appointed Chair of something called Leadership Victoria.
Most of the Board of LV are women. Some, even, are women of whiteness. Non-colour. Kimberly Cheatle would, no doubt, approve of the selection processes down under.
With so many friends in high places, failed female “leaders” always seem to find another gig.
See Jacinda Ardern, Julie Bishop and Julie Gillard. The list is very, very long.
The worst argument for more women in leadership positions is to look at those held up as examples of the genre. It is like standing on the shoulders of pygmies.
Cheatle has been an equal opportunity employer. She herself seems to be a prime example. The estimable Australian journalist Judith Sloan once said, when my old employer, RMIT University, decided to drop the ATAR (university entry score) for engineers to the low sixties, “I would prefer to be crossing a bridge designed by engineers with an ATAR of 80 than 60”.
The same might be said of snipers and associated SS “protectors”. The Donald was very, very kind to them in the aftermath.
Nixon led her troops off to the gay parades. Cheatle implemented DEI. Some day jobs require more than the touchy-feelies.
So much for number two, leadership-wise. Number three is the former Premier of the once great State of NSW.
Dominic Perrottet becomes the third and final departure from the scene of the NSW COVID/net-zero junta. He follows Gladys Berejiklian and Matt Kean.
Like Gladys, Perrottet has scored a corporate gig. In the USA, with, of all companies, BHP.
The Dom, too, was once heralded as a “leader”. After his curfew-enforcer predecessor, Berejiklian, fled the stage, Perrottet was (absurdly, in the context of NSW Liberal politics) seen as a “conservative”.
SUCK-HOLE
He was a best mate of Matt Kean, now running Albo’s Climate thingy, to boot. He was also a Dan Andrews suck-hole. (What the hell was that about?)
Conservatives in NSW politics simply do not exist. They are not allowed to enter the building.
But, irrespective of conservatism, Dominic Perrottet aspired to leadership, apparently. But he either didn’t have a clue, or, more likely, was given his job description by off-stage Liberal apparatchiks – who also managed to be rich consultants sucking off the teet of ministerial connections.
Either way, Perrottet came and went, without, as they say in cricketing circles, troubling the scorer.
Wherein lay the career achievements of the former NSW Premier? Good people, solid conservatives, saw in him an emerging Right-of-centre leader. Australia now has so few, he was promising, once.
Yet, Perrottet turned out to be yet another careerist and a puppet. At least, unlike Kimberly Cheatle, he didn’t all-but-lose a President.
Notwithstanding COVID policy, his personal tenure didn’t involve killing people.
Which brings us back to number one.
Trump, post-assassination attempt, has been described by Tucker Carlson in an as-usual entertaining and powerful RNC speech, as a “leader”. The speech was itself a mini-treatise on leadership.
It was an impressive attempt to present The Orange Man as the hope of the side. The Trump of Tucker Carlson’s telling is a changed man, and is now engaging with a changed American nation.
A greater contrast with Cheatle and Perrottet could not be imagined, of course.
Trump now presents, post Butler PA, as a unifying leader. To many, this will seem paradoxical, even absurd.
A changed American nation? Can one successfully depicted by the elites over several years as “literally Hitler”, to the extent that his assassination became (arguably) inevitable, be seen by the people as a “leader”?
Sadly, America, post Butler PA, is still the America of last week. All of the elites that run the show are still there. Determined to preserve their fiefdoms. More determined than ever, as it happens.
Yes, now Joe Biden had to go. His departure and his very small-l legacy are topics for another time.
PUPPET
In an age of post-modern politics, of global elite puppet masters, of unelected bad actors, of corrupt elected officials and of the deep State, can any politician, let alone a “divisive” one, be presented plausibly as a “leader”?
Could anyone at all “unify” the toilet that is contemporary American democracy?
These are serious questions.
When the Renaissance father of political science Machiavelli wrote The Prince, he could not possibly have imagined the world we now inhabit.
A world of globalist governing elites. Of diminished nationalism. Of unelected public policy actors, running rampant and unchecked. Of big, intrusive government.
Of an American political system that is not remotely a simulacrum of a democracy. Or a system with the remotest possibility of unimpeded, leaderly governance.
Donald Trump cannot be The Prince. Can anyone, now? Is political leadership, traditionally conceived, even possible?
The deep State, plausibly, still wants Trump dead, or at least off the scene.
Absent a majority post-November in both houses of Congress, Trump will be the subject of four more years of unrelenting undermining by those who will still be in place. And, of course, he is still to overcome the cesspit that is the US electoral system before he even gets there. Draining swamps can be hard work.
Leadership has become a contested space, with severely limited possibilities. An impossible job. What would Winston Churchill do? What would Margaret Thatcher do? They probably couldn’t help us, in these times. To whom might we turn?
One thing is certain. For heaven’s sake, don’t turn to Dominic Perrottet or Kimberly Cheatle.
Three contrasting models of leadership, to be sure.PC
