The Bluestocking, vol 164
War-crimes innovator Genghis Khan.
Happy Friday!
Long intro this week; feel free to skip to the end of the email, where a hallucinogenic nightmare awaits you.
Helen
As bits of Barack Obama’s memoir dribbled out this week, it made me think about weak and strong leaders. Not very much unites the political philosophies of Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn, but it’s striking to see the same failings identified in each of them.
Here’s an excerpt from Andrew Rawnsley on Boris Johnson:
“Left to his own devices, Boris will wander off from decisions and read Pliny or Pericles or eat or shag,” remarks a senior Tory who has sat in the cabinet with this prime minister. “The bit of self-knowledge that Boris has is that he needs someone who will sit him down at the table and say there’s a decision to be made and tell him that you’re not leaving this room until you’ve made it.”
It was by being the person who cajoled decisions out of the prime minister that Mr Cummings made himself so powerful. He’s gone.
And here’s Tim Shipman:
Brexiteers said Cummings has become vocal in private about Johnson’s shortcomings in recent months, labelling him “indecisive”. One characterised this view as: “Just make a f***ing decision and stick to it.” He added: “People are now openly questioning whether he is right for the job.”
OK, now here’s Patrick Maguire on Jeremy Corbyn:
Labour MPs had no shortage of cartoon villains during the Corbyn era. But none inspired quite so much enmity as Karie Murphy, his chief of staff.
A combative Glaswegian schooled in the direct, no-nonsense politics of the trade union movement, Murphy – known universally in Labour circles as Karie – was the woman who took the executive decisions Corbyn was all too often unwilling or unable to.
And here’s Politico on Donald Trump in 2017:
President Donald Trump has threatened to pull out of NAFTA, the Paris climate agreement and the Iranian nuclear deal — unless he opts to stay. He decided to revoke legal protections for the Dreamers, then urged Congress hours later to enact new ones. And he has repeatedly demanded that lawmakers enact major legislation on health care, tax reform and a $1 trillion infrastructure plan — without making it clear what he wants the final product to look like.
Of all the factors that have made the president’s first year so turbulent, one of the most important has been Trump himself: Combining quick mood shifts, a rancorous White House staff and his own fuzziness on the details, the self-proclaimed dealmaker has left his options way open on a range of contentious decisions — while inducing whiplash in many of the political insiders, business leaders and even foreign governments with a stake in the outcomes.
There’s a saying in journalism — three makes a trend — so let’s not over-interpret from these particular examples. But it is weirdly striking that the three politicians I’ve read the most about this year all attract the same label. Indecisive. Because they can’t make decisions, their courts devolve into in-fighting and factionalism, as everyone vies for proximity to the king, knowing that he always agrees with whoever spoke to him last. Advisors are deemed “bullying” and “over-mighty”, but their defence to the accusation comes back like this: look, someone’s got to be in charge round here.
What might explain this pattern? I can think of several reasons.
You campaign in promises but govern through decisions. All three men were and are great campaigners. They tell people things they enjoy hearing. They make them feel good. But that is a very different skillset from the whack-a-mole which comes with running a party, or a country. There, it’s all about allocating limited resources and balancing competing interests. We elect salesmen and then wonder why they’re not better managers.
Decisions are hard. That’s a glib observation, but we know that choices have a cognitive cost, something which is supported by research on “decision fatigue”. It’s why Steve Jobs only wore black; it’s why Dominic Raab shouldn’t be so defensive about the suggestion he eats the same lunch every day. Decision fatigue might be one of the unnoticed factors which traps people in poverty.
Decisions upset people. Politicians, almost by definition, want to be liked. Decisions create losers and winners: sorry, your mate can’t be chief of staff; sorry, but that is anti-Semitic; sorry, I’m not going to support healthcare reform. Managing people’s emotions when they’re upset or disappointed is also cognitively draining, and worse, this kind of “emotional labour” is often seen as women’s work. (Ironic: we elect men because they are “strong” and then they turn out to be weak because they don’t know how to let someone down gently.)
The other half of the problem is us, and our turn towards teenagerdom, as a society: full of complaints, but expecting someone else to deliver the solution. Good leaders are like strict parents, and who wants to be a strict parent nowadays? It involves you shrugging off your self-perception as cool and relaxed, and assuming a disciplinary role for which you will receive absolutely zero thanks.
Yet making decisions is vital. I mentioned Obama’s memoir at the start, because starting to read it sent me back to Michael Lewis’s 2012 Vanity Fair profile of the US president. Lewis is obsessed with leadership (and more latterly, “referees”, the neutral arbiters of life who can set the rules) and he asks Obama, multiple times, what someone would need to know if they suddenly became president. Obama’s first answer is to wear the same clothes every day, and to adopt a fixed schedule, because “you need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”
Most people think that the presidency is a PR job, Lewis adds later in the piece: selling policies from your bully pulpit. Not true:
“If you happen to be president just now, what you are faced with, mainly, is not a public-relations problem but an endless string of decisions. Putting it the way George W. Bush did sounded silly but he was right: the president is a decider. Many if not most of his decisions are thrust upon the president, out of the blue, by events beyond his control: oil spills, financial panics, pandemics, earthquakes, fires, coups, invasions, underwear bombers, movie-theater shooters, and on and on and on. They don’t order themselves neatly for his consideration but come in waves, jumbled on top of each other. “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” Obama said at one point. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.” On top of all of this, after you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it. People being led do not want to think probabilistically.”
To accomplish this, Obama used to hold meetings that were structured as a series of “mini speeches” so he could see a problem from several points of view. Beforehand, there would be “a kind of road map, a list of who will be at the meeting and what they might be called on to contribute”. As the technologists put it: control the menu, control the world. The meeting to decision whether to intervene in Libya — shudder when you see the word “Benghazi” — included not just Pentagon people and vice-president Joe Biden, but Samantha Power, author of a book on genocide.
Anyway, despite all this strategising and apparatus, Obama still made plenty of tactical mistakes as president. Which is pretty depressing. I return to my original point. Decisions are hard. But we have to elect people who don’t shy away from making them, because elected politicians are the only ones who legitimately can.
What have I missed? Do these stories remind you of a boss you’ve had? Let me know. I feel like there’s a piece in this somewhere, but I can’t see the shape of it yet.
PS. It would be too grand for the Bluestocking to have a Christmas appeal, but I am always awed by the work of Women for Refugee Women, a small charity who are donating £20 in shopping vouchers to refugee and asylum seeking women.
Earldoms for Girldom (Atlantic)
Many baronetcies can also be inherited only by men. A baronetcy gives you the right to be addressed as “Sir,” as Sir Richard Carew Pole is, but is not to be confused with a knighthood: Sir Elton John is not the descendant of a long line of noblemen who fought valiantly for some long-forgotten monarch; he grew up in social housing in a London suburb and was given an honor by the Queen for performing the best song in The Lion King.
The wife of a marquis, incidentally, is called a marchioness. Because Britain has had an aristocracy for more than 1,000 years, we have forgotten how ridiculous that sounds. In fact, while we’re here, let’s try a quiz: Hereditary peer or Harry Potter character? Alexander Scrymgeour, Valerian Freyburg, Merlin Hay, Godfrey Bewicke-Copley, Rupert Ponsonby, Edward Foljambe, and Roualeyn Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce. Trick question! They are all current members of the House of Lords.
Pro tip: never post a piece on Twitter which asks readers to go on a journey and confront their kneejerk assumptions, or you are just deluged with plonkers who didn’t read it, airing their kneejerk assumptions.
DVD extra: a reader pointed me to this case of an “intersex” baronet, and the complications around his inheritance.
Mank Isn’t A Love Letter (The Ringer)
As a political filmmaker, [David] Fincher works more abstractly than peers like Oliver Stone or Spike Lee, whose movies are expressly styled as counter-mythological visions of American history. Typically, Fincher is more interested in how history is textured—in the exactitude of his period recreations, how things look and sound—but Mank has an urgency that supersedes its fetishistic aesthetics. The film is spacious enough to suggest parallels between the communist paranoia spouted by Hearst in 1934 and the Hollywood Blacklist scandal a few decades later; it also permits a more contemporary allegorical reading positing Sinclair as a predecessor of Bernie Sanders, a left-wing revolutionary undermined at a potentially transformative moment by the powers-that-be. And make no mistake: Fincher and his film see this as a tragedy.
David Fincher is in my “OK, just because it’s you” category, a system of media consumption which never lets me down. And this is a great piece of movie criticism; it hasn’t usurped my desire to watch Mank, but intensified it.
Elissa Slotkin Braces for A Democratic Civil War (Politico)
“It’s not just that [Donald Trump] eats cheeseburgers at a big celebratory dinner. It’s not just that he does things that the common man can kind of appreciate. And it’s not even because he uses kind of simplistic language—he doesn’t use complicated, wonky language, the way a lot of Democrats do,” Slotkin said. “We sometimes make people feel like they aren’t conscientious enough. They aren’t thoughtful enough. They aren’t ‘woke’ enough. They aren’t smart enough or educated enough to just understand what’s good for them. … It’s talking down to people. It’s alienating them. And there’s just certain voters who feel so distant from the political process—it’s not their life, it’s not their world. They hate it. They don’t like all that politics stuff. Trump speaks to them, because he includes them.”
Quick Links
“On Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, [FT editor Lionel] Barber observes: ‘She was divisive. But she transformed modern Britain and helped end the Cold War. Not a bad legacy.’ Thanks for that, AJP Taylor.” Rob Hutton has been liberated from the shackles of Bloombergian neutrality, and embraced his inner biatch. This book review at Politico, and his regular sketches at The Critic, are unmissable.
On a related note, Ben Smith’s media columns have a consistent hit rate of interestingness that I would kill for. This week, President Macron phones him up to reheat his beef with the American press not understanding laïcité.
“[Greenham] was also in a way a gift to Thatcher, I think, because here was exactly the thing she was not. If you found the Greenham women alarming, look to Thatcher instead – trundling around in a tank with her head peeping out the turret, headscarfed and smiling, an unlikely but perfect confection of feminine grace and firepower.” Sarah Ditum on Margaret Thatcher? Yes please.
“Barack Obama was describing to me the manner in which the Mongol emperor and war-crimes innovator Genghis Khan would besiege a town. ‘They gave you two choices,’ he said. “‘If you open the gates, we’ll just kill you quickly and take your women and enslave your children, but we won’t slaughter them. But if you hold out, then we’ll slowly boil you in oil and peel off your skin.’” My boss interviewed Obama, and came back with this intro. (Atlantic)
I had a lot of shocked responses to the Frankie Boyle transcript last week. (Disclosure: I did News Quiz with him a couple of years ago, and he was perfectly pleasant to me.) Still, on that theme, it’s amazing to me that just a decade ago the BBC allowed SEVEN COUNT THEM SEVEN men to sit around slagging off women’s appearances. And people still get upset about the mere existence of Woman’s Hour! Again, tastes have changed very quickly.
Clicking this repeatedly is what I’m doing this year instead of having a holiday. I want to be in some of these places so much it hurts. (This was my favourite.)
Kwame Anthony Appiah on the problem with “lived experience.” Love the example of the Black American twin professors, Claude and Shelby Steele, who end up as ideological polar opposites.
The Now-Traditional Jack Dorsey’s Beard Update Section
That Hallucinogenic Nightmare You Were Promised
Inevitably, I have snacked back The Crown. However, I would like to raise a strongly worded complaint that the very best thing the royal family did in the 1980s, namely an aristo version of It’s A Knockout, was unaccountably not included. (Think of the metaphor potential, Peter Morgan!) Come for Prince Edward in Lib Dem yellow, stay for Princess Anne possessed by the spirit of Cardinal Richelieu.
See you next time . . .
My first boss at the BBC called himself Head of Bother on the basis that no decision ended up with him that wasn't a headache to solve...