Better leaders. Yes. But what kind of leaders?

How do we get better leadership?

An earlier post on the Labour Party generated robust discussion, raising three topics: getting better leaders, understanding neoliberalism (and alternatives to neoliberalism), and changing the electoral system (again?)

So let’s start with political leadership, and a straw poll on who might be best to lead the Labour Party. This is not just for Labour supporters, as a Labour leader may one day become prime minister, like it or not.

The Substack poll only allowed me five options, and I’ve gone by the present hierarchy and by what people say. If you feel someone’s unfairly left out, you can post a comment.

Many of us are wondering what’s happening to political leadership after the extraordinary debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump last week.

In general, what do we look for – or need – in a political leader?

In 2023, an international Pew Research survey asked people “how to improve democracy”. The most frequent answers were about getting better politicians – and less often about changing the system. Responsiveness, competence, honesty and hence trustworthiness are qualities that people say they want in their leaders. Traits like intelligence also matter, but there are other ways to look at it. Many people are concerned about shared social characteristics referred to (paradoxically) as “identity”, notably ethnicity and gender. Others may look more closely at a candidate’s professional, business or community-service background. The policies that a leader promotes may influence support too, as they reflect the leader’s values and the direction in which they want the country to move.

And then there’s the question of how well the leader communicates his or her values and translates them into actions that people can see, hear and understand. Does the leader express a clear direction, create shared understanding and connect with a wide audience? Jacinda Ardern was praised by experts for her abilities as a communicator during the pandemic – but criticised by others for “failing to deliver”. In contrast, Aucklanders may recall Mayor Wayne Brown not communicating well following the Jan 27 flood while blaming the journalists around him. But that doesn’t mean he lacks other competencies as a civic leader.

Good leadership is something we know when we see it, but it’s hard to define and pin down. For example, we may agree that honesty is an essential quality, but many Trump supporters say he’s honest, while detractors call him a pathological liar. “Honesty” is an abstract noun that doesn’t capture the nuances of how people behave and how we perceive their behaviour.

There are diverse ways in which we can evaluate what’s good leadership and who’s a good leader. Styles of leadership differ and a particular leader’s style may suit some situations better than others. Charisma isn’t essential, I believe, and it can even be a distraction. We won’t all agree anyway, and that’s part of the reason why we have elections.

One of the most widely admired and trusted New Zealanders was the late Sir Edmund Hillary, a Labour supporter. Had he been minded to get into politics, he could well have made it to the summit, so to speak. But would a political career have changed the way that New Zealanders now regard him? We’ll never know, but our trust in a leader and their success in politics may not line up neatly.

A Reid Research poll done in late January 2023 asked whether people trusted each of the two major parties’ leaders. Rounding out the figures:

53% said Yes and 27% No for Labour leader and then prime minister Chris Hipkins. (The rest didn’t know.)

37% said Yes and 44% said No for National’s leader Christopher Luxon.

That looked like a major “trust deficit” for Luxon at that time. But which of the two men is now prime minister? And is it a coincidence that 38% voted National in the election? That was uncannily close to the 37% who said they trusted the National Party leader.

On the other hand, if 53% said they trusted Hipkins, then why did only 27% vote for Labour?

Perceived trustworthiness isn’t everything, it seems. Luxon campaigned on his competence – and on Labour’s incompetence, saying they’d over-spent and under-delivered. That worked well enough for him.

Around the world, however, people are losing confidence in political leadership. With so many crises to deal with, the best is needed more than ever. But Biden’s decline and Trump’s lies, evident in their recent debate, make us think that surely Americans can do better. The Brits are about to dump a discredited Tory PM and the French president has thrown his country into chaos with a snap election. Italy’s far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni now looks like a pillar of stability. In Argentina, people understandably feel frustrated and angry with rampant inflation, but they elected a real disrupter and radical libertarian, Javier Milei (imagine David Seymour on meth).

By the way, surely Joe Biden must now stand aside as Democratic candidate. In a rare moment of consensus, commentators ranging from the editors of the New York Times to real-world Trump supporters agree that he should go.

On what criteria are political leaders developed, selected and elected?

Ever since Plato, some have thought that the best rulers only take their seats at the governing table reluctantly. But Plato also thought that philosophers should rule, and you only have to attend a conference of philosophers to be disabused of that idea. Much as I like the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who would have met Plato’s reluctant-to-rule criterion) I would not have asked him to organise a raffle.

Elections, however, are inherently competitive, and especially so in today’s media-soaked world, so only the ambitious get the top jobs. The modest and decent Sir Eds of this world wisely stay away.

For many centuries people have pondered and written about the problem of training rulers to be wise and benevolent, and not impulsive and self-serving – with some success some of the time. The Chinese had sophisticated methods for educating emperors and officials. This reached a peak, it’s said, under the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), but would you want that Confucian style of government, with no elected representative assembly?

Sometimes people ask if there should be formal training or an educational qualification for entry into politics today. There are two problems with this. First, it would undermine the democratic principle that any citizen should be able to put their name forward, consistent with the universal franchise. And some of our most respected leaders of the past had little formal education. Second, if anyone was to propose a curriculum for such training or education, then others would shoot it down, and we’d be back at square one: arguing over what makes the best leaders.

One problem with the modern representative system is that the voters rely on the political parties to foster and put forward new leaders. By definition, a political party is an organisation that nominates candidates for election. The political parties are independent, with their own rules for candidates. Selection processes are hotly contested, but not normally open to public scrutiny or input.

The Labour Party rules include the option of a primary-style election for their leader. In the straw poll above, however, I’ve assumed that the next Labour leader would be one of their presently top-ranked MPs. Why should anyone assume that?

The Labour Party and the wider labour movement think harder, I suspect, about whose turn it is to rise in the ranks than about abilities. It’s not so much a long queue as a set of waiting-rooms, however.

The right-wing parties are more likely to parachute someone in to be the next idol in their cargo cult. With NZ First, in contrast, the party is defined by its leader and could hardly exist without him.

As for the Greens, Jacinda Ardern’s parting comment about Squid Game makes a lot of sense now.

It was the Catholic monarchist conservative Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) who wrote that “every nation gets the government it deserves” (Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite). That’s a bit unfair on some nations, and I don’t subscribe to de Maistre’s views in general. But, if there’s a grain of truth in what he said, it might guide us to complain less about our leaders and ask, “What can we do to deserve better government?” One problem with modern representative government is that it positions most of us as passive audience-members, and yet we all play a part, no matter how small.

A constructive debate about leadership and government is always called for, but it’s needed now more than ever.

From right, President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida watch a skydiving demo during the G7 world leaders summit at Borgo Egnazia, Italy, June 13, 2024.

Domenico Stinellis/AP