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Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962). Image via Nitrate Diva. |
It's world-famous political scientist David Brooks, here with his hot takes on how the political world is currently working, or failing to work ("
Choosing Leaders: Clueless or Crazy", July 5 2016):
These days, if you want to elect a leader, you generally have two choices: a sensible, establishment figure who is completely out of touch, or a populist outsider who is incompetent, crazy or both.
I'm inevitably asking myself how that applies to the 2015 contests in Greece, Nigeria, Israel, UK, Argentina, Canada, Burkina Faso, Spain, or Myanmar, or this year's elections in Peru, Serbia, the Philippines, and Australia. Which figure in that schema is Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, or Justin Trudeau? Or Muhammadu Buhari? Keiko Fujimori and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski? Isaac Herzog and Ed Miliband might count as sensible, establishment figures who are completely out of touch, but their opponents were the less-than-populist hardly-outsiders Binyamin Netanyahu and David Cameron respectively.
I can see complaints that the new Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte may qualify as populist and crazy, though hardly an outsider or incompetent, given that he served as mayor of Davao City, the country's third most populous city, for 23 of the last 28 years, where he encouraged a literal war on drugs conducted by extrajudicial death squads, and remarkable police brutality against protesters, but also was a strong supporter of LGBTQ rights. Last September he personally showed up at a local bar where a foreign tourist was violating the anti-smoking ordinance and forced the offender to swallow his cigarette butt. As president, he has offered a Trumpian pivot, promising to be "prim and proper... almost, I would become holy." He is in some ways what Trump wishes he was, a truly tough guy, competent and psychopathic at the same time, compelling and deeply appalling.
Other than that, I'm really not seeing it. The sensible-but-clueless will always be with us, no doubt. That's true of Thought Leaders as well, isn't it?