Financial markets around the world reeled when the Italians rejected the European status quo and their own political establishment in the last election. This should not have come as such a surprise; few political establishments anywhere in the democratic world are as spectacularly rotten as Italy’s, and the European status quo is the biggest man-made policy disaster since the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Italian voters don’t have a lot of use for their leaders, and it’s hard to say they are wrong. The left wants to preserve the unsustainable, the right doesn’t have what it takes, and the center is dominated by short term, self centered careerists whizzing through the well oiled revolving doors that connect business with government. But how different are politics elsewhere? Voters ultimately weary of repeat policy failure by the well connected and well educated, and whether you look at Europe, the United States or Japan, the failures of national leadership keep piling up.
Americans often like to believe that our problems are as exceptional as our strengths, but our stale and ineffective political establishment looks a lot like its peers around the world. The American elite is not alone in its inconsequential futility and its lack of strategic vision; world leaders everywhere are falling down on the job.
The assumption that the people guiding the destinies of the world’s major powers know what they are doing is a comforting one, but there’s not a lot of evidence to support it. The “pass it to find out what’s in it” health care ‘reform’ in the United States, the vast stinking policy corpse that is European monetary union, the failure of establishments everywhere to figure out the simple arithmetical problems that our welfare states are encountering because of the demographic transition, the metastasizing tumor of corruption also known as the Chinese Communist Party: none of these suggest that the world is being governed with unusual wisdom.
But the problem is bigger than politics; in civil society as well as in government we are in an age of empty suits and stylish haircuts on hollow heads.
The people who run our affairs today come in many shades of bland. There are the elected officials and their direct appointees clinging more or less precariously to their posts. There are the career bureaucracies and civil servants who toil on regardless of the political winds. (This is a group that includes senior staff in national and regional governments and central banks; others in this category work for international organizations like the EU, the UN, the IMF and the World Bank.) In the developed world there are also the serried ranks of the leaders of the imperial non-profits: the heads of foundations, presidents of universities and think tanks, top staff at prominent NGOs. There are the intellectuals and academics whose views influence the decision makers, and there are the press lords—proprietors, editors and writers—who shape public and elite perceptions about what matters. There are the CEOs and financial movers and shakers whose views and deeds can move markets. More influential in some parts of the world than in others, there are the religious and spiritual leaders, officials and opinion makers. There are the cultural powers in Hollywood and elsewhere that both shape and express the zeitgeist.
As individuals, many of these people are outstanding: bright, hardworking, public spirited and dedicated to their jobs. They score well on tests and they get good grades in school. They can navigate the tricky path of advancement in the large and clumsy institutions that are the hallmark of our time. There are a lot of things they do well: they are mostly polite, they pay their bills and are reasonably faithful to their spouses and reasonably mindful of their kids. They are good company at cocktail parties and can at least appear attentive to panel presentations at multiday conferences. Whatever virtues are fashionable they are ready to exhibit, whatever opinions fit them for power they are eager to embrace. They look the part.
But they also have their limits: generally speaking they not only can’t think outside the box, they can’t conceive of a reality beyond the box’s comforting walls. They are bad at estimating probabilities, bad at anticipating consequences, bad at policy design and bad at managing change. Most are technical rather than strategic intellectuals; they often understand their own specialties pretty well, but cannot grasp the big picture. Incremental and cosmetic change they can process; deep change, not so much. They color between the lines and they play well with others, but under their mostly well meaning and eminently consensual direction the world is careening toward chaos.
The world has been cursed with this kind of polite incompetence before and it doesn’t end well. The rampant elite foolishness in the run up to 1914, the cretinous military and political leadership on both sides during that war and the idiotic mash up at Versailles and afterwards show what can happens when the world leadership class isn’t up to its job. One of the great ironies of history is that Thomas Mann’s brilliant takedown of the hollow civilization and international chatterati of pre-World War One Europe is set in Davos where an international group of the well heeled and the well informed discussed the problems of the world. They talked and talked and talked until the guns of August called them home in the summer of 1914.
The next generation of clueless leaders stayed out of Davos but their stewardship was no better; the blind leaders of the post World War One era unloosed plagues worse than those Moses brought on Egypt. After the war, sobered and seasoned by almost fifty years of serial policy failures and global disaster, the western elites somehow managed a burst of statesmanship. People like Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle and Harry Truman—all of whom would have died in near-obscurity if the war had not cleared a path for them—actually built the foundations of a world order that worked. This was not just about a handful of politicians at the top; it was about civil societies that were sobered by war and depression, and determined to do the right thing if only because the wrong thing was so horribly expensive. Businessmen had watched the patterns of international trade collapse and in many cases seen their enterprises physically destroyed by the war. The horrors of totalitarianism during the Fascist era and the threat of Communist takeovers shocked intellectuals and other civic leaders into maturity and responsibility. Even journalists at least for a while were jolted into something like wisdom.
By the end of the 1980s and the end of the Cold War, the temporary surge in sobriety and thoughtfulness was coming to a close. Perhaps because times had been so good for so long, leaders of all kinds tended to become more mediocre and thinking at high levels became duller and more conventional. It’a understandable; life in Western consumer societies, and especially in the comfortable institutions through which elites generally move, offers many pleasures but imparts little wisdom. The World War Two generation lived in a world of real terrors where choices were clearly fateful; their successors thought they lived in a world whose foundations were secure. With the big issues settled, they could focus on detail.
Political leaders lost the ability to think seriously about risk; take Helmut Kohl’s twin monetary mistakes with respect to the ruinous East German/West German 1 for 1 monetary union and the even dumber and more reckless decision to dash for the euro. The Clinton/Blair era of flash, glitz and fizzy finance was incomparably less serious than the kind of statecraft found on both sides of the Atlantic after the war. The era of George W. Bush, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder was even worse. Japan’s response to its bubble was a generation of passive decline.
So far, the new era looks no better and the list of unsolved problems grows. The middle class on both sides of the Atlantic and in Japan is in trouble. The euro is poisoning the European Union. NATO is eroding as continuing cutbacks in European defense budgets steadily reduce the alliance’s capabilities and relevance. Pension systems and social entitlements everywhere are unsustainable. The complex international dynamics of Asia and the assorted crises of governance and legitimacy in the Middle East can easily develop in ways that create security challenges as serious as anything in the twentieth century.
In the twentieth century it took a brutal series of hard knocks to wake the Western leadership class into competence and seriousness of purpose. Now the shock has worn off and once again a global ship of fools drifts aimlessly towards no one knows what. One hopes no cataracts or rapids lie downstream, but that seems unlikely. History is rarely dull and our new century looks to be full of surprise.