Throughout the history of liberal democracies, a link has persisted between good character and leadership, even if it has often been maintained tenuously or fraudulently (think of Bill Clinton saying: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"). Even amid such hypocrisy, there has at least been the appearance of a common unspoken understanding that character and the highest offices of leadership are intrinsically linked.
That link was broken during the strange epoch of the leadership of the US president Donald Trump, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison and UK prime minister Boris Johnson. Trump and Johnson were leaders who not only basked, Machiavellian-like, in power for its own sake (and resisted attempts to make them relinquish that power) but were nakedly open - celebratory, even - about character traits that would have once been considered shameful and hidden. They could not be accused of hypocrisy because their personal selves and their political selves were in appalling alignment.
Trump nodded to this shift when he said he could kill someone and it wouldn't matter ("I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn't lose any voters, OK?"). And you knew at the time, deep in your bones, that it probably wouldn't.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 22, 2022-Ausgabe von The Guardian Weekly.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 22, 2022-Ausgabe von The Guardian Weekly.
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