Celebrities simply not leaders
IF a future alien race ever cares enough to comb through the ashes of planet Earth, it may one day discover what we were too stupid to realise.
That the cause of our annihilation wasn’t climate change or nuclear war but the moment we decided to make celebrities our leaders.
Politics has always had something in common with show business. Both industries are heavily populated with attention-seeking narcissists who have other people write their lines for them. Indeed, Washington has been famously described as “Hollywood for ugly people”.
But the whole point of this was that they were supposed to be two very separate places. If you were dumb as a box of hammers but had a pretty smile, you went to LA. If you were smart as a whip but had a face like a bashed crab, you went to DC.
Everybody knew their place. It was a simpler time. Of course, politicians always wanted to be associated with celebrities because people actually liked celebrities. JFK cavorted with Marilyn Monroe and Richard Nixon enlisted Elvis to fight the war on drugs – or at least those drugs for which the King didn’t already have a prescription.
Then along came a B-grade supporting actor called Ronald Reagan and everything changed. Reagan showed that not only could an actor become president but that you didn’t even have to be a particularly good actor. As long as you stuck to the script and could sell a good line, all you needed to do was listen to people smarter than you and the country would pretty much run itself – which is precisely what Reagan did.
Bob Hawke tells an insightful story about meeting the leader of the free world. Every time Hawke asked him a question Reagan would answer in vague generalities. Then he would simply refer the PM to one of his Cabinet secretaries or advisers.
This is not necessarily any snide dismissal of Reagan – on the contrary, his system worked remarkably well. Indeed, most world leaders and policy makers would kill for such a considered approach from the current White House. But of course, the Reagan model only worked as long as he effectively sidelined himself and followed the advice of his team. And that is not Donald Trump’s style.
That is the risk of putting up a celebrity candidate. Eventually, they might start to think that they are actually in charge – and celebrities should not be in charge of anything.
It is telling that while Trump’s Twitter feed might be pretty stupid by presidential standards, by celebrity standards it is a towering work of genius. Just as his speeches might not be as eloquent as Obama’s, they still make more sense than Kanye’s.
And, of course, the Left has delighted in lampooning Trump as nothing more than an infamous idiot but sadly, this exposes only their own foolishness. After all, if Trump is so stupid, then how stupid must be the entire US political establishment he defeated?
A clue to this is found in the latest cause de jour of the American liberal elite, as distinct from the genuinely working class and poor who, I suspect, have bigger issues to worry about.
Apparently, the solution to the damage caused by a celebrity president with no political experience is to elect another celebrity president with no political experience.
Somehow a celebrity hashtag campaign that had its beginnings objecting to female actors being asked what they were wearing on the red carpet and then morphed into a campaign defined by actors being asked what they were wearing on the red carpet has now morphed into a campaign for Oprah Winfrey to become the next president of the United States, purely on the basis of a speech she gave at the Golden Globes.
The problem, it seems, is that show business types appear to have difficulty distinguishing between the West (also known as the “free world”, of which the president of the US is the leader) and The West Wing, which is a television show by Aaron Sorkin.
In the latter, the speech is met by rapturous applause, the problem is solved and the credits roll. In the former, some Middle Eastern dictator just fires another rocket.
So perhaps instead of turning to slack-jawed TV idols to solve our political problems, we should instead turn to community leaders who have truly devoted their lives to the public or policymakers who are already devoting their lives to solving the very problems we complain about.
Because I doubt very much they’ll be solved by a celebrity and they sure as hell won’t be solved by a hashtag.