We get the leaders we deserve
by Fionn Shiner, TCW:
In St Augustine’s City of God, a seminal work that still exerts influence on theology and philosophy today, the great saint discusses how God allows certain leaders to take power at certain times as a form of reward or punishment. Leaders don’t emerge in a vacuum, and if a society is wicked and cruel its leaders will be too.
He says tyrants such as Nero Caesar are allowed to reign by ‘by the providence of the supreme God, when He judges that condition of human affairs is deserving of such lords’, before adding more generally that ‘it is most clearly said of God that He “maketh the man who is an hypocrite to reign by reason of the people’s wickedness”.’
The implication is clearly that the character of our leaders holds up a mirror to the character of the nation. What, then, does Theresa May say about the state of Britain? That we are bereft of ideas and unsure of ourselves – grey and unimaginative.
A leader as bland as Theresa May could emerge only in a morally relativistic culture where standing for something, and believing in such throwbacks as ‘right’, ‘wrong’ and ‘truth’, are anathema. I struggle to remember anything she has ever said that has stuck with me, and as a so-called ‘conservative’, and the daughter of a vicar, what exactly has she conserved?
May speaks clearly to the crisis of identity in the UK: Peter Hitchens says we are like ‘an amnesia patient’, a people cut adrift from our history and cultural heritage, a nation that has had its metaphysical foundations cut from beneath it and is now vainly trying to invoke its meaning from nebulous values such as ‘tolerance’, ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’.
Leaders such as May, Blair and Cameron don’t emerge so readily in a culture sure of itself, and a people who know who they are.
Trump, too, is a sign of the times, but those on the Left would rather see him as some sort of inexplicable phenomenon, put into the White House by the Russians or stupid racists, rather than as the logical conclusion of a culture they helped create.
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