In the choppy waters of public conversation, rulers have recently attracted much attention as they have bobbed along on its surface. This is not unusual, but in these months the attention has been more frenetic and perhaps harder to read. Whether it be Trump, Johnson, Andrews, Ardern, Berejiklian or Pope Francis, there have been unusual eddies about them that merit reflection.
Nothing useful can be said about Donald Trump, of course. He has always been a rip that takes everything and everyone reasonable out to sea and leaves them to drown.
Daniel Andrews, who has recently held his hundredth press conference on the coronavirus, is a more interesting case. TV watchers have been his Parliament, and scientific advisers his Cabinet. He is enduring. He has been professionally worked over by a hostile Murdoch Press and spokespersons for business groups, attacked by people impatient at restrictive measures imposed to deal with the virus, and left bleeding from the evidence of government mistakes and mismanagement of quarantine. He should be dead in the water and food for the sharks that pursue him.
Despite all this and despite popular weariness at the restrictions, popular support for him and for the lockdown he has presided over remains steady. Even more remarkable has been the popular response to journalists from hostile outlets who question him aggressively. The tidal flow of resentment that is social media has turned on the journalists and not on the premier, much to their discomfort. Whether or not Andrews survives the continuing economic and social pain brought by COVID-19, the level of his support and its passion are surprising.
In this context, too, we might mention Pope Francis whose reach and style of engagement with people have been much crimped by the coronavirus, and whose critics wanting more or fewer changes within the Catholic Church have multiplied. Yet he has also retained his popularity, and some of his critics have complained that they themselves are attacked by people who would normally be their allies. The currents here, too, are fluky.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand Jacinda Ardern has swum serenely towards election victory, unassailable when her success in suppressing the coronavirus and in responding to the murder of Muslim New Zealanders by a right wing terrorist. She is another ruler who carries the people with her.
Finally, Gladys Berejiklian seems to have survived the evidence that she had been in an intimate relationship with a former member of Parliament and businessman involved in dodgy deals and corrupt behaviour. In the face of the humiliation involved in the publicising of intimate emails and the questions raised about the separation of private and public interests involved in the relationship, she does not seem to have lost popular support. Even her political opponents praise her leadership in the time of the coronavirus. In this case, too, the sharks scented blood but the intended prey evaded them.
'Reflection on the representative character of rulers in times of crisis might also illuminate the hierarchy of vices and virtues that are taken to matter in rulers. Journalistic attempts to strip from rulers their moral legitimacy do not seem to be effective.'
Taken together these instances suggest that people now imagine their rulers as transcending party politics, and perhaps democratic institutions. They see them as personally representing their people. This view of leadership flourishes in times of crisis. It recalls the British attitude to Winston Churchill during the Second World War. He and others in similar positions were seen as protectors of the people, representing them through their endurance, as did Moses when he stretched out his hands while battle raged in the plain below. As leader of the people Moses also embodied the qualities that the people needed in order to survive. It is tempting to find in this story a parallel with Andrews’ endurance of a century of press conferences, his being cut and wounded by the journalists and his political enemies, and his emerging safe to plot the battle against COVID-19 late into the night. Because rulers represent the people, who themselves recognise their dependence on their leaders, any attack on the ruler is seen as an attack on the people.
The parallel with Moses also recalls the cosmic role attributed to rulers in much of human history. In a time of crisis and anxiety the presence of the king in his castle represents a universe in which the protective canopy of the universe is stretched over the people. Few moderns admit to thinking this way, of course, but we may commonly feel so, drawing on childhood experience of parents who can ward off harm.
Reflection on the representative character of rulers in times of crisis might also illuminate the hierarchy of vices and virtues that are taken to matter in rulers. Journalistic attempts to strip from rulers their moral legitimacy do not seem to be effective. Andrews faces daily assaults to pin on him responsibility for the mistakes his government has made and for his economy with the truth, but they do not wound him fatally because to the people such failings do not greatly matter. The ambiguities of governance raised by Berejiklian’s relationship with her ex-partner, too, may be seen to matter as little as did the financial dealings and sexual morality of medieval kings to their people. The virtue that is taken to count is their endurance in the struggle to protect the people. In their endurance people find security.
This is admittedly a very crude moral universe, neglecting as it does the connections between personal faithfulness and public reliability, and between personal integrity and public trust. In a world where triviality reigns, however, it does have the merit of focusing attention on the serious things that matter. Stern moralists are left to take comfort in the knowledge that rulers who are respected as protectors often lose their position at the end of the crisis. From Moses who was refused entry into the promised land to Churchill who lost the first post war English election, rulers in crisis have served their people when their strength was needed and have given way to others when their weaknesses and excesses were seen more clearly.
In calmer waters the sharks that smell blood may have their way.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: SW Premier Gladys Berejiklian answers questions about what she knew about the business dealings of Daryl Maguire in the NSW Legistative Assembly (Getty Images)