Independent consultant and blogger in Dar es Salaam
On January 9th, America bid farewell to President Jimmy Carter at his state funeral. On January 20th, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.
The eleven days between President Carter’s funeral and President Trump’s inauguration provided a perfect opportunity to reflect on the contrast between these two men.
“From Jimmy to Donald in 39 Years: One Generation in American Politics” would make a good political science project or book, don’t you think?
I am too young to have personal opinions on the Carter presidency, everything I know is filtered through media and conversations with older people.
What stood out to me is the way in which admirers and detractors unanimously labelled him a ‘decent human’ being - his strength, his weakness. He seemed a man out of his time, cleaving to values of a bygone era.
There is no such consensus when it comes to President Trump. He evokes polarising opinions. The intensity of feeling – and civic action – says a lot about the age we are living in, how media has evolved and how its effect on politics has changed.
The contrast between two leaders in one generation’s lifespan also raises the eternal debate about leadership qualities and character.
The most famous treatise on this issue is probably Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ and to be fair I only found out in the last five years that Machiavelli wrote it as a commentary about the tough realities of living in medieval Florence under the ruthless Medici family.
Centuries later, the lessons people choose to take from ‘The Prince’ remain open to interpretation, and thus a testament of one’s character. Does one detect the warnings, or embrace the paternalism and unapologetic use and abuse of power?
When it comes to the 20th and 21st centuries – especially in America – ‘Quiet’ by Susan Cain offers a valuable social psychological insight that compliments Machiavelli nicely: “Self-help books have always loomed large in the American psyche. Many of the earliest conduct guides were religious parables, like The Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1678, which warned readers to behave with restraint if they wanted to make it into heaven.” She goes on to say that “...by 1920, popular self-help guides had changed their focus from inner virtue to outer charm [...] The same author, Orison Swett Marden, who wrote Character: the Grandest Thing in the World in 1899, produced another popular title in 1921. It was called Masterful Personality.”
If “From Jimmy to Donald in 39 Years: One Generation in American Politics” ever gets written, I think that it could do worse than start off from where Cain does: the deep social tectonic shift in values of the 20th century, carried over with astounding speed and power into the 21st.
Due to globalisation and Pax Americana, this is not just a ‘them’ problem. It is a global trend, and I fear that we are all the poorer for it.
To bring it home, “From Julius to Jakaya in Forty Years: One Generation in Tanzanian Politics” would be a similarly interesting and valuable project about the arrival and consequences of the Cult of Personality and the death of the Culture of Character. What better time than an election year to have that discussion in public, right Comrades?
Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report.
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