Three Cs, like three Rs in schooling, Crucial to Good Governance

Vacuousness Destroys Possibility

Like the tried-and-true (sorely lacking today) four R (or three-R sounding) essentials (reading, writing, reasoning and arithmetic (budding responsibility) in the formative years (child and adolescent learning and development years) — four Cs (not churlishness, contemptuousness, color or creed) are essential in adult positions of leadership and public service, particularly positions affording inordinate power and influence.

The four fundamental Cs (sorely lacking today) are Character, Courage, Competence, and Civility.

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’ve been concerned with the quality of public service leadership for a long time and these thoughts came to mind as I was reading a piece by Australian journalist and lawyer Graham Hryce appraising the caliber and consequences of Western leadership and one particular reflection of it.

Individuals aspiring to public service or finding themselves in leadership positions are too often hungry for power, hollow, and susceptible to being handled.

The seeming “madness” of Britain’s Mary Elizabeth “Liz” Truss who holds a position gifted to her by “Thatcher-worshipping members of the Tory Party” is, according to journalist Graham Hryce, “a product of a crude neo-liberal economic ideology”; and true to the code, she “persists in robotically touting the benefits of ‘trickle-down economics’;” and “(unsuccessfully) trying to blame (Britain’s and more generally the West’s) economic crisis entirely on Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin and the conflict in Ukraine.”

Like the US factions, the Truss regime has attempted “to remedy deep-seated problems … in the economy—including decades of wage stagnation, ongoing working class and middle-class impoverishment, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, dramatically rising energy and food prices, and the crisis in housing affordability”—by squaring a round hole or vice versa: doubling down with certifiably unworkable “neo-liberal economic policies.”

Systemically Weakened Economic systems Death knell of Western democracies

“Global elites” ruling Western “democracies,” Hryce observes, adhere obstinately to “greed-based, crude neo-liberal economic theories” and pledge their allegiance “to overturning the social democratic consensus” that prevailed, for example, before the UK’s (senile former plastics company worker boasting contempt for government service) Baroness Margaret Hilda Thatcher, and before the US’s (senile B-movie actor boasting contempt for government service) Hon. Knight Grand Cross Ronald Wilson Reagan. Thirty-two years later, another senile entrenched gerontocratic bencher followed Sir Reagan.

Britain’s current head of state as the United States’ current head of state preside over layered economic and political crises.

Some of Hryce’s insights (with added commentary) are these.

Any political system that seats a demonstrably incompetent person “is irretrievably broken.”

Any political system that encourages a long train of nepotistic, incestuously ideological incompetents perpetuates political instability.

 A system that allows insider, gerrymandered selection (or pre-public balloting) of leaders degrades the quality of candidates and policies, weakens “democratic” processes, destabilizes institutions of governance, and deliberately forfeits the essential trust of the body politic (general public). 

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eakness of character, competence, courage, communication invites malleability. An incompetent in public office (public service or any position), a person mindlessly harnessed to hardened ideology, open to the puppeteer, opens to any manipulation by any element of influence.

Such weakness weakens a nation, and is a threat to the larger world.

Sources in addition to general references

An original article by Graham Hryce, October 3, 2022, “Truss exposes the current instability of Western democracies” “The turmoil in British politics can lead to disastrous consequences. It also mirrors the current state of the wider West.”

Author: “Graham Hryce is an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.”

 

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Copyright © Carolyn LaDelle Bennett
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