This post started as a complaint about the President's approach to leadership. It has clearly evolved.
We are living - as the old curse says - in interesting times. The myriad challenges facing us today require dynamic, flexible, innovative and charismatic leaders. Our era requires great leaders. Yet we seem to have a dearth of great leaders. The crisis in American leadership can be stated simply as our leaders have proven deeply inadequate to our challenges.
A common theme that emerges in these discussions is the assertion that our system is broken or dysfunctional. But the institutions haven't changed and these same institutions used to deliver results. Steve Benen, at Washington Monthly, observed that
. . . American politics can be exasperating, a characteristic that’s defined the system since its inception, but it’s still perfectly capable of functioning and problem solving. Indeed, it’s capable of doing great things, even when power is divided between the parties, as has been common, off and on, for several decades.
The institutions, in other words, don’t necessarily have structural flaws. With competent, well-intentioned officials in place, the process can be entirely effective. It’s worked before, and can work again. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with how the United States does its business.
But the system breaks down when one of the parties goes berserk. We’re not in a broken-down car; we’re in a perfectly good car with a crazy person in the passenger seat recklessly grabbing the steering wheel at inopportune times.
He concluded by quoting Jonathan Bernstein:
“It’s only now, and during the years of unified Republican control, that we are seeing long-time observers complain about a broken Congress or the worst Congress ever. But it’s not Congress that’s broken. It’s the Republican Party.”
Better, more responsible leaders, could work effectively, even from widely divergent perspectives, to make responsible decisions and to govern well. The institutions themselves aren't broken. Government can still work. It should still work, it would still work save the failure of contemporary leaders. The rise of the teabaggers would not have been possible in a political system with effective leaders - for many reasons, not the least of which would have been implementing better, more effective policies. In short - the institutions work if the people in them want them to work. It's arguable that the current crop of Republicans do not want the institutions to function.
The broken quality of the Republican party reflects the absence of good leaders in that party. The teahadist wing of the Republican party pretends at leadership but is made up of radicals, ideologues and modern day know-nothings. Their influence is a sign of the weakness of Republican leadership. The gaggle of theocrats, ideologues, attention whores, ingenues and has-beens running for the Republican presidential nomination right now is one of the clearest condemnations of American leadership we've seen in a long time. It is also a sign of the absence of real leaders in the Republican party.
The Democratic party is the weakest it has been in decades - adrift, lacking any public principle beyond "we're not the Republicans." It's a party that has stumbled from crisis to crisis for a decade - well-meaning but punch-drunk, disdainful of it's base, terrified of the opposition, uncertain of its own values and without coherent or effective leadership. Again and again, it seems that the central value of Democratic leaders is compromise - there may be a vision of America but they lack any meaningful strategy to communicate that vision, to campaign on it, to fight for it.
And so the US stumbles from disaster to catastrophe to crisis. A restless, unhappy electorate has cast a jaundiced eye on its officials and found them badly wanting. That same electorate is so hungry for any kind of leadership that they'll follow even obviously ill-informed demagogues - the people who voted for teabagger candidates in 2010 were voting for the vain hope that they could so something about our nation's problems. Given an opportunity to lead, the teahadists behaved like the know nothing zealots they are at heart - promptly grabbing the flag and marching off in the wrong direction, misdiagnosing the nation's real problems and challenges, determined, ill-informed and stubbornly resistant to facts and experts. Democrats helplessly and haplessly wrung their hands but found no way to effectively deal with them. And so the nation's policies drift ever less effectively rightward, our real challenges remaining unaddressed.
It hasn't always been this way.
At one point in time, America produced leaders in every aspect of life, at every level of society. You could walk into any church, union hall, Fraternal Order of Eagles/Elks/etc lodge, Rotary Club meeting and see a room full of leaders. Leadership was taught through example, through mentoring, through a vital web of relationships and connections. This was before the contemporary glut of books on leadership - and before contemporary America lost its leadership skills.
American leadership was capable, technocratic, effective, professional. The world could follow American leaders precisely because they were largely understated. JFK and LBJ stood out precisely because they were outsized personalities. Most American leaders of the time were sufficiently capable that their leadership was almost invisible. Their skills were taken for granted but far reaching. The US was well-regarded and respected world wide, at home we had peace and prosperity. People around the world trusted Americans precisely because we were competent, technocratic, capable. We got things done and we did them well.
I take the example of my congregation. Founded in the early 1950s, it's first two generations of leaders were in the mold of the man with the sensible suit, the horn-rimmed glasses and functional haircut; the women who led did so with energy, enthusiasm and competence but rarely looked as if they were anything more than suburban hausfraus. They weren't flashy but they were profoundly competent. They fostered an environment of identifying problems and experimenting with solutions. They founded the first pre-school in the State of Utah; a second generation of leaders founded the first emergency hotline in the state of Utah. From this relatively small church, leadership spread throughout the valley such that a sizable host of non-profit organizations and agencies were founded or cofounded through the church's work - working on justice issues for children, combating domestic violence, providing affordable housing for seniors, service agencies for the homeless. The ethic they fostered was profound - one that combined vision and action. It wasn't enough to believe, you must do, and doing must be meaningful and directed toward a vision.
As the 1960s faded into the ugly age of the 1970s, that generation of leaders began to fade away. Their ethic of leadership was sufficiently profound that is sustained American institutions - but without fresh infusions of leadership they began to drift. A critical failure of the Carter administration was missing the opportunity that the President created with his unfairly maligned "malaise" speech. In the speech, Carter shrewdly connection the problems we face with actions we could take. He failed to capitalize on the powerful response Americans had to his speech and a key opportunity was lost. Although most people argue Carter was a weak president, I believe a different explanation is equally valid. Carter presaged the drift in American leadership by shying away from the style of leadership that has characterized the US. Carter's reflective, self-questioning style was a response to the era's leadership.
Competence and professionalism look, to the outsider, like arrogance and over-confidence. Carter was an outsider - a Southerner, a devout and sensitive Christian. Though educated and intelligent, Carter identified as a farmer and church-goer. Unlike a great many other presidents, Carter could not emotionally adapt to the style of leadership that could ignore, as for example, JFK's affairs or Nixon's deep-seated distrust. Carter was also an outsider in the South's traditional political culture. His approach to leadership was such that presented with a profound opportunity to reshape his administration, rather than taking action to move his agenda forward he reshaped his administration. It was a well intentioned, but misguided move based on rejecting the arrogance and over-confidence of previous leaders. Reading his books or listening to his interviews, it's difficult to escape the sense that Carter is profoundly humble, self-aware, self- questioning. He can meet with someone like Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il and listen sensitively to that person's ideas and statements because he is keenly aware of his own short-comings and so is able to see the flawed human being and to honor their share humanity. It's a powerful gift and can create a powerful leader - and Carter has become such a leader. But he is a moral leader, not a political one. Dag Hammarskjold had a similar personality and was described as entering negotiations from a position of weakness on purpose (in addition, though, he was a competent technocrat and administrator).
The first Bush administration attempted to revive the post-war style of American leadership with great success internationally but poor success at home. The Clinton administration was forced into a position of technocratic competence. The result of those president's policies - including tax increases and institutional reforms - was an American leadership that was working in the world. At the end of Clinton's second term, the US was held in high regard around the world. George H. W. Bush was a product of the old-guard - culturally competent, intelligent, comfortable in almost all settings, able to deal with people of all types effectively. Clinton was never self-effacing but he had a knack for meeting and dealing with people as equals. They engendered trust with other nations. I would argue that though he lost the 1992 election, Americans never disliked George H W Bush personally. Clinton's approval rating at the end of his term was extremely high. Both men were bitterly disliked by the right wing of American politics - the wing now in firm control of the Republican party.
By itself the rising influence of the right wing would be problematic enough, but in the absence of stronger leadership elsewhere in the political spectrum, it is becoming profoundly disturbing. The reasons for the absence of effective leaders elsewhere is the real crisis in American leadership. Where are the great liberal leaders? Where are the moderate leaders? Near the end of 2010, Ezra Klein described the so-called moderates of American politics:
The people who tend to control the 55th through 60th votes on any given issue are not like you and me. They are driven by a baffling combination of raging egomania and crippling terror. They want to be treated like statesmen even as their decisions are based on a paralyzing fear of contested elections, primary challenges, Fox News and party pressure. They have few opinions on what good policy looks like, what opinions they do have on the subject change frequently, and they’re not willing to risk very much on them anyway.
Jim Matheson is a good example - his frequent emails boast of his "leadership" yet given even the whiff of opposition from the right, he folds. It's not leadership and it is symptomatic of a deeper and broader cultural problem. The crisis in American leadership is characterized by a lack of vision and principle, by the pursuit of compromise for its sake and the rejection of any certainty. It is also characterized by an absolutist vision and pursuit of principle for its own sake, rejection of compromise and a willingness to behave in extreme ways for the sake of certainty. The strange glorification of personal virtue has become a centerpiece of public discussion of politicians - the assumption that just because you don't cheat on your spouse you are a good leader or that if you do cheat you're a bad leader, the idolization of one version of sexual morality over the pursuit of sane policy has distorted public discussion; decades of attacks on experts and expertise by the right have been ignored or badly answered by both experts and the left; experts are wrong all the time, but that doesn't mean we should reject expertise. Yet that's exactly what has happened.
America's leadership crisis is deepening for specific reasons which cannot be ignored and which I will explore in part two.
Crossposted at www.oneutah.org