Christian Science Monitor has an article today by David Gergen and Andy
Zelleke in which they discuss why America is not producing the
same caliber of leaders it once did.
Several years ago, the pioneering leadership scholar Warren
Bennis wondered how it could be that the much smaller society
at the time of the United States' founding could have produced
six world-class leaders: Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton,
Madison, Adams, and Franklin – while in recent times, he
suggested, we seem to struggle to find even one or two.
Indeed, at the presidential level, our survey indicates that
relatively few Americans believe they will be choosing, on Nov.
4, between two good leaders (albeit proponents of divergent
policy agendas).
I've often thought about the same thing, and insomuch as they
point out that there is a problem, I agree. But in spite
of the fact that Gergen and Zelleke work at the Center for Public
Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School, this article doesn't
seem to benefit from any real understanding of the etiology of
America's leadership problems. In order to understand how
they would need to be fixed, you have to understand why they
exist.
Gergen and Zelleke's solution is to blame it all on the
policymakers, who we are to believe have squandered the public's
confidence, and then to urge those policymakers to fix it
themselves:
The near-perfect storm of challenges facing the nation has
created an urgent need for better leadership. But how do we
restore the public's confidence in leaders in our most
important institutions and sectors?
They have to earn it back.
Those of us who work in these domains have ample opportunity -
and in these troubled times, the responsibility - to do our
part.
They go on to explain that accomplishing this rehabilitation of
the public's confidence will require that policymakers "be
extaordinarily competent" and "demonstrate greater commitment to
the common good and less to their own self-interest." Well,
yeah. That would be good.
Here's my take on the subject of leadership in America, which I
will mostly confine to the sphere of politics:
To come straight to it, we in modern America elect our
politicians to represent us--not to lead us. The
distinction is important: representation and leadership often
take very different forms. Representatives are the
candidates next door; they adjust their dialects to whatever
crowd is present (Cf. the much reviled
Peggy Noonan article) they dissemble and equivocate in the
most insultingly obvious ways, and in general seek to assure
constituents that life will be easier under their auspices.
Above all, they do not point out Joe Six-Pack's vices or
flaws.
Leadership, on the other hand, must sometimes tack against the
prevailing winds. All great leaders share one defining
quality: the audacity to challenge and to admonish their
followers to rise to some unfulfilled potential. That often
requires that a leader be candid and tell people the truth,
whether they want to hear it or not. To tell people the
truth requires that you respect them. For people to permit
you to tell them the truth requires that they respect you.
We don't have that respect in America right now, nor do we really
want leaders. The populism of our middle-class runs deep,
and in ages past, that was part of her strength. Americans
have never had much patience for elite rule. But inherent
in that populism is a narcissism. We want to have our
prejudices reinforced. We want to be reassured that we lost
our houses because bankers bamboozled us to line their own
pockets. None of it's our fault.
So that's what we're told by our politicians. If a
candidate were actually to tell us the truth, his candidacy would
be a spectacular failure. Can you imagine the combination
of baffled horror and furious rejection that would be in store
for any Presidential candidate who told us the truth about how we
got into this financial crisis? I can imagine it now:
"Well, to be honest, Main St., for decades many among you have
been incautious with your investments and have racked up more and
more personal debt. Your eagerness to get something for
nothing is the sickness, and nothing the government can do will
really cure it. It's up to you to be smarter and more
responsible."
In urging wisdom and selflessness, Gergen and Zelleke ask the
impossible of policymakers. Those two qualities do not
currently float in Washington. Likewise, when they ask
leaders to act like leaders, they ignore that these people were
not elected on the basis of leadership, but instead on the
ability to lie skillfully. We Americans want our leaders to
lie to us. Seeing them do so neither surprises us nor
bothers us--in fact, it feels pretty good. And here I come
to my ultimate response to Gergen and Zelleke, which takes the
form of two axioms:
1. The leadership of a legitimate, representative government
ultimately reflects the values of its people.
2. Where truth is valued over self-interest, it flourishes. The
contrapositive: Where truth does not flourish, it is not valued
over self-interest.
Americans have the "leadership" they want. That they are
unhappy with it, anyway, only speaks to their unhappiness with
themselves. And that is the true source of the current
national malaise.
