THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 29, 1996 TAG: 9609270716
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: DECISION '96
SOURCE: BY ANNE P. NEILL, SPECIAL TO THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
LENGTH: 86 lines
The leadership issue resurfaces every election year, typically in the form of a lament. As a great nation, we may indeed feel that we have a right to great leaders. Since the Kennedy era, few individuals have ignited the nation's energies with a compelling, irresistible sense of national purpose. But, if this is the case, why is it so? Is not the other side of the relationship between leaders and people equally important? Do not great leaders have a right to great followers? Is it even possible for the one to exist without the other?
The alternative view would be that leaders emerge fully grown, in a political and cultural vacuum. This appears less reasonable than the assumption of a fundamental relationship between leaders and the larger context in which they flourish. Historically there tends to be a symmetry between the quality of leadership and the character of nations. We need only think of Hitler to realize that great followers would not be taken in by false leaders. Churchill and the British people offer another type of example where courage and determination in leader and followers emerged together, summoned forth by a great crisis which bound them together in a common struggle.
For Americans today, leadership itself falls prey to the more general divisiveness that afflicts the country. Moreover, the claim to leadership in American political life is easily made. Oliver North absorbed the phrases and posture of leadership - the leadership look, if you will - but without any principled vision upon which to take the lead. Abraham Lincoln was the opposite. The future of the country may, in fact, depend upon the ability of the American electorate to distinguish between a Lincoln and a North.
We may believe we want great leaders, but great leaders have a penchant for difficult truths. Often their greatness lies in their courage to face squarely the painful realities that the population at large has difficulty accepting. What if we have leaders, but can't bear to hear what they might have to tell us?
Indeed, the truths and realities Americans have to face today are challenging. Leadership and followership may have been easier in the 1950s when we did not face major industrial competitors. Since the 1960s, transformations in global political and economic structures have - in a way that is beyond the power of any individual leader to control - altered the position of the U.S. in the international arena.
From a global perspective, the history of the United States over the past few decades is one of relative decline in relation to the emergence of other industrial powers. American co-existence with ideologically compatible, economic rivals is an entirely new challenge. This new condition of our world situation goes directly to the issue of the future of American democracy and the fate of the American dream as discussed during the past week in this newspaper.
Yet, so far as we prefer to define the national political problems as those of family values and taxes, perhaps we are not ready to face the leading issues. If leadership in high places seems wanting, it is also wanting among us so far as we are immobilized as a society by our collective inability to recognize which issues represent root problems and which do not. We can agree to pretend that the decline of family values is the single most important crisis in America today, but that does not move us in any direction at all.
Nevertheless, it is true that family life is threatened in this country. It is not threatened by liberals or liberated women. Family life is threatened by a changing economic structure that has virtually eliminated employment opportunities in some sectors and communities across the country. (See the article by William J. Wilson, ``When Work Disappears,'' The New York Times Magazine, August 18, 1996.)
``Read my lips'' is a clever line, reminiscent of an actor playing a part. It is not a statement of leadership. If we vote for men who utter such lines, then we do not have a right to complain about their performance later. So long as we tolerate such intimidation in the guise of political debate, we discourage genuine leadership from engagement in public life. We are eager for candidates who meet all the requirements of the ideal American character and who tell us what we wish to hear. The problem today is that all of our values are not equally realizable. Great leadership would require a nation willing to make sacrifices in order to achieve what is most valued.
Is it possible in the context of the late 20th century world to revive the traditional family structure, have decent paying work for all, guarantee the free market and world peace, eliminate crime and drugs, solve the health care crisis and reduce taxes all at the same time? If not, then what needs to be done? In a democracy, leaders cannot make these fundamental decisions alone. We need to be participants in the task of choosing a future direction. That is the work of good followership, called citizenship. Democratic leaders can only take us where we ourselves have already resolved to go. MEMO: Anne Neill is a historian living in Norfolk.
KEYWORDS: LEADERSHIP ELECTION by CNB