The leadership vacuum: It's worse than you think

By Stephen B. Young The Daily Record Newswire For Americans, our current angst and political troubles may be more intractable than first appears. We are immobilized by gridlock in our national and state government, incapable of making large and important decisions. We have not had a federal budget adopted in three years. Those who cannot decide how best to advance their interests become fate's roadkill. Gridlock comes from weak leadership. Ideological and sectarian polarization, on the one hand, and lassitude on the other, have raised up for us not leaders but cheerleaders and managers to hold positions of authority -- leaving most of us afraid of the future. The cheerleaders among us seek to rally the faithful and largely ignore what we all have in common. The managers among us just go on from day to day in a petty pace of self-protection and self-promotion, equally disdainful as the cheerleaders of advancing, or even advocating, a common good. But ideology, sectarian prejudice and hunkering down are all psycho-social trends that only cultural vision and intellectual conviction can overcome. And our culture is thin these days, with little to offset a downward spiral of self-imposed defeatism. I struggle against coming to this conclusion, but keeping up the fight is getting harder and harder. As Cicero would say if he were with us, we have lost our "virtue." In June 59 BCE, when the first triumvirate of Crassus, Pompey and Julius Caesar was ruling the Roman Republic, doing what it wanted in defiance of elections, Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus, who was in Greece, that the people were resentful. When Caesar entered a theater, nobody clapped for him; a playwright received standing ovations for putting a pun on Pompey's name in a performance; young gossips passed around inside stories of cronyism among the three and their clients, Cicero wrote. But then he concluded that these facts made him more sad as they showed the Roman leaders capable of making moral judgments but at the same time just sitting around with "their virtue in chains." Recently I saw some so-called leaders very "chained" to passivity and got really depressed. I was invited to attend an insiders' conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Bertelsmann Foundation from Germany, the Financial Times and the China Daily's new Washington bureau. The occasion was the spring meeting of principals of the IMF and the World Bank. We had some impressive figures come to speak and facilitate -- not necessary top drawer but nothing to laugh at, either. Glib professionals, senior officials, persons with reputations as wise heads who have earned the right to have us take their opinions seriously. Smooth presenters all and masters of their talking heads metier. But to me there was not a leader among them. The German minister of labor and social issues -- an articulate lady -- was about the best. She politely explained the German system of relating job training to real jobs for young Germans -- something we are not doing well at all as admitted by Tom Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis. Solis, for her part, had down pat the politically correct vocabulary of promoting women and minorities but left you wondering about how all the other Americans will find jobs and how the economy plans to create enough jobs for all. Gene Sperling, who is now director of President Barack Obama's National Economic Council after serving in a similar post under President Bill Clinton, was factual, modest, informed and fatalistic. I sensed that, deep down, he sees himself more as a commentator than a doer. He is a modern professional, true to his discipline and unwilling to raise expectations or emotions. He is comfortable with, and was mostly likely hired for, his throttled-back "let's-first-just-look-at-the-facts" approach that will stir no ire but inspire no passion or commitment. This comfortable affect was fully in evidence as he calmly said that if we don't solve our long-term disequilibrium between promises to pay out for baby boomer health care and baby boomer retirements, the American system will collapse. No passion; no exhortation; no plea for action; just cold commentary. At one dinner during the conference, I was assigned to a table and ended up chatting with a former White House legal counsel and a head of Citigroup's capital asset management office in Europe. The lawyer was gracious and well-read, but mostly a lawyer -- whose mission is to serve the client and not lead. The banker was mostly adept in pleasing people, the better to get and retain clients. He had few insights to share on what to do to improve our economy. We then listened to the American professional who had just negotiated the massive voluntary surrender of wealth by owners of Greek government bonds to help Greece avoid default and the euro zone avoid collapse. Our speaker was again smooth and comforting, reliable and conventional, patient and non-judgmental -- just what you need to help angry and frightened parties reach agreement. But he, too, saw himself as just an onlooker -- just doing his job, punching the clock and hoping someone, sometime, will step up and solve things. As we broke to head back to our hotels, I heard many comment on what a fine job he had done and what a great guy he was. But throughout the conference, there was no energy that leadership could draw on -- no charisma, no self-confidence, no assumption of personal responsibility. No one talked about Occupy or the Tea Party. We were all awaiting what fate will bring in the November elections without much expectation that our future will be much different than what we have today. On walking back to my hotel, I thought suddenly: This is how elites die. They just kind of give up and drift along. We need people who care, but not about narrow things, not about myths and shibboleths. We need people who care about great things; people who care enough to sit up, get up and take action. Heroes would be great to have, but I would settle for active, engaged citizens. But behaviors follow ideas and values. Before we can get the leaders we need, we need to shape the right kind of ideas to inspire and reassure along with the values that instill confidence and commitment. The current American problem is not gridlock, not polarization, not lack of people in positions of authority -- all of which we have -- but rather a vacuum of sound ideas supported by inspiring visions, a vacuum that promotes a decline of virtue. We have met the enemy and it is us. Published: Fri, May 25, 2012