“The Leadership Revival,” is a provocative January 13 column by David Brooks, who is one of the New York Times’ columnists reviewing the adventures of American conservatives inside and outside the preserves officially occupied by the Grand Old Party.
Brooks troubles many Republicans because he too often writes from a sense of country rather than party. This troubles the GOP’s present atrocious, embarrassing cluster of haters, racists and their taste for destructive fairy tales. The Tea Party and its allies find Brooks too thoughtful, unnecessarily possessing a deep and wide vision of political responsibilities and conduct.
True, examining the concept of leadership at this moment may seem an unrewarding errand. Yet we should hastily note that Brooks doesn’t call for an attempt to parse how to become a greed-driven clone of the king of General Electric, Jack Welch, who each year would fire the bottom ten percent of his managers, irrespective of absolute performance. Nor do we need to step back to review current imitators of Napoleon Hill’s series of ”how-to-get-rich-quick” handbooks that were so popular in the 1970s and ‘80s, among many “mature” foreigners then residing in Guadalajara and at Lake Chapala.
Brooks happily often wrenches free of the unbecoming grip of far right-wing associates frequently enough to prompt their ire. This is one of those occasions. Thus, the reason Books can be worth a look by folks of less punitive political — and philosophical — proclivities: He frequently gives voice to his often veiled store of humanitarian instincts.
His “Leadership” column speaks of that singular moment when a politically interested person’s “imagination suddenly was inflamed beyond its normal scope.” That perhaps it was while re-reading “the Declaration of Independence, or watch(ing) the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s mountaintop sermon, or Nelson Mandela’s 1964 speech from the dock.” At that moment, Books writes, “You were enveloped by this epic sense that public life could truly be heroic.”The heroes that such an “epic sense” he writes, “...(B)rought their lives to a glorious point, pledging their sacred honor, offering to sacrifice their lives to some public mission.”
But, like the rest of us, Brooks asks “How do you translate the poetry of high aspiration into the rose of effective governance?” The gritty pit of reality, with its harsh nuts-and-bolts problems pulls a shade over the shining goal, the worthy dream. “This is the common problem today. Most people go into public life for the right reasons, but government doesn’t work.” The quality of the people may be “high, but the quality of leadership is low.”
Three productive responses offer themselves immediately, he suggests.
“First, apprentice yourself to a master craftsman,” he recommends. “Find yourself a modern version of Ted Kennedy (when he was) cobbling together a Senate majority. Find yourself some silent backstage official who knows how to slide ideas through the bureaucracy. Glue yourself to that person in order to learn the craft of governance.” He’s your necessary mentor.
All of the successful people I have known, not only in politics and business, but in teaching, music and other creative arts, even in bull fighting and rodeoing, all were proteges of older mentors possessing an impressive ledger of eperience.
When I accidentally entered the business world — answering a help-wanted ad seeking what turned out to be a “mail-boy” for a division of a very large corporation. What I was told almost immediately was that this “institution” was known as being stingy about advancements. “So don’t expect fast wage raises.” Fresh out of military service, I knew nothing of the corporate world except that civilian “work” wasn’t any work at all.
I went skating down the marbled halls that first morning pushing a cart stuffed with carefully segregated “important” envelopes, and in one hand a map — it was a huge building — and the names of people all of whom were evidently persnickety, especially the “executives.” What some of the executives took to be my eagerness — but was only excess energy from being cooped up in a building — impressed my boss’s boss’s boss.
There were layers of “important” people — all of whom I was instructed to “never bother,” for their mail went to one of their secretaries or one of their assistants. “Don’t talk to the execs, understand. And Mrs. Oleander (a large forbidding looking, widely disliked woman of about forty-five), though she’s just a clerk, is a favorite” of the president of a subsidiary company. The place was a labyrinth of brass just like an Army battalion headquarters.
I got to work early because the bus bringing me near my workplace was an early one. And when the neck-tie-ed-and-starched-collared folk locked their offices and gathered at the elevators, I was sitting on a hall bench studying the bound history of the corporation, asking if there was anything I was supposed to be doing. People gawked at me. I was used to long hours and exhausting duty. These people, I quickly realized, were pampered and would never know what “real work” was.
One of the executives soon recruited me as the junior member (often gofer) of his staff. From that time on, my “you-got-a-job, I’ll-do-it” attitude sent me up a ladder that vast offices of gray-looking men nailed to rows and rows of desks didn’t believe was accessible. I was a protege to an “important” mentor, and didn’t know it; but learning this stuff was an exhilarating series of challenges. I was simply energetic, curious, young and dumb — though a slew of challenges quickly made me get smarter fast. The mentor-protege gig teaches in ways that are far from, say, grad school. It’s hands-on stuff that’s not in any book because, as Brooks says about politics, it’s about the “craftwork” of accomplishing things skillfully — and tactfully. And the ways of the trade of good governance (that have now “been forsaken and disrespected”) can only be accumulated by being “embedded” in the duties and strategies of an experienced veteran, Brooks reminds us.
To enter politics you have to be way smarter than I was in those days. Or, rather, possibly shrewder than smarter, though smarter is surely demanded.
Yet today’s shrewd political corps offers few encouraging presidential possibilities.
Second, Brooks writes, is to “go away.” He calls it a “reality bath.” “Go off and be a stranger in a strange land.” and “stay there long enough to...forget the herd mentality of our partisan culture.” On returning “you’ll see the contours of your own reality more clearly.”
Third, Brooks says, “(C)lose off your options, People in public life live in a beckoning world. They have an array of opportunities. Shrewd strategists will tell (you) to make a series of tepid commitments to see what pans out. Play it smart. Hedge your bets.” But, he warns, “shrewd strategy leads to impotence.” You end up making your own trivial career “the object of your attention, not the vision that inspired you in the first place. Only masters of renunciation leave an imprint — those who can say a hundred Nos for the sake of an overwhelming Yes.”
Such political options call not only for smarts, but a sense of the “national moment.” Not just the brains and an embracing feeling for what citizens need, but for what they are not yet articulating as a goal. Where do they sense they want to go, and why? And most preciously, those in pubic life have to be generous gradualists, persuasive educators. Which means a lot of self-education in order to be attain such versatility of thought and intuition. Brooks‘ call is for those willing to take on a job of rigorous life-long self-discipline and self-education in the service of others.