Down the rabbit hole
On questions of politics, power and the potential of leadership
Ok friends, I’m going to let you know off the top that this week I am going to grapple with something. Some big somethings. This is about my sense making and meaning making and needing to externalize some stuff that confounds me in the hopes of understanding it. It will be messy and full of questions, because I’m full of questions. I also hope it can kick off a conversation, so do jump in if you have thoughts you can offer. Here goes…
On January 19th I posted an article to facebook with a preface that said:
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand how one’s political worldview can prevent basic human goodness.”
The article was about an emergency debate the Vancouver Parks Board had to hold after one of the Commissioners put forward a motion to close Community Centres as warming shelters during a month long “butt-numbingly, face-chappingly, lake-freezingly cold” snap, the likes of which Vancouver has not seen in a decade.
What I should have prefaced the article with was what in the actual fuck???
Because seriously. You guys. It was so cold Trout Lake was skateable for the first time in 20 years. And we had a Parks Board Commissioner using public time and money to try to close places for other humans to keep warm?
It’s not the first time I’ve posted, thought or wondered (aloud and to myself) how these egregious, harmful, hateful actions get passed off as politics as usual. The possible examples I could have chosen to highlight my point feel endless right now. For example, as I sit here editing this, my phone buzzed with a notification from the Guardian that reads: Trump administration rolls back protections for transgendered students.
I repeat: what in the actual fuck?
And these are just present day, present moment examples. They are not even the worst ones. History is even more bleak on this subject.
I do not, cannot, and have never been able to understand how heart-shattering, head-shaking, deeply confounding examples of anti-human, anti-life, anti-livelihood, anti-wellbeing, or anti-integrity actions get sanitized and sanctioned as “politics”.
I cannot for the life of me figure out how or why hate is now routinely being served on the political table (so to speak). I cannot figure out why any of these things are acceptable in “advanced democratic societies”. And, following from that, I can’t understand how or why any of this gets sliced up across the political spectrum. How is it possible that it is a “Lefty” thing to do to care about another human being or the welfare of someone different from yourself? Isn’t that just basic human goodness? When did it become part of ones political identity? After all, isn’t the political spectrum, at least in its purest form meant to span all ideological potentials of how we get to the best possible world for the greatest number of people? I mean isn’t that the point, to be striving toward ideals? And aren’t your politics supposed to be about how we get to that better place, not who gets to be a part of it?
I actually do not understand. I do not understand for a second.
This stuff has been rattling around in my brain and shredding at my heart for a long time. I can remember a few years ago laying in bed with my former partner (seriously, this was so much of our pillow talk) and asking him: “How do you define politics?”
I’ll never forget his answer. It was instant, concise and clear: The pursuit of power.
Let me say that again. Politics, at least according to one of the best political minds I know, is the pursuit of power.
Huh?
So, not about the wellbeing of all people?
No.
Power.
I guess the logical next question (that I didn’t ask him) is, power to what end? Perhaps that is the part where we start talking about the governance of society toward ideals and wellbeing. After all, you do need to be able to exercise power to achieve outcomes, especially at the scale of a whole society. And still it is confusing to me that this is an accepted definition of what politics is.
The deeper down this rabbit hole I go, the more I wonder if I am asking the right question. Maybe this isn’t about politics at all.
There is a word in all of this I have refused to use so far and that is leadership. So often we interchangeably use the terms “Politician” and “Leader”. What is unspoken in the above and informs many of my own ideals is that to be a politician is to be a leader and to be a leader is a responsibility that comes with a significant expectation of doing better, being better, and, being invested in the betterment of all people. All people. Full stop. It is actually a form of love, if we take last week’s definition as true. But that’s a whole other topic. Let’s stay here.
What all of this adds up to for me, the more I think and investigate it, is a huge crisis of leadership. I think we could go down a whole other rabbit hole about the brokenness of the political system itself, and how our politicians are playing by the rules of the system, appealing to their base, and therefore this is all could be chalked up to systemic failure. But I don’t want to go there right now either. What I do see and where my curiosities now lie is in a whole additional problem set, one that I think is best defined as a remarkable, intense and overwhelming vacuum of leadership in the political and social sphere. This vacuum has created the conditions for the rise of Trump and it is as true in Canada as it is the States.
There is someone who explains this far better than I ever could, so for a moment allow me to give the floor to umair haque:
This generation of leaders has failed utterly, remarkably, absolutely at leadership. The facts — measurable, quantifiable, visible — are as indisputable as they are stark. They are not stewards and shepherds of human potential. What are they? They are landlords of human potential. We pay them rent merely for existing, being, surviving. Hence, our human potential goes…nowhere. It is sapped by the day, merely by the exigencies of living in the rubble of the dream. And that is why we are angry, outraged, weary.
And yet, every time they are asked, they will not admit their failure to practice leadership. Result? No one trusts them or believes them. They have no credibility, and little legitimacy. But still, no one can dislodge them. Hence, an Age of Rage. This generation of leaders has produced an age of rage because they have not enlarged and expanded human potential. They have, again, in measurable terms, done the very opposite: they have diminished and reduced it. They are its slumlords and racketeers. Not its champions and benefactors.You can tell someone driving an Uber between two McJobs that barely pay the rent, who should, could, and can be doing a biomedical PhD which unleashes tomorrow’s cure for cancer that she’s reaching her fullest human potential. But no one except a rube, a sucker, or a flunky’s going to believe you. It isn’t merely an eye-roll-inducing nostrum: it is as patently false as saying the earth is flat. Hence, a tidal wave of anger against an establishment that has not just failed — but, crucially, is willfully blind to its own failure.
Leadership vacuums happen when leaders stop practicing leadership. When they forget, ignore, or neglect, when they betray the eudaimonic challenge — the fundamental responsibility of leadership, which is neither conquest nor victory nor personal gain — but creating better lives. And in those leadership vacuums, when leaders leave people not just directionless and rudderless, but fractious, fearful, and faithless, arise demagogues, who prey on people’s fears and anxieties.
Leaders stopped being leaders, and that vacuum gave rise to a Trump. The converse is also true. To defeat Trump will take true leadership. Not more empty claims of recovery, nor pleas to place faith in a broken system. It is about reaching not just people’s minds — which are the littlest parts of us — but healing the burning resentments and wounds hidden in their hearts, spirits, and beings. But you’ve got to be able to see those wounds first.
Those wounds have left people incandescent with anger whose intensity and quality both is unlike any era in recent history. But we must look past their anger, into their wounds, if we are to be leaders. Beneath the anger, underneath the rage, inside the endless, constant din of perma-outrage, trapped in the shifting sands of a class structure in which they are drowning, people are traumatized, hurt, and afraid. By and of the very leaders that they trusted with their lives.You can’t fix a mistake you won’t admit. If this generation of leaders can’t acknowledge their failure to be leaders, they’re not going to regain the credibility, legitimacy, and power they have lost. That, and no less, will tell people that the people formerly known as the middle class that they people they call leaders but are something more like historic, jaw-dropping failures, slumlords of human potential, have, at long last opened their closed eyes.
So, perhaps the answer to my own question that I have posed again and again and again in different ways in opening this exploration is that these actions from politicians and what is passing as “politics” are not in fact politics but severely bad leadership. Politics can be about power, and in fact you need power to get shit done. But when that power is exercised without the capacity and intent of leadership for better lives, imbued with an ethic of love, and a baseline of basic human goodness, it is a failure. You are at best a ‘slumlord of human potential’ to use haque’s words. And that is not about Left and Right and Progressive or Conservative, that is about the betterment of life and potential for all people. We have got to stop calling bad leadership and the institutionalization of hate, politics. We have got to stop saying ‘that’s just the way it is’. It’s not just the way it is or the way it has to be.
It feels important at this moment to pause and point out that this vacuum is not total. Thank the good lord (as my mother would say) that there are remarkable leaders among us (political and otherwise) that show us what is possible. The problem being is that they very nearly stand alone. They are in the minority and the state of our politics shows us that.
Last week iPolitics put out an article called The centre cannot hold: Canada faces a populist eruption: The forces that made Trump now threaten Trudeau more than Trump himself. In it, the author described how trust in public institutions in Canada has plummeted to a new 17 year low this year. I think it is this leadership gap that is at the heart of it. I think Haque is on to something.
I wish I had a nice bow to wrap all of this up with. I don’t though. It’s an ongoing query that leaves me at once baffled, exhausted and hopeful. Baffled and exhausted I think are self-explanatory. The hopeful part is that I see this kind of leadership-for-the-wellbeing-of-all haque describes all around me in my community. Hopeful because of the increasing numbers of people unwilling to accept hate masked as politics-as-usual. Hopeful because after the anger and outrage dissipate, I need fuel to keep going, to keep approaching these questions, and to keep working toward a better possible future for all people. All people. Full stop.
