How This Generation of Leaders Failed Leadership
Or, the Social Combustion of Demagoguery
By now, klaxons are ringing like banshees across the Capitol Beltway. Donald Trump’s rise is the single greatest threat to the established political order since the war of 1812. And yet. If we were to rewind just a year, we’d struggle to find a single pundit, politician, or commentator propounding the preposterous notion that the GOP front-runner-by-a-country-mile for President would be a bombastic bigoted billionaire by the name of Trump. But now that he is, insiders are comic-operatically panicked. Not just by his rise — but because they’re baffled by it.
So how did Donald Trump happen?
My tiny theory is simple, though it raises troubling implications. Let me put it to you simply.
Just as we can have a financial crisis, or an economic recession, so too can we have what I’ll call a Leadership Meltdown. A Leadership Meltdown happens when a generation of leaders betray — forget, ignore, or just plain neglect — the art of leadership. In the resulting leadership vacuum, the social order, aimless and adrift, combusts into demagoguery.
And that is precisely how Trump happened. Let me explain.
For too long, the “establishment” (I’ll use Trump’s own terminology — not to praise him, but to explain him) has shouted the following line from every Olympian mountaintop: the economy, they say, is recovering. True. But it is truer to say that the recovery is a largely meaningless one. The rich are mega-richer, the banks are mega-bigger. But it has not meaningfully benefited the average person — it has left many, perhaps the majority, worse off than they were before it. Their incomes have not recovered. They enjoy fewer and worse public goods, whether libraries, schools, parks, decrepit infrastructure, or poisoned water. The jobs that have been created during the recovery offer lower wages, less security, and fewer opportunities than those before it. The economy is, in a very real sense, replacing not just good jobs with bad ones, but the promise of good lives — middle class ones, resonant with prosperity and confident in stability — with poor ones.
Do you think I overstate my case? Perhaps you are a firm believer in the “recovery”. Very well. Consider two damning statistics. The majority of public school children in the US are now, for the first time in modern history — utterly unheard of amongst rich countries — are in poverty. The vast majority of the fastest growing jobs in the “new”, post-crisis economy are dead-end minimum wage McJobs: food preparation, retail, hospitality, cleaners. Pause and reflect for a moment. What do the indisputable facts above really mean?
In essence, the class structure of the American economy changed radically, historically, profoundly — and for the worse. From a healthy one, composed of middle class prosperity, with rich and poor at the margins, to an unhealthy one, composed of an imploded middle class, with ultra wealthy and new poor in the main. Establishment pundits and economists and politicians proudly trumpeted “recovery”. But reality for many, particularly the former middle, was a descent into a new world of insecurity, instability, exploitation, and anxiety — a voyage into the abyss unparalleled in modern history, and utterly unique amongst the fraternity of rich countries. The triumphal exceptionalist rhetoric of crisis and recovery did not match up with reality — and so grew a bitter distrust amongst politicians and people.
Why did the Establishment trumpeted the credulous, fantastical claim of recovery…at the very moment America’s class structure began decaying into something closer to dynastic caste neofeudalism? The answer that I will offer you is this: the Establishment was trying to persuade the people of a recovery to maintain its power. Pundits, politicians, and analysts alike offered a narrative of recovery. It fed conveniently into their own aspirations for high office, power, privilege. But they should have known better. If you hope to be a leader, well, then your true challenge is not merely hoping to pull the wool over people’s eyes, just as you have managed to pull it over your own: it is acknowledging the great problems that people actually face.You can’t hope to stand the test of credibility by telling drowning people up is down. All that is why people are so angry. They feel not just cheated of prosperity — but something worse still: cheated of leadership.
What is a leader? A leader is a person we trust with our lives. Because they enable us to reach and then exceed our fullest human potential. Far from being a homily, there are simple tests for precisely that central and profound insight of contemporary economics. Consider Michael Porter’s Social Progress Index. There is revealed the full depth and scale of America’s leadership deficit: the US ranks close to the bottom of all rich countries amongst a panoply of measures. In short, people enjoy the lowest standards of what you the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia: a life well lived.
If you accept my definition of leadership, then the inescapable conclusion is this.
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 thy? 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.
Umair
London
February 2016
