America’s Crisis of Leadership
How Teddy Roosevelt can help save us from our Marie Antoinette problem
The biggest single crisis facing the United States on the eve of the election does not come from Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. It does not come from our enemies abroad. It does not come from our dissensions at home. It does not come from unfunded entitlement commitments. It does not come from climate change. Our greatest and most dangerous crisis is the decay of effective leadership at all levels of our national life, something that makes both our foreign and domestic problems, serious as they are, significantly more daunting than they should be.
Average confidence in institutions ranging from higher education to organized religion rests at historic lows, with fewer than 30% of respondents telling Gallup pollsters that they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in major American institutions. Only small business, the military, and the police inspire majorities of the public with a high degree of confidence; less than a fifth of Americans express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, big business, television news, and Congress.
Much of the country’s political and intellectual establishment responds defensively to numbers like this, blaming falling confidence on the corrosive effects of social media or the general backwardness and racism of the American public. The East German communist hacks Bertolt Brecht satirized also blamed their failings on the shortcomings of the masses: “The people have lost the confidence of the government and can only regain it through redoubled work.”
While social media is problematic, and not every citizen of the United States is a model of enlightened cosmopolitanism, America’s core problem today is not that the nation is unworthy of the elites who struggle to lead it. That superficial and dismissive response is itself a symptom of elite failure and an obstacle to the deep reform that the American leadership classes badly need.
Signs of elite failure are all around us. In foreign policy, the field I follow most closely and one in which I myself have not been error-free, the American establishment fundamentally misjudged the global economic and political situation over the last generation, thinking that the world had entered a posthistorical utopia even as China and Russia laid the foundations for a formidable challenge to the American order. NAFTA was going to make Mexico more democratic, reduce cross-border migration, and enrich American workers. Conferring permanent most-favored nation status on China and admitting it to the World Trade Organization was going to turn it into a peaceful and law-abiding member of international society. It was certainly not going to create a new communist superpower determined to challenge the United States around the world.
Since 1945, the most powerful armed forces in the world have only won one war (the Gulf War against Iraq). A massive, sustained and very public Chinese military buildup failed to elicit a coherent response from the American side. As a result, the balance of power in the western Pacific shifted dangerously in China’s favor, increasing the risk of catastrophic great power war. Twenty years of earnest attempts to build civil society in Afghanistan collapsed ignominiously when the Taliban stormed back into power in 2021. Decades of illusory “democracy promotion” by American diplomats and philanthropists failed to stem a very real “democracy recession” as the rule of law retreated around the world.
Much of what distressed establishment figures deplore as “isolationism” is nothing more than a well-grounded skepticism about the competence of American civilian and military leadership in international affairs. For many in the foreign policy establishment, it is easier to condemn the shortsightedness of neo-isolationism than to ask why as individuals and as a class we have made such major and such costly mistakes for so long and in so many parts of the world.
Signs of elite failure are all around us.
It is much the same at home. The intellectual and moral collapse of the public health authorities in the face of the COVID pandemic deeply damaged public trust. The instinctive response of many in the news media to rally around a misguided establishment, while also marginalizing critics and skeptics further poisoned the wellsprings of public trust. The rising (and in my view tragic) popularity of trends like generalized vaccine skepticism fills the vacuum created by the absence of confidence in public health leadership.
More profoundly, the failure of American society to respond effectively to widespread and deeply damaging phenomena like the fentanyl plague reflects the inadequacy of leadership in all walks of life. Spending political capital on affirming trans students by making tampons available in boys’ bathrooms in public schools while the opioid epidemic kills more Americans every year than the Vietnam War killed in nearly a decade strikes many sensible people as a sign of derangement. Are they wrong?
“Trust the technocracy” and “invest in institutions” is the message Americans hear from establishment media. But the state of our society does not inspire confidence. Key social programs ranging from Medicare and Social Security at the federal level to civil service pension programs in many cities and states are seriously underfunded and set on fiscally unsustainable paths. Infrastructure construction has become almost impossibly expensive. The urban doom loop of higher costs driving higher taxes driving business and residents out of the cities spirals relentlessly without much pushback from a Democratic Party ostensibly committed to bettering the lives of the poor.
Per-student costs continue to skyrocket in many school systems even as students score poorly on standardized tests. The higher education system saddles too many young people with unpayable debt. Graduates of a handful of prestigious universities often enjoy undeserved access to desirable jobs, but many of those universities have lost sight of the values it is their duty to uphold. When a president of Harvard University can be credibly charged with plagiarism, the signs of decadence and decay are unmistakable.
The policies that contributed to the housing boom of the early 2000s and that were adapted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis were equally misguided, and the costs fell primarily on vulnerable families on the margins of the housing market. Home ownership, which is the foundation of middle-class prosperity and American political stability, is increasingly unaffordable for young families. At the same time, the weakening of labor unions has left millions of Americans without the support and protection that, imperfect as the old labor movement was, organization and solidarity gave to union members. The rise of identity politics testifies to the declining ability of American leaders to gain trust that crosses ethnic, racial, or gender lines, and the resulting fragmentation makes America harder to govern and deepens existing fissures in American life.
Americans are not wrong to believe that this level of comprehensive strategic and political failure across so many dimensions of our national life is unacceptable. They are right to withdraw their confidence from institutions and a leadership class that seems both unusually incompetent and indecently self-interested. But populism is better at expressing dissent than at planning for success. And the leadership problem transcends the division between populists and the current establishment. Populism too needs leaders, and many of those coming forward as would-be tribunes of the people are at least as poorly prepared for real leadership as the fumble-fingered elites they hope to replace.
While the American leadership class has been failing the test of history, not all of its sectors are equally culpable. When it comes to scientific and technological accomplishment, American culture continues to produce geniuses of all kinds. Although the rise of scientific fraud and the reproducibility crisis in certain disciplines points to some concerning trends, America’s failure point is not in the STEM disciplines. The failures come from where the wonders of technological progress intersect with the dysfunction of daily life. Our failure points are in the worlds of culture and social organization, not in the worlds of tech and hard science.
Nor is the leadership crisis entirely our fault. Countries around the world suffer from a leadership deficit in these difficult days; one big reason is that the disruptive consequences of the Information Revolution make the tasks of leadership objectively more difficult. When transformational changes are surging through the economy and society, it is much harder to lead institutions from the federal government to a local middle school. Every firm, every political party, every school or university, every religious institution, every family, and anyone trying to make a living or invest for the future must cope with the unpredictable changes rippling through every society in the world.
And yet America’s leadership problem is only likely to become more acute as the international situation grows more challenging. In stable times, the need for effective leadership can recede into the background. But in crisis, institutions and societies with weak leaders often perish. Great Britain could survive the rule of sleek nonentities like Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s, but after Hitler’s blitzkrieg broke the allied lines in Europe, only Winston Churchill would do. Franklin Pierce and John Tyler might have been good-enough presidents for peaceful times, but it took an Abraham Lincoln to lead the country through the Civil War. Average leadership may work fine in average times. But extraordinary times demand more.
No matter who wins the election, a stormy period in American and world history lies ahead. Unless the quality of leadership in American life dramatically improves, the country could be heading toward some extremely dark hours.