#WTH We need better leaders

This New Year's, let's resolve to do more to fix our nation

This was not the best of years. It’s not Donald Trump’s fault, or Bibi Netanyahu’s; it’s not Joe Biden’s, poor Kamala’s, or Zohran Mamdani’s; further afield, it’s not pompous Keir Starmer’s or feckless Emanuel Macron, or useless Anthony Albanese, or even vile Vladimir Putin or scheming Xi Jinping. We are in a moment of particular bankruptcy, an interval without good men (or women), and it feels as though there are none waiting in the wings to usher back the golden days for which we yearn.

Obviously some leaders are better than others. Volodymyr Zelensky is better than Putin, Trump is better than Xi (and better, I daresay, than Biden as well). But these are low bars to jump over. Nor should this blanket judgment suggest that our leaders cannot do good things; that is manifestly untrue. But we are living in parlous times, and innumerable dangers are swirling. Some are standard issue national security problems: Will Putin attack NATO? Will Xi attack Taiwan? Will Iran get the bomb? Yet, others are harder to label, inflection points like the industrial revolution that threaten to reorder society in ways that are as yet unclear, and are naturally frightening.

In such times, one hopes for a steady hand, a moral clarity, and a quality of leadership that will steady rather than roil our world. Where is that?

Indeed, looking back over a year’s commentary and debate, one theme dominates: We lack good leadership. In America, our system has withstood a full quarter of a millennium, and in that time we have seen greatness and failure, war, peace, riches, and terrible poverty. And while we have been guided by the steady hands of great men at times — Washington, Lincoln, Reagan — we have had plenty of Buchanans and Hardings as well. But what has stood the test of time is not the greatness of one man, it is the flex of the sinews of America, the institutional pillars laid out in the Constitution that have kept the nation steady.

We have been testing those sinews of late.

This is not the usual, dull trope about Donald Trump being a dictator in waiting, nor even a reiteration of the assault on our democracy committed by the Biden enablers. Rather, it is a lament about the unseriousness of those intended to help the American people navigate treacherous waters.

I like a lot of what Donald Trump has done, and try to calls balls and strikes without leaning into the whining over the ballroom or the Kennedy Center. He has had the courage to say what a lot of Americans think, and to act where others have failed. But the President is not a man of character; he is weak, and vain, subject to manipulation by malign actors. In addition, he has done little to transition his constituents from a cult of personality to a cohesive movement around a set of ideas. As a result, he has encouraged a bidding war for the MAGA mantle that has allowed un-American demagogues a platform they do not deserve.

The Democrats are no better. The party’s standard bearers are lost in the wilderness, grasping at “affordability” and Jew hatred with equal enthusiasm, unanchored to any set of principles. They are delighted to highlight corruption on Team Trump, but refused to condemn the same habits in their own leader. And let’s face it: The fact that politics has become a pathway to obscene wealth is a national shame, a stain upon the offices these power hungry men craved.

Congress, once the stalwart of American democracy and avatar of the people, has also lost the plot. Partisanship is now the coin of the Capitol, with members unwilling or incapable of looking beyond their own D or R to the good of the nation. Working across the aisle is vanishingly rare, and disinterested oversight is gone. We might forgive these political games if members actually did their jobs, passed bills, and stewarded the public purse, but they don’t. Instead we have been treated to more than a decade of continuing resolutions and omnibus monstrosities that conceal Congress’s own unwillingness to monitor, let alone rein in the federal government’s out of control spending.

Then there are the voters, we, the people. It would be a pleasure to assure you that we do not deserve this, and that we have been “taken” by canny salesmen who betrayed our faith once in office. But that isn’t so. After all, Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected. More than once. So was Ilhan Omar. These people reflect our choices — more spending, more trolling, less bipartisanship, more deconstruction, and less leadership. Good people regularly bail out of Congress because they just can’t see the point — people like Elise Stefanik, who was once considered a leader of the GOP.

This is not new. We can admit that the German people looked at Adolf Hitler with relief after years of uncertainty and anger. That the Russians embraced the Revolution as the solution to all that was wrong with the Tsar. That people have made bad choices, and bad people have regularly sought to elevate themselves to power, one way or another. But this is not a Hitler or a Stalin problem. This is drift, defining deviancy down one election at a time.

Even the guardians of the fourth estate have largely given up on serious journalism, with a few important exceptions. The democratization of the press has been cleansing in some ways, but in others has merely hardened the atomization of America into competing ideological cells. We have curated ourselves into alternative narratives, intolerant of competing ideas, and unwilling to accept honest differences of opinion. Everyone is evil, bad, a tyrant, an enabler — an epithet, dehumanized and rejected.

Yes, this is a downer of a piece, a cri de coeur. I yearn for clarity and decency. I am sick of moral relativism, tired of rotten people, weary of write in candidates. I do not want to use hashtags to express my righteous views and hope in consequence for likes; I want to nod along as my leader does me proud.

But it’s also a reminder that this tide we are floating on unhappily is a choice. We can do better, can seek out and support better leaders, can step back from the angry judgments that motivate our social media posts. We can wrest our destiny back, one day at a time. Think of the stakes.

America counts 250 years this year. It remains the greatest country on earth, its people the best in the world bar none. I continue to believe it even as I lament our faults. The history of the nation is one of course corrections, or amendments literal and figurative that have transformed history and kept alive the flame of liberty. This should be the year we pay tribute to the Constitution and to our founders, and one man at a time, think about what we owe to the nation and each other.

Happy New Year to you all. Thank you for being part of #WTH.