If We Had a Real Leader
Imagining
Covid under a normal president.
By David Brooks
Opinion
Columnist
·
May 28, 2020
This
week I had a conversation that left a mark. It was with Mary Louise Kelly and
E.J. Dionne on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and it was about how past presidents had handled
moments of national mourning — Lincoln after Gettysburg, Reagan
after the Challenger explosion and Obama after the Sandy Hook school shootings.
The
conversation left me wondering what America’s experience of the pandemic would
be like if we had a real leader in the White House.
If
we had a real leader, he would have realized that tragedies like 100,000
Covid-19 deaths touch something deeper than politics: They touch our shared
vulnerability and our profound and natural sympathy for one another.
In
such moments, a real leader steps outside of his political role and reveals
himself uncloaked and humbled, as someone who can draw on his own pains and
simply be present with others as one sufferer among a common sea of sufferers.
If
we had a real leader, she would speak of the dead not as a faceless mass but as
individual persons, each seen in unique dignity. Such a leader would draw on
the common sources of our civilization, the stores of wisdom that bring
collective strength in hard times.
Lincoln
went back to the old biblical cadences to comfort a nation. After the church
shooting in Charleston, Barack Obama went to “Amazing Grace,” the old abolitionist
anthem that has wafted down through the long history of African-American
suffering and redemption.
In
his impromptu remarks right after the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Robert Kennedy recalled the slaying of his own brother and quoted Aeschylus:
“In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful
grace of God.”
If
we had a real leader, he would be bracingly honest about how bad things are,
like Churchill after the fall of Europe. He would have stored in his upbringing
the understanding that hard times are the making of character, a revelation of
character and a test of character. He would offer up the reality that to be an
American is both a gift and a task. Every generation faces its own apocalypse,
and, of course, we will live up to our moment just as our ancestors did theirs.
If
we had a real leader, she would remind us of our common covenants and our
common purposes. America is a diverse country joined more by a common future
than by common pasts. In times of hardships real leaders re-articulate the
purpose of America, why we endure these hardships and what good we will make
out of them.
After
the Challenger explosion, Reagan reminded us that we are a nation of explorers
and that the explorations at the frontiers of science would go on, thanks in
part to those who “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”
At
Gettysburg, Lincoln crisply described why the fallen had sacrificed their lives
— to show that a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal” can long endure and also to bring about “a new birth of freedom” for all
the world.
Of
course, right now we don’t have a real leader. We have Donald Trump, a man who
can’t fathom empathy or express empathy, who can’t laugh or cry, love or be
loved — a damaged narcissist who is unable to see the true existence of other
human beings except insofar as they are good or bad for himself.
But
it’s too easy to offload all blame on Trump. Trump’s problem is not only that
he’s emotionally damaged; it is that he is unlettered. He has no literary,
spiritual or historical resources to draw upon in a crisis.
All
the leaders I have quoted above were educated under a curriculum that put
character formation at the absolute center of education. They were trained by
people who assumed that life would throw up hard and unexpected tests, and it
was the job of a school, as one headmaster put it, to produce young people who
would be “acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck.”
Think
of the generations of religious and civic missionaries, like Frances Perkins,
who flowed out of Mount Holyoke. Think of all the Morehouse Men and Spelman
Women. Think of all the young students, in schools everywhere, assigned
Plutarch and Thucydides, Isaiah and Frederick Douglass — the great lessons from
the past on how to lead, endure, triumph or fail. Only the great books stay in
the mind for decades and serve as storehouses of wisdom when hard times come.
Right
now, science and the humanities should be in lock step: science producing
vaccines, with the humanities stocking leaders and citizens with the capacities
of resilience, care and collaboration until they come. But, instead, the
humanities are in crisis at the exact moment history is revealing how vital
moral formation really is.
One
of the lessons of this crisis is that help isn’t coming from some centralized
place at the top of society. If you want real leadership, look around you.
