We have forgotten how transformational leadership works

In this morning’s paper, the editors of the New York Times did it again.  In an article about some of Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ left-leaning positions, the authors wonder whether the country is ready for such radical notions as taxing the rich in order to afford universal healthcare, infrastructure maintenance, affordable college and humane policies that support child-rearing.  They ponder whether these supposed leaders are out of step with the mood of the citizens.  Isn’t Bernie hopelessly out of touch with voters?  Won’t Clinton have to moderate her proposals in order to match the country’s centrist tendencies?  If you want to lead, they imply, you have to figure out first what the people want to hear.

A presidential wannabe

Well, how “out of step” is the rhetoric of the right-wing?  For instance, here is a presidential wannabe talking about an expansion of government support of healthcare:

    Let’s take a look at Social Security itself. Again, very few of us disagree with the original premise that there should be some form of savings that would keep destitution from following unemployment by reason of death, disability or old age. And to this end, Social Security was adopted, but it was never intended to supplant private savings, private insurance, pension programs of unions and industries.
   
    In our country, under our free-enterprise system, we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world. Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to chose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other.

    In this country of ours took place the greatest revolution that has ever taken place in the world’s history; the only true revolution.   Here, for the first time in all the thousands of years of man’s relations to man, a little group of men, the founding fathers, for the first time, established the idea that you and I had within ourselves the God given right and ability to determine our own destiny.

    Write those letters now, call your friends and tell them to write.  If you don’t, this program will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other federal  programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day we will wake to find that we have socialism, and one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

A Southern governor

And here is another presidential wannabe, a Southern governor, telling us to beware of the government in Washington:

    To realize our ambitions and to bring to fruition our dreams, we must take cognizance of the world about us. We must re-define our heritage, re-school our thoughts in the lessons our forefathers knew so well, first hand, in order to function and to grow and to prosper. We can no longer hide our head in the sand and tell ourselves that the ideology of our free fathers is not being attacked and is not being threatened by another idea . . . for it is.

    We are faced with an idea that if a centralized government assume enough authority, enough power over its people, that it can provide a utopian life . . that if given the power to dictate, to forbid, to require, to demand, to distribute, to edict and to judge what is best and enforce that will produce only "good," it shall be our father . . . . and our God.

    It is an idea of government that encourages our fears and destroys our faith . . . for where there is faith, there is no fear, and where there is fear, there is no faith. In encouraging our fears of economic insecurity it demands we place that economic management and control with government; in encouraging our fear of educational development it demands we place that education and the minds of our children under management and control of government, and even in feeding our fears of physical infirmities and declining years, it offers and demands to father us through it all and even into the grave.

    It is a government that claims to us that it is bountiful as it buys its power from us with the fruits of its rapaciousness of the wealth that free men before it have produced and builds on crumbling credit without responsibilities to the debtors . . . our children. It is an ideology of government erected on the encouragement of fear and fails to recognize the basic law of our fathers that governments do not produce wealth . . . people produce wealth . . . free people; and those people become less free . . . as they learn there is little reward for ambition . . . that it requires faith to risk . . . and they have none . . as the government must restrict and penalize and tax incentive and endeavor and must increase its expenditures of bounties . . . then this government must assume more and more police powers and we find we are become government-fearing people . . . not God-fearing people.

    We find we have replaced faith with fear . . . and though we may give lip service to the Almighty . . in reality, government has become our god. It is, therefore, a basically ungodly government and its appeal to the pseudo-intellectual and the politician is to change their status from servant of the people to master of the people . . . to play at being God . . . without faith in God . . . and without the wisdom of God. It is a system that is the very opposite of Christ for it feeds and encourages everything degenerate and base in our people as it assumes the responsibilities that we ourselves should assume.

    Its pseudo-liberal spokesmen and some Harvard advocates have never examined the logic of its substitution of what it calls "human rights" for individual rights, for its propaganda play on words has appeal for the unthinking. Its logic is totally material and irresponsible as it runs the full gamut of human desires . . . including the theory that everyone has voting rights without the spiritual responsibility of preserving freedom. Our founding fathers recognized those rights . . . but only within the framework of those spiritual responsibilities. But the strong, simple faith and sane reasoning of our founding fathers has long since been forgotten as the so-called "progressives" tell us that our Constitution was written for "horse and buggy" days . . . so were the Ten Commandments!

Who are these people?

It might test your knowledge of current right-wing ideologues to try to guess who these people are, who are offering such familiar, fear-mongering tropes.  Any ideas?

Well, don’t bother.  Because these words are more than 50 years old.  The first few paragraphs were from a 1961 recording of Ronald Reagan, on an LP produced and distributed by the AMA, to get garden club members to oppose Medicare.  The second screed is from George Wallace, in his 1963 inaugural address as governor of Alabama.

Those two statements were, in the Sixties, considered far, far outside of the mainstream.  Reagan and Wallace were considered crack-pots by the overwhelming majority of thoughtful commentators.   

Yet, the familiarity of these statements today is no fluke.  Fifty years ago, there were transformational leaders who believed deeply in their ideals and the threats that they saw of government hegemony.  They didn’t base their opinions on what the latest polls indicated would “sell” to the American public.  They said what they believed, and, over the years, taught the public to believe in the same thing.  They shifted the center of gravity of public opinion far, far to the right.  They (and their corporate supporters) transformed public debate.

They made it possible for Nixon to win and govern from the right.  They set the groundwork for the “Reagan Revolution” and Bill Clinton’s elegy for “big government,” and W’s public policy panacea of “tax cuts for the rich.”  Their ability to transform public debate was a heritage to which Obama paid homage, but never realized. 

We need transformational leadership

What is needed today is similarly transformational leadership, to lead Americans back to a more balanced view, that some things are best done by markets and some things are best done by government.  That when corporations are too big to fail, then they are too big.  That when our richest people are unimaginable rich, and when more than half of our families are not “getting by,” it is time to redistribute the wealth our system has produced.  That, while America has to be a leader for democracy around the world, it can not be democracy’s sole enforcer.  That infants have a right to be free of hunger, that children have a right to a good education, that teenagers have a right to a hope-filled future, that young adults have a right to rewarding jobs, that all of us have a right to healthcare.

The question to me is not “Do Bernie and Hillary have to move to the center?” but are they the transformational leaders that we need, to move the center of gravity of public debate back to a reasonable position?  

It is not the case, as the Times’ authors believe, that real leadership seeks out positions that are supported by public sentiment. 

Transformational leadership precedes public opinion.