Opinion
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.
The Times
is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to
hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And
here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The
New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and
Instagram.
Correction:
May 29, 2020
An earlier
version of this column misspelled the name of a college in Atlanta. It is
Spelman College, not Spellman. It also omitted a word from a phrase in the
Gettysburg Address. Lincoln mentioned “the proposition that all men are created
equal,” not “that all men are equal.”
David
Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The
Road to Character” and, most recently, “The Second Mountain.” @nytdavidbrooks
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário