Effective leaders conjure a worthy goal for followers to shoot for. Follow me, for this way lies peace, prosperity, and a happy future, they say.
A leader who fails to identify a goal worth struggling for is not a leader, but a directionless wanderer.
A leader listens to his followers and determines instinctively the direction in which they are willing to go. He leads, in this sense, by following.
He follows, in this sense, by leading.
He fills a need by saying "Here's the goal, it's within our reach.
"The peope, they need a leader," the late Julia Phillips author of "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again" quoted her father as warning. She was a friend of friends a long time ago.
He (It could be she, see Joan of Arc, who had visions, a bit too vivid perhaps, in another sense.) must state a marching goal to remain effective, one that seems attainable, but not with ease or soon, for these detract from worthiness.
General Washington led the rebellion of the colonies from Britain towards independence and as the result of his success was elected, unanimously, president.
John Marshall of Virginia, war-fighter under Washington, and fellow sufferer in the winter at Valley Forge, where patriot troops lacked food, clothing, shoes, arms, and shelter for lack of effective national government, learned one lesson well.
To run an army, later a nation, strong centralized national government and leadership was essential. Marshall formed and fought for a vision of strong central, national power which controlled his decision-making as the new nation's fourth chief justice.
Appointed Chief Justice by President John Adams in 1800, Marshall envisioned a strong, centralized, national government.
There are two kinds of people: Centralizers and Decentralizers.
Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, Marshall's hated cousin, regarded Virginia as his nation and the new central, national, government as a "foreign power," according to the quote in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s "The Age of Jackson."
Jefferson did not fight with Washington at Valley Forge or in any battle. He fled for his life when British troops invaded Virginia. He spent the rest of the war in Paris with Franklin and Adams, seeking loans from the French and the Dutch.
Jeffeson was surprised in 1787 when he saw the new Constitution that his friend James Madison and colleagues had crafted in Philadelphia. He wasn't sure that he liked it. In fact he pretty much didn't. It didn't reflect his vision of decentralized power leaving the states and the common-man farmer ascendant. A debt-ridden aristicratic slave-owning plantation owning planter, Jefferson saw himself as just a common farmer. His reality was a little different than yours.
Jefferson was, nevertheless, the best political poet the world has known, able to put in ringing words an exalted vision of the country, all countries, for that matter: "All men are created equal." We try to follow this vision today, some of us, at any rate, to one degree or another.
Jefferson's vision was that the new nation needed to be protected from the evils of London and Paris, where ruling elites from time immemorial, wealthy and powerful clergy, aristocrats, and financiers, sat on a nation of downtrodden worker bees.
Hamilton, Federalist, divided the world into the "high and well-born," read rich, powerful, and good, and toiling masses, not so good. Voting power under Hamilton's vision, which was implemented, went to men of property, emphasis on the 'men' and 'property.' Landless peasants, mechanics (men who worked with their hands or hand-tools for themselves or others) and women need not apply.
Hamilton favored the London arrangement of concentrated wealth and power in a business class bound to support the new government for security of their future well-being.
To Jefferson, an overlordship of the common man (the country was 90% farm people) by a wannabe class of aristocrats living off stock-share and bond speculation, who rented money out at interest through banking, and depended on government granted corporate monopolies, was the opposite of what he foresaw as the nation's salvation.
Jefferson believed that salvation lay in DE-centralizing power and wealth. Put them both in the hands of the yeoman farmer, a man who owned his own farm, a man who could not be fired nor put out of business by city interests, a man who will fight for his state and country, in that order.
Which way to go? These conflicting visions served as articles of religious-like faith for adherents.
As you see (when was the last time you knew anyone living on a farm, or even visited one?) the country has developed into a nation of city-dwellers who own and work for corporations that move informaton and paper. Our corporate manufacturing has been out-sourced to China. Labor intensive information activity has been off-shored to India. Our jobs have gone along with them.
This is decidedly not Jefferson's vision.
It is Hamilton's.
We live in Hamiltonia, not Jeffersonia.
We have a very strong, centralized national government. It began with the Federalists, and Marshall. We experienced a terrible time under Madison during the War of 1812 when we were not centralized enough to fight a war with Britain and saw our capital invaded.
(The weekend after 9-11, I took a bike ride along San Francisco's Fishermen's Wharf and met a British husband and wife, from London. They expressed their sincere sympathy at our tragic loss of thousands of ordinary citizens at the World Trade Center in New York.
Thank you, I said.
We were in London during the Blitz, when German V-2 rockets killed 10,000 Londoners. You've never been invaded, they said.
No, we haven't, I agreed, relegating Pearl Harbor to an attack on an off-shore territory, and we parted, when I remembered.
"Right, we haven't been invaded except in our nation's new capital by you, the British, who burned it," I recalled. I'm glad I didn't think of it as we spoke. It was just as well. The British had been retaliating for our burning of their town in Canada. You shouldn't burn your enemy's capital; they tend to remember it.)
Our national power increased during the our Civil War as we industrialized to support Northern armies using coal, iron, steel, railways, and wheat, infrastructure and business combinations.
Laissez-faire unregulated business activity solidly entrenched a landed, monied, Wall-Streeted class of money, power and education, the key to keeping it going through the partnership of business and politics. Very Hamiltonian, non-Jeffersonian. Jefferson founded a university, the U. of Virginia. He knew, too.
Theodore Roosevelt ("Walk softly and carry a big stick") embarked us on the high seas of imperialism, sending the Great White Fleet around the world in an exercise of gunboat diplomacy. "Here we are," trodding the world stage, " we told the world, as Britain under Victoria painted the map red. The sun never set on the British Empire while it lasted.
We were competing for a place in the sun, as was France, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany, in Africa, India, and China. Russia and Britain in Central Asia in the 'Great Game' over oil. The middle East. Oil.
Armies and navies no longer ran on wind and coal. Oil.
Woodrow Wilson's vision, following World War One, was "to make the world safe for Democracy."
Later emended to "make the world safe for hypocrisy," but that's another story. Visions contain an element of unreality, the difference between what's in one's head and what exists on the ground.
Nevertheless, we do need a compelling vision, otherwise what exists on the ground is meaningless.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vision during World War Two was to defeat the Fascism of Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. Uncle Joe Stalin's communism was conveniently swept under the rug. The enemy of our enemy is our friend. We sent convoys to Murmansk.
Then the Cold War, the West, us, versus the East, Godless Communism. One nation Under God. Containment. Mutual Assured Destruction. Visions of mushroom clouds.
What are our national visions today?
Our god is Democracy. Freedom is on the march, President George W. Bush proclaims. We are at war. Against Terrorism. Thanks to us, women are voting for the first time in Kabul, Afghanistan.
In January, after our election in November, we expect voting in Iraq, says the president, justifying our invasion with a new rationale, forget about Weapons of Mass Destruction, still sought, but still unfound.
We are in the heat of an election campaign, Bush the Incumbent vs. Kerry the Challenger. Two conflicting visions. Each trying to conjure up in graphic words a seeable future.
A vision is a greater principle, the umbrella under which all others take shelter, otherwise they are inconsistent, competing visions, belonging to some alternative reality, not ours.
The challenger, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, a fighter in and later critic of the War in Vietnam a generation ago, doesn't think we are at war, says President Bush, the self-proclaimed war president. How can you win a war if you don't believe you are in one, he asks.
Kerry says the president is bewitched, beguiled and bewildered by a vision that no longer exists. Weapons of mass destruction, our pretext for invading Iraq, no longer existed when we invaded. Terrorists struck, but are no longer the same threat, he seems to be saying. Threats recede. There is a bigger danger in creating more terrorists by acting the bull in the china shop. And where are our allies? How can you lead a world coalition against terror when the allies sit to the side?
Kerry's vision is that the war that exists inside Bush's head is not the war that exists on the ground. He's tilting at windmills, a la Don Quixote, and we're getting knocked to the ground, with new killings of our troops and Iraqi civilians every day by insurgents loyal to the idea of Saddam or reclaiming their own power.
My newly married son, Robbie, impressed me at a family gathering last evening, when he mentioned with concern a news report picked up by Bob Herbert, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times that morning, Oct. 22, 2004. I was glad to see a son of mine alert to the important stuff.
As Herbert writes, "...[T]he writer Ron Suskind told of a meeting he'd had with a senior adviser to the president. The White House at the time was unhappy about an article Mr. Suskind had written."
"According to Mr. Suskind, "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' wich he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'" The aide told Mr. Suskind, "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality."
What do you call a person who inhabits a world that is foreign to your idea of reality?
Crazy.
We treat people like that using drugs or institutions, sometimes both.
Whose reality is real?
Jefferson's or Hamilton's?
Reagan "Tear down that wall!" or Gorbachev?
Bush "We're at War!" or Kerry "We shouldn't be."?
There's a reason why Cervantes' Don Quixote has lasted four centuries. Originally seen as a verbal comic strip for the antics of the elderly man who dons helmet and bucker to sally forth as a knight of the realm on his noble nag, with trusty, maxim-spouting, fat sidekick, Sancho Panza, astride a mule alongside, righting the world's wrongs in a quest for the impossible dream, Don Quixote tilts at windmills, which unseat him, breaking his bones.
Is Bush the War President a conquering hero or a Quixote?
Was 9-11 a terrorist attack or a war?
Was Pearl Harbor a terrorist attack or a war?
Is there a difference?
Since we are not living in the future, looking back, as we usually are in history and Con-Law, we have only our current vision, our view of the world, how it is and how it works, how people are, to inform us as to what is real.
Even if you don't think you have a view of the world, you do, for claiming not to have a view is as much of a view as having one. It is one bet out of a choice of competing bets, only one of which is going to come in. Not betting is betting 'No.'
"Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 1916, Ch. 12.
Sometimes rendered: "Dictators who prate in the night are distilling theories of some long-dead economist."
Are we making the world safe for democracy, imperialism, hypocrisy, or other?
Do we have a monopoly on democracy?
Do we have democracy? See Bush v. Gore (2000).
Do we have a vision as to where we were, where we are, and where we're going?
Is it a correct vision?
Who informs your vision? People you talk to?
Late-night comics on TV?
Ministers?
Politicians?
Family?
Friends?
News outlets?
Which?
Can you tell where you're going if you don't know where you've been?
When you come to a fork in the road, will you, as Yogi Berra advised, take it?
What is your vision?
Visions, as you may see, are matters of life and death.
The enemy is either real or a windmill.
You are either a knight or a Quixote.
In Con-law, we have visions.
Justice John Harlan, the first justice Harlan (his grandson was the second) dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to the idea that separate was equal when it came to race, said that he envisioned a "colorblind" Constitution.
A noble principle.
We do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed or color.
Yet that's ALL we discriminate on the basis of, plus anything other perceptible thing of course. We are hard-wired to notice distinctions. It is how we discern the tiger in the grass that might eat us.
Reality or hypocrisy?
Today we don't have a colorblind Constitution, do we?
We have equality, don't we?
Do we?
We have something we call equality, but is it really real?
Sometimes the Court bows to a noble principle and does just the opposite. See Everson on separation of church and state in the context of parochial schooling.
There, in 1947, after Justice Black had just said the wall between church and state was high and impregnable, he allowed local school boards to reimburse parents for the cost of public transportation to both public and private (religious) schools.
Which prompted Justice Robert Jackson to state, in dissent: The "most fitting precedent was "Julia who, according to Byron's reports, 'whispering "I will ne'er consent," -- consented.'"
We take color into account, oh, maybe 24 hours per day, on average. And gender orientation, and ethnicity. Imagine the City attempting to fire a Civil Service worker for incompetence on the job. An outspoken, gay, black, female, Civil Service employee. Equality? Would you care to predict the outcome of the hearing?
We have affirmative action. To make up for past crimes, we take race into account to help an entire sizable racial group catch up in employment and education. I'm not sure about housing, but I wouldn't count on it.
We can take race into account, but not too much. We can't give bonus points for race, nor set quotas. You can add race to the mix, and it can make the difference, so long as you cannot quantify it. Race works as quality, not quantity. We have a lot of bad road to make up for. But only for the next 25 years, hoped Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in providing the crucial fifth vote allowing affirmative action to persist for a little while longer in Gratz and Grutter, the U. of Michigan cases decided in 2003.
So we have two conflicting visions: Constitution as Colorblind, Constitution as Affirmative Action. The choice is yours. Which do you think we should have to make this country run right?
A color blind constitution makes losers of blacks who've been left behind?
Or Affirmative Action that makes losers of whites who've been left behind on the hiring or promotion list, or left off the college or professional school admission list on account of race, quantified or not?
Are visions important?
Visions are life and death.