134 - Positive, Inspiring, Leadership is Required in 2023 and Beyond: I
Honest, forthright, visionary leadership is always essential in human and political affairs, especially in these unusually troubled times. President Nelson Mandela forestalled race riots in South Africa when a leading militant was killed by white reactionaries. And then, a little later, simply told his own supporters, armed to the teeth though they were, that continuing to battle against an unrelenting black adversary was harming the peace and reconciliation that he was prescribing for his country. “Listen to me,” he told a fired-up mob of fighters a year before South Africa’s independence, when the cities were alight with mayhem and violence. “I am your leader, and I am going to give you leadership…As long as I am your leader, I will tell you, always, when you are wrong.”
Mandela possessed a deep and abiding vision. He mobilized his followers, many of whom preferred rioting rather than patience, behind that vision of a reconstructed Rainbow nation free from discord and able, united, to overcome the economic, social, and political deficits of apartheid.
Mandela could not have enlisted his disparate and long-suffering peoples behind such a vision if he had not emerged from prison possessing unparalleled rational legitimacy (even before being elected president) and a deserved reputation for principled integrity. He could be forthright and decisive because his honest intent (and wisdom) was well-tested and believable. He exuded an uncommon affect, effectively preached and enacted inclusive behavior, and – most of all – gave all South Africans (not just his African National Congress adherents) a newly enlarged sense of self-worth. Mandela launched a large-scale national and continental enterprise that incorporated all Africans into a global enterprise for good.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, as I have written in this Newsletter from the first month of the invasion, has given his people and world citizens a similar sense of belonging to a worthy enterprise much greater than themselves and their parochial concerns. Foremost, has been his standing tall for Ukraine: “I need ammunition, not a ride;” and his hunkering down in Kyiv amid the early assaults and the continuing bombardments.
Like Mandela, and the greatest of leaders, Zelensky has over and over enunciated a lofty vision for Ukraine, for the West, and for freedom. He has connected the dots and reminded both his own national followers and responsible European, American, and NATO leaders that only by defeating Putin and Russia could freedom triumph in the world. If Russia repressed Ukraine, the remaining flickering lights of global freedom would go out.
Zelensky’s greatest triumph, at least so far, has been his lifting up high of Western chins. When they saw an easy Russian victory, Zelensky saw successful resistance. Where they sought a cheap peace, Zelensky saw total victory, or at least pushing the Russians as far back from central and southern Ukraine as feasible. Without Zelensky’s integrity and poise (and his effective generals) Putin would have waltzed into Kyiv despite the demonstrated ineptness of Russia’s early campaign.
Positive leadership under fire, as demonstrated so well by the examples of Mandela and Zelensky, is greatly lacking in today’s edgy environment. Two days ago, I wrote about absence of honesty in so much of today’s leadership. Mandela and Zelensky, as I have emphasized, really told it and tell it as it is. They dissemble rarely. They know themselves. They are true to their cores and can therefore be trusted by their followers – by citizens in cities, of course, but especially by the beleaguered men and women in the foxholes of hell near, say, Donetsk. (I was moved by Luke Mogelson’s riveting reporting from the Ukrainian trenches in this week’s New Yorker.)
In early modern England there was a fictional Anglican Vicar of Bray. In consummate eighteenth-century satire, the vicar was a man who changed his principles and loyalties over and over to remain ensconced in his “living” -- to keep his ecclesiastical office despite cascading alterations in the external ruling environment. Celebrated now in folksong (especially by the melodious counter-tenor Richard Dyer-Bennet, and in an early version of Sweeney Todd), the Vicar of Bray boasted that whomsoever came to rule England – whether a Roman Catholic King, a Protestant Queen, the Dutch William, the Whigs, and finally monarchs of the House of Hanover - he would give obedience despite his original beliefs and thus remain (no matter the sovereign or the new political dispensation) the Vicar of Bray. “And this is law, I will maintain/Unto my Dying Day, Sir/That whatsoever King may reign,/I will be the Vicar of Bray, Sir!”
Which brings me to the spectacle in Washington, where a “spineless careerist” (says Paul Krugman) has been giving away everything, even his proverbial uncles, to become Speaker of the House of Representatives. I wrote about his lack of integrity, and hence his forfeiting of any pretense at being the leader we need or want, on Wednesday. So no more need directly to be said by me on that spectacle now (after the eleventh failed vote), except to call attention to the ignoble speechifying by Republican adversaries. There are worrying hints, too, of dark money being employed to influence the decisive votes.
Where are we ever to find the Mandela/Zelensky leaders to guide North America out of its disruptive season of discontent?
(I had planned to write about positive leadership in contemporary Africa but, for space reasons, will do so on Monday.)