FUNCTIONING LEADERSHIP

I have in this blog described and explained a general view of politics and governance that, in its traditional form, had been the prevalent guiding mental construct of our political thought. That prevalence lasted from the nation's beginning until the 1950s. Through those years, other views of politics coexisted and challenged the prevalent view. As a matter of fact, the influence of what I call traditional federalism continuously diminished throughout those years. Then again, traditional federalist ideas and ideals are not totally foreign to our current political thinking and acting. One of the main purposes of this blog is to promote a more updated version of federalist thought in our curricular planning of civics and government courses. But at our core, this nation relies predominately, not exclusively, on the natural rights view to guide our political thinking. I was reminded of all of this as a reaction to the “tri-scandal” situation in which President Obama currently finds himself.

Within the challenging posture that I have taken – of promoting federation theory over the natural rights perspective – I have emphasized the communal character of federation theory. Generally, my argument has been that for an organized effort to be the most productive and efficient it can be, the mode of interaction between the members of the arrangement should be communal – that is, caring, cooperative, morally committed to the common good of the group – and, in addition, should promote equal standing among its members. Under this strategic mode, a member of an organized effort owes the group his loyalty, honesty, skills, knowledge, and trust. Such a commitment is based on a moral posture, but it also has very practical dimensions. With this type of interaction, members of a collective need not expend unproductive energies worrying about their fellow members doing them harm or having to engage in excessively competitive machinations. Yes, a certain level of competition is good, but it should be based on merit and carried on objectively with well established norms of behavior that are geared toward fairness. Equal standing does not mean equality of results – equal pay, equal power, equal status – but it means all members participate according to the same rules – equal condition. Advantages are earned by reasonable acknowledgment of contributions to the achievement of the organization's aims and goals. In short, the organization becomes a community dedicated to those aims and goals it has set for itself and, through that effort, for the mutual advancement of its members. There is, under an ideal federated arrangement, a cultivated and protected communal sense of advancement.

Then there is the function of leadership. All of the above pertains equally to the organization's leaders, even to the person at the top. A lot of the punditry on the various media outlets became highly critical of President Obama for poor leadership as a result of the three “scandals” that have erupted recently. Specifically, they found fault with his ability to be the tough boss who is disposed to having “heads roll” when people screw up in doing their government jobs. I don't want to make comment on this judgment; time will tell how it will turn out for the President. But I do think this whole episode or series of episodes provides a good case study by which to address and study the issue of effective leadership as viewed by federation theory.

To begin with, one needs not lose sight of the context in which the Presidency exists. The President is the “boss” of a huge bureaucracy. Between the civilian and military workforce, the federal government hires in the neighborhood of 4.3 million people. These people are distributed among a hefty number of departments, agencies, bureaus, and the like. The average federal worker has a multitude of bureaucratic layers between himself or herself and the President. In such an organization, one can readily see that to create an overall communal atmosphere from the top would be impossible, but I do think a President can set a tone and a message of what he or she values and is disposed to reward. A lot of this can be communicated by the political appointments the President makes. He or she can most definitely communicate it by how the White House staff is run. But the question remains, can such an approach – one that promotes a communal culture – be tough enough when the interest of the nation calls for the leader to take decisive action, willing to make those distasteful moves that include “throwing someone or some people under the bus.”

By all accounts, the very effective president, Ronald Reagan, was a really nice guy. He treated people kindly or that is what we are led to believe. To take on the tough guy role, he hired tough Chiefs of Staff, like Howard Baker, to “clean out what needed to be cleaned out.” Of course, even Reagan was able to be the bad guy at times, such as when he fired the air traffic controllers. But is this within the federalist way of doing things? At times, given the seriousness of a given set of conditions, a heavy hand is needed because an organization, no matter to what organizational theory it ascribes, needs to implement changes quickly if it is going to survive in an acceptable manner. Drastic changes will call for a new set of players to make those changes. This should be done in as judicial a way as time allows and, of course, basic rights of workers, depending on the contractual terms under which they work, should be honored. This latter concern is particularly important when one is talking about civil service workers as is the case for the majority of federal employees. If, on the other hand, time is more generous, then workers need to be given a chance to fix the problems, but that effort needs to be significantly planned out with intermediate steps identified and evaluations done at appropriate intervals. Disruption can ensue if leaders just go about disciplining or relieving people of their jobs without sensible and reasonable processes. In such cases, the message is “watch out, they're after us” or “be very careful how you do your job and don't take chances.” Such messages will stifle creativity and innovation. But the situation can be more serious: if trust and honesty are the issues, then the basis of any loyalty is compromised and more aggressive approach would be justified. All of this can be accommodated under a federalist model.

Under such challenges, the aim of maintaining the communal character of the organization should not be lost, but it also cannot be the obstacle that stands in the way of putting the organization on a productive path. Bigness is, in itself, a challenging factor. Bureaucracies, experience tells us, are, by and large, not the paragons of community. It is easy to get lost in the shuffle, but our public leaders need to take on the commitment of creating the environments that encourage a sense of belonging and mission. This, in turn, needs to reflect the purposes behind creating a worker's position in the first place.

In terms of teaching the topic, leadership – one usually not mentioned in civics classes – the above concerns could be used in organizing a lesson or two on the importance and function of governmental leadership. President Obama's recent “troubles” are just the latest of a long list of similar episodes. In each, US presidents have provided ample examples of these types of challenges that usually include their leadership skills being questioned.

POLAR POLITICAL PARTIES

The last posting of this blog was about how some major figures of our current political environment have implemented anti-federalist strategies. The posting first identified a list of constitutional attributes taken from an analytical work by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein: “debate and deliberation,” “divided powers competing with one another,” “regular order” and “avenues to limit and punish corruptions.”¹ It then outlined how each of these attributes helps make our political system a federalist arrangement.² Generally, these attributes provide the political “infrastructure” that permits the interchange between the vast array of factions and interests that make up our political landscape. Further using Mann's and Ornstein's analysis, this posting continues in this vein by focusing in on one of the current conditions that challenges the federalist nature of our politics and governance.

Before getting into the specific anti-federalist condition, in order to appreciate its detrimental effects, one needs to understand a bit of its context. Politics in a democracy revolve around a few processes that allow the system to work. One is the funneling of political demands. Each of us has our own view of the perfect world and our own situated reality falls short of that individual view. Some of us readily express demands that we feel will help us get our world closer to our view of perfection. Most of us don't express those demands and are part of what Richard Nixon called the “Silent Majority.” Few of us are very vehement in expressing our demands. There is a relation between our views and the probability of whether we will be silent or expressive.

There are a variety of ways to describe or even, to some degree, measure the variety of opinion that exists out there. A common way to visualize this range of ideas and ideals is to describe a particular person's positions as reflecting a degree of purity on an ideological scale. What seems useful in this language is the left-right ideological spectrum in which liberal to conservative beliefs are arranged from extreme beliefs in one direction to the extreme beliefs in the other direction. While there are a lot of individual positions lodged at different levels of ideological strength along the spectrum, people generally fall at one point or other on this spectrum. The fit, for any given person, will not usually be perfect, but by and large, people will identify as belonging at some imprecise point on the continuum from strongly liberal to strongly conservative. And how does the American population fall along this continuum? Roughly, they “fall” on a bell-shaped curve with fewer people at the extremes and the bulk of the population in the middle or the neutral position. The other general characteristic of this distribution is that, generally, people in the middle of this curve tend to know less about politics and political issues and care less about them as well.

With this in mind, consider the following:

Fundamentally, the problem [of undermining our constitutional attributes] stems from a mismatch between America's political parties and its constitutional system. For a variety of reasons, … the two major political parties in recent decades have become increasingly homogeneous and have moved toward ideological poles [or the extremes]. Combined with the phenomenon of the permanent campaign, whereby political actors focus relentlessly on election concerns and not on problem-solving, the parties now behave more like parliamentary parties than traditional, big-tent, and pragmatic American parties.³

What this means is that the traditional role of parties to funnel demands is skewed by the narrowing of interests that a political party will represent. It is also skewed to those demands emanating from those who are represented by the more extreme ends of the political spectrum. These people are usually considered the base of a party – those highly motivated, highly “knowledgeable” people who get excited over political developments. I put the word knowledgeable in quotes because these people's knowledge consists of what the extremists view is of the truth, which by any objective estimation is highly biased and often wrong or highly misleading in its lack of veracity. This tends to be true for those at both ends of the extreme.

With these limitations, our system suffers because it becomes much more difficult for citizens to become federated with those who don't fall on the same end of the ideological spectrum – which is most of us. Positions are defined by their perceived moral standing and less by their practicality, vis-a-vis, the social or economic problems they address. Take the gun control/safety issue. Those who are against any restraints on the selling of weapons and ammunition have made the provisions of the Second Amendment – which by most accounts are difficult to interpret – as inalienable; that is, a right with no limitations. We don't hold that position for any of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. The result is that practical approaches to meeting the levels of deaths and injuries caused by or, at least, assisted by the inordinate number of weapons in general distribution are beyond our system's ability to implement. Stated another way, government is being prohibited from providing its most basic service: to protect its citizens. This is but one of the issues that government is finding more and more difficult to address.

1This list is quoted from work by political scholars, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein. See Mann, T. E. and Ornstein, N. J. (2013). Finding the common good in an era of dysfunctional governance.  Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 142 (2), 15-24.

2Mann and Ornstein don't use the term federalist; that's my terminology. The use of the term is explained in my last posting.

3Ibid., p. 18.