The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow
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Yes, presidents can inspire and enable, as Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the bank panic right when he was elected president. And they can make us more fearful, as George W. Bush did in the 2004 presidential campaign by constantly ratcheting up the color-coded threat level. Psychologically, fear triggers anxious regression to infantile feelings of helplessness so that people express transferential attitudes of passive obedience to leaders who promise to protect them. Fear combined with loss of meaning can also drive people into embracing fundamentalist ideologies that explain the world to them, bind and direct their fear and anger, give them false hopes and real enemies.
Besides global warming, I believe the greatest danger in this time of complex change and confusion comes from people with extremist ideologies that, closed to evidence and reason, justify destructive actions. Some of these ideologies are religious, promising rewards in a future life to destroyers killed in acts of terrorism. But secular ideologies can also be dangerous, such as unquestioning belief that communism, democracy, or market forces will magically solve economic and social problems. The goal of America’s remarkable founding brothers was the development of free, educated, and productive citizens. Democracy and freedom from intrusive government were the means not the end of their purpose.
WHO SHOULD BE PRESIDENT?
What kind of national leader will be able to recognize our threats and opportunities, infuse people with hope by engaging them to rise to the challenge ? I’d like to be able to name people who would clearly be the president we need, but history shows it’s not possible to predict with any accuracy how someone will act in the office of president. No one predicted that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would become the inspirational leader who gave Americans hope during the dark days of the Depression and rallied the country after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Before FDR was elected president, Walter Lippmann called him “an amiable boy scout” and H. L. Mencken wrote that he was “somewhat shallow and futile.”4 No one expected Lyndon B. Johnson, who rose to leadership in the U.S. Senate on the shoulders of Southern racists, to bully that body to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1957 and later lead Congress to pass the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. No one expected Richard Nixon, who gained office by attacking Communism, to meet Mao in China. No one expected Ronald Reagan to hasten the end of the evil empire not by force but by dealing face-to-face with Mikhail Gorbachev. Yet, these politicians turned out to be the leaders we needed to rally the nation, right the wrongs of discrimination, improve chances for peace, and expand the realm of freedom.
In contrast, other American presidents did not rise to the occasion and give America the leadership needed. Woodrow Wilson, for all his brilliance and idealism, proved too rigid to lead the country to support the League of Nations after World War I. Although George W. Bush brought America together after 9/11, he ended up dividing the country over the ill-conceived war in Iraq.
If past achievement doesn’t tell us enough, is there any other way to decide who we should support for president? Or course, we all see things through the lenses ground by our unique experiences. My view of what’s important will be seen through the prism of this book’s argument.
What I look for in a political leader who wants to be president is someone who understands the challenges facing us in social and human as well as economic and security terms, and has the combination of emotional and intellectual qualities—personality and brains—to shape solutions and galvanize the country to implement them. I write this with the belief that the Interactives, more than the bureaucrats, will recognize the importance of evaluating candidates in terms of their personal qualities, including their ability to both listen to and educate the public, rather than their résumés. Interactive leaders look at what people can contribute to a team, and in that spirit, we all need to ask what a presidential candidate will do for the country. And that depends even more on a candidate’s personal strengths and understanding than the espoused policies that may change once the president takes office and has to share power with Congress.
What kind of personality should we look for? Both psychology and history provide clues.
Obviously we want a president who is gifted temperamentally with qualities of openness, agreeableness, emotional stability, and conscientiousness—qualities that make us feel good about a leader. FDR had them all. It was sometimes said that he had a second-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament. However, Lincoln was sometimes depressed, Nixon was suspicious and disagreeable, and Reagan wasn’t very curious, even though they all had the other positive elements of temperament. So clearly, while desirable, good temperament is not enough for a president to deal with the challenges we face.
Almost all the leaders who have moved America in new directions have been gifted productive narcissists, like Lincoln, FDR, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan. That’s because this personality type, not wedded to the past, wants to change the world and has a deep need plus the skill to recruit others to make it happen.5 Narcissists can combine a hopeful vision for the common good with political cunning, guiltlessly using people and tossing them aside when they’re no longer useful, pragmatically shifting positions while appearing to stand for basic principles. (How many people know that Reagan, the revered icon of the Right, as California governor signed the first bill in the United States that legalized abortion?)
Narcissists are extremely competitive, and the most effective ones enjoy the combat of a campaign. They get sharper when stressed. Watch for this in the primaries. The productive narcissists will not be defensive, but will turn aside attacks with clever counterattacks or, like FDR and Reagan, sometimes with disarming and dismissive humor. I saw this close up in 1967, when I was a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Reagan, who was then governor, visited the campus, and one of my students, a radical rebel, tried to bait him.
Student: Is it true you said trees cause pollution?
RR: You have a beautiful campus here.
Student, pulling me over to meet RR: Can you believe it? This man is the governor of the whole state of California.
RR, smiling: Well, at least you learned a little civics.
The best of our narcissistic presidents have formed strong convictions about key issues facing the country. These aren’t based on opinion polls or what consultants advise them, but on their own study and experience; or like FDR, they invite the best minds on different sides to debate an issue, which can be as good as doing the research themselves. These presidents persuade and inspire others because they persuade and inspire themselves to take action. They bring the public into their internal dialogue. A powerful example is Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union, which was essential in gaining him the Republican nomination for president. Lincoln spent months studying the views of the framers of the constitution on slavery before crafting a speech that argued that while ending slavery would be like cutting out a cancerous growth and risking death by bleeding, letting it grow was certain to destroy the patient, by which he meant the spirit of the Republic.6 In conclusion, Lincoln made it clear that he was ready to lead a righteous struggle, saying, “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
Intellectuals had little respect for Ronald Reagan’s intellect. But they were wrong. George Schultz, his secretary of state, reports that when Mikhail Gorbachev took over the U.S.S.R., Reagan studied everything he could get on Gorbachev and the Soviet Union for over a year. And when Reagan and Gorbachev had their first meeting, the senior staff was horrified that the president was meeting the chairman with only a translator present. But Schultz points out that Reagan knew what he wanted, he’d been a labor negotiator in Hollywood, and after studying Gorbachev for a year, he knew him better than any member of his staff.7
Reagan had transformed himself from a self-styled bleeding-heart liberal to the spokesman for free enterprise and against Big Government when he was the TV face of GE from 1954 to 1962. Thomas W. Evans, a lawyer wh
o served in the Reagan administration, tells the story of Reagan’s conversion through discussions with GE executives and workers that caused him to rethink his views.8 The famous speech for Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention that made Reagan the leader of the Right expressed the result of his own internal dialogue.
Of course, the danger with narcissists is lack of control over their appetite for power (in Bill Clinton’s case, it was sex). They ignore laws and constitutional limits that hamper their purposes, for example, Lincoln with habeas corpus; FDR trying to pack the Supreme Court and interning Japanese-Americans during World War II; Nixon trying to harass political opponents with the IRS; Reagan and the Iran-Contra deal.
At an Economist Leadership Forum I attended in Rome on “Narcissistic Leaders,” Fausto Bertinotti, president of the Chamber of Deputies, stated a bit facetiously that only narcissists can be visionary leaders, but they’d be wise to learn to act humble.9 We rightly fear grandiose visionaries, and we appreciate visionaries who can keep their egos in check.
But other personality types, even those obsessives with high moral standards like Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, haven’t moved the country to address the challenges of their time. Our one great obsessive president, George Washington, was needed to manage two great narcissists with clashing visions, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Obsessives like Hoover and Carter act like know-it-all experts, which does not stir followers. A similar attitude turned some voters away from Al Gore and is still a source of satire about him, even though he has performed a huge service in raising our awareness of global warming. While effective narcissists bring the public into their own internal debate, with a conclusion that demands action, obsessives sermonize in ways that leave people feeling inadequate or guilty, like Carter’s famous speech about the national “malaise,” which just made people feel bad and mad at him. Both Hoover and Carter were great humanitarians, leading admirable projects before and after their terms in office, but neither was the leader the country needed, and of course, neither was reelected.
What about George W. Bush’s personality? Starting with temperament, he is low on curiosity; he reads little and gets his information digested for him by his staff.10He’ s been emotionally stable since he stopped drinking—but alcohol can make anyone unstable. He’s conscientious and sticks with things to a fault, and he’s extraverted, sociable, and agreeable, although he lacks the dazzling brightness of FDR and Reagan. All in all, it’s a positive temperament for a national leader, except for the lack of interest in learning, a gap we’ll consider further. However, we can’t tell whether Bush’s stubbornness is a personality trait or whether he is just sticking to a script written for him. Possibly, it’s a combination. People who knew him at school and college remember he had to win, even if that meant taking big risks. He wouldn’t quit.
In my book on narcissistic leaders, I described Bush as a marketing personality with a bit of a loving (erotic) quality, which explains both his warmth and the machismo typical of the erotic who doesn’t want to seem soft. My view was based on his history of shaping his persona to fit his audience. He was a uniter as governor and ran for office in 2000 as a healer, a bridge-builder. But in 2004, his persona, as outlined by his political guru Karl Rove in a campaign brief, was a “Strong Leader” who favors “Bold Action” and “Big Ideas.”11 Of course, part of this had to do with his post-9 /11 role of a war leader. However, after my book was published, a reporter who had talked with Bush in the White House said to me that he felt Bush had also become a visionary with his idea of spreading democracy. Didn’t I think my characterization was wrong, that he really had a narcissistic personality?
No, Bush seems to me a counterfeit narcissist who outsources his visions. Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan studied and worked hard to develop their visionary ideas; they convinced others because it was evident they had convinced themselves. Bush tried to sell concepts he hadn’t worked through. His speechwriter David Frum told a TV interviewer that he had hoped that by writing visionary language for Bush, the president would then internalize the vision and act on it. Frum was disappointed.12
A good example of lack of thought is the idea of spreading “democracy.” Bush uses the term as though its meaning were self-evident, when in fact there are many variations of democracy and it’s not at all clear what would be evidence for him that a country was truly democratic. Nor has he seemed aware that the authors of our Constitution debated the strengths and weaknesses of democratic systems and some argued that democracy can be dangerous. In the Federalist Papers, published before the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison argued that direct democracy can result in factionalism and tyranny of the majority, that the United States should be a republic, with checks and balances to protect individual liberty. Furthermore, Madison and many of the other framers of the Constitution believed that without an educated electorate, democracy would be vulnerable to dangerous demagogues. American democracy has evolved over two hundred years as the central ideal of individual freedom has been gradually expanded. The American experience is that democracy needs to be continually tended and developed. The purpose of our republic isn’t democracy but liberty as the basis for the fullest development of all Americans, the opportunity to realize our creative potential in the pursuit of happiness. Democracy is important, but not the only means to this end.
Tocqueville observed in 1830 that American democracy was rooted in local town meetings and the emotional attitudes of Americans, their “habits of the heart,” or in the language of this book, their social character.13 A Russian delegation found this out when they visited America after the fall of Soviet communism to study democracy. When I met the group at the end of their study trip and asked what had most impressed them, they described meetings they’d witnessed in Protestant churches where each person was able to express an uninterrupted view on an issue. In Russia, they said, this never happened. People interrupted each other and the loudest or strongest person dominated. (Think of the television’s McLaughlin Report.) They returned home with the sober view that Russian democracy would be fragile until cultural attitudes changed. During the G8 summit in St. Petersburg in July 2006, after suffering a lecture by Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush allowed that democracy had a different meaning and tradition for Russians than for Americans.
Bush assumed wrongly that building democracy is the first priority in every country. Of course, people everywhere want to be free of oppressors. But they also want freedom from want and fear. If they had the choice, would people in developing countries choose political democracy before security and material well-being? In Singapore and Chile, autocratic governments established free markets that stimulated economic growth before allowing political freedom. China has taken a similar path. Leaders in these countries believe that a stable democracy depends on sustainable economic success.
And keep in mind Erich Fromm’s analysis in Escape from Freedom of why the German people voted for Hitler.14 A people who have felt humiliated are vulnerable to leaders like Hitler who preach revenge, combined with hope of future greatness. Isn’t this what motivates supporters of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Shiite militants in Iraq?
Put Bush’s thin vision of exporting democracy together with his illconsidered idea of turning social security into a risky investment scheme and the persona of a visionary leader becomes just that, a persona, which comes from the Latin word for mask, or, in Jungian terms, taking on the archetypal role of visionary without the underlying substance. Unlike true visionary presidents, Bush has taken big gambles without fully understanding the odds or the consequences of failure.
Arguably, George W. Bush seems to be our first interactive president, with both the strengths and weaknesses of this social character. As a campaigner, his agreeable temperament and marketing traits are winning. In good interactive style, he’s both collaborative and decisive. But his decisiveness seems more like a video-game “decider,” a term he gave himself, than someone who takes deep dives into the
material. In a conversation among journalists and writers who have covered the Bush White House, he comes across as someone with only a superficial grasp of the decisions he makes. For example, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post says, “You can’t help but look back at Clinton’s famous late nights at the dorm when he would pick through details and ask questions and keep people well past midnight . . . And if you look at Bush, he’s kind of, you know, meeting starts at 9, the meeting is over at 10. That’s it.” Thomas Ricks, author of the best seller Fiasco, adds, “He [Bush] should be a central figure in decision making. And again and again, there’s never any one key meeting.” Says Woodward, “And in this whole story, he’s been the cheerleader.”15 Or better said, the salesman for decisions made with or by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Under Bush, the interactive marketer, the White House staff enjoyed remarkable collegial collaboration among the inner team, unlike the competitive conflict among advisers typical with narcissists like Roosevelt, Nixon, and Clinton. But interactive collaboration doesn’t guarantee good policies, and conflict can be creative. Bush picked close advisers who were hard-liners like Cheney and Rumsfeld. His guru Rove had him campaign on fear of terrorists, gay marriage, the specter of social security bankruptcy. He was directed in 2004 to market to his base, to play on their fears and prejudices. But in his message, there was little of the hope generated by FDR’s “We have nothing to fear but fear itself ” or Reagan’s “It’s morning in America.” Once in the White House, Bush backed policies that rewarded his base of the rich and socially conservative. Policies on national security, meant to protect the country from its enemies, threatened democratic values, and even our allies came to view Bush’s democratic rhetoric as hypocritical. America’s reputation fell to new lows, depressed by Bush’s insulting macho style. But Bush finally lost the support of most Americans when his reasons for invading Iraq and promise of a quick victory both proved false and his response to the devastation of hurricane Katrina was inept, demonstrating that a winning personality can take a politician only so far. 16 And by the start of 2007, the persona of a strong leader had faded; the majority of the public considered Bush neither strong nor effective. 17