Where Did Our Leaders Go?

Abraham Lincoln was somewhat of an inept man. Any child can recount the stories of his many failures in life, business, and politics before becoming one of the few pre-Roosevelt presidents the average American can name. As commander in chief during the Civil War, chaos reigned within his administration. Lincoln would regularly procrastinate on issues or fail to make decisions entirely. His self-proclaimed policy was to have no policy. Yet it is hard to imagine another man guiding the country through the war and holding together the fabric of our nation.

He may have been a heavy-handed and disorganized manager, but Lincoln was a giant of a leader. Through willpower and force of personality alone, Lincoln was able to reshape the world around him to reflect his vision of a united nation, righted along the path of destiny. Disciplined, principled leadership sees no bounds and knows no barriers. History's great leaders have created empires, crushed them, defined civilizations, deciphered God's secrets, triumphed over disease, conquered the worst in human nature, harnessed the best in human nature.

Today we have a dearth of these thoughtful, visionary leaders who can lead society into a better future of their own design. If leading in the now was once measured in years and months, it is now measured in days, if not hours. We have become so immersed in our hyper-now culture that we lost our ability and willingness for vision beyond tomorrow's headlines. Consequently, political attention spans and the scope of strategic calculations have atrophied.

This surely makes the job of our leaders much easier - and they certainly have taken advantage. Policy horizons no longer stretch over decades, only election cycles, with agendas dictated by opinion polls. At some point our leaders (and the majority of the world's leaders) missed the lesson that by definition you cannot lead people by asking where they want to go. I am a firm believer that over the long-term, the free and educated masses will always get it right. In the short-term, however, the masses are more likely to be wrong and therefore require leaders to paint and guide towards the future. Governance by popular opinion is not only erratic and unprincipled, it is extraordinarily dangerous. The most brilliant, prescient, and tested collective of political philosophers, our Founding Fathers, understood this, which is why our government is a republic, not a democracy.

Unfortunately, the detriments of our modern short-term myopia are manifesting themselves in frightening ways with our political institutions convulsing to lurches in popular opinion and largely ignoring the important long-term problems that truly threaten our ideals of liberty.

In Iraq, 1,700 American soldiers and 24,000 civilians have been murdered, yet this is often little more than a headline while Congress and the president devoted an inordinate among of attention, calling special sessions and going to great lengths to prevent a feeding tube from being removed from a brain-dead woman in an irreversible vegetative state; when was the last time the president cut short a vacation or Congress passed special legislation to give thousands of our troops the armor they so desperately need, or trying to rescue now-beheaded hostages, or to devoting serious effort and resources to winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the Middle Eastern 'Street'?

On health care, energy, trade, the environment, taxes, et cetera ad infintum, the examples are sadly abundant and provide material for countless posts, but all lead to the same question - where have our leaders gone?