Sherry Chandler

On politicians, leaders, and radicals

Contemplating this year’s three candidates for president, I see John McCain who promises four more years of governing just like George W. Bush. Such promises violate the rule of holes. Barack Obama seems to offer voters an empty slate on which they can write the transformational dream of their choice. He was careful to run before he had any substantial record that would prevent him from running such a campaign of inspiration and high ideals. Hillary Clinton offers a long history of substantial accomplishments and substantial losses, mistakes and self-reinventions. It is this very history that infuriates some voters.

What I don’t see, among the three candidates, is much in the way of innovation or leadership. Certainly I see no radical leaders, not even Jeremiah Wright. (He, I think, is flogging a book.) Why is that so in a year when the country is so eager to be taken in a new direction? Because the candidates are politicians, and politicians deal and compromise. They legislate and govern. They have to be elected, a process that tends to smooth away any radical edges. They hide behind “the will of the people.” They have tremendous egos necessary to believing they should be the elected one. But they rarely lead.

We need politicians. They can accomplish great things.

Even Abraham Lincoln was a consummate politician. So was FDR.

George W. Bush is not much of a politician and look where he got us.

But great leaders don’t come from the government, they rise from the people. I was reminded of that when Rosalie sent me this article on climate change by Michael Pollan, Why Bother?

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.” For Berry, the “why bother” question came down to a moral imperative: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”

Wendell Berry is a man of truly radical ideas. He’s a libertarian and a hard-nosed moralist. But I think he’s right when he says it is we, the people, who have to do these things. Does that mean Dick Cheney was right when he sneered that ecology is a choice of personal morality? Yes, I think he was, though the sneer is his problem, not ours.

I don’t mean this post to be about climate change in particular but about change in general, taking the country in a better direction. Cheney is living proof of at least one of Jeremiah Wright’s preachings: governments fail. Politicians, even Barack Obama, do what politicians do. It’s up to the people to hold them accountable. Where is the outcry about torture? Where is the outcry against war crimes done in our names? Where is the outcry about our huge military expenditures? About our huge prison population? About mountaintop removal? About our staggering national debt? We all seem to want some one to change these things for us, but not if they have to raise our taxes. Not if it means we can’t have TiVo and iPod.

If George W. Bush had been a leader, he could have used the fall of our topless towers to strengthen our moral fiber. Instead, being a coward himself, he chose to play on our fears in order to keep his own power.

So it looks like we’re going to have to grow our courage from the grassroots if we want to survive. We are, after all, a democracy.

Or, as Anglachel put it:

It’s easy to denounce the entire corrupt US government, or to declare you are not a part of the great unwashed, but belong to an archipelago. It does not require courage. One needs nothing but an ego, a distorted view of your own self-importance, and an internet connection for that form of radicalism. It is not very radical, nor does it really make you part of Left politics.

True radicalism is the courage to say “No, I’m sitting here,” on a bus ride, not knowing if this might mean your death. And that courage is the heart and soul of Left politics.

Equality has always been the most radical thought in politics.

Pollan, by the way, doesn’t even ask you to do something this dangerous. Just give up meat or take a sabbath from consumption or plant a garden in your yard:

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

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