In uniform, I never got beyond Wolf, which is the next-to-bottom rank in the Cub Scouts. But I did study leadership years later at the Army War College, and I have a crisp khaki Army hat to prove it. The big media company I worked for also got me management training from smart faculty members at Northwestern and Penn and Harvard business schools.
Here's one lesson they all stressed: Leaders need followers, of course, and a key attribute of leaders who inspire “followership” is the ability to actively listen to the people they lead. Listening yields critical information on whether you’re headed in the right direction. Good leaders rarely need to use force — you know, “Because I said so, that’s why!”
But for all the attention leadership gets in the business world, it seems to be more a talking point than a developed skill in government. And we are seeing the consequences that – in the rush of Republican leaders nationally to ignore the big majority of voters who support thoughtful gun control … and who want to fight climate change… and, most notably, in the gap between public opinion and officials’ response to reproductive rights.
It’s not just in Congress or in statehouses. It’s a big issue at the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court.
With the Dobbs decision last year, in which the Supreme Court took away the reproductive rights that American women had held for four decades, we are beginning to see why leadership matters even in the context of a court, which is empowered to use that “because-I-said-so” authority.
Americans have long told pollsters, by a roughly 2-to-1 margin, that they want abortions to be always safe and legal in most circumstances. Should that matter? Well, judges will tell you that they act on matters of law notwithstanding public opinion – that their rulings are based on the Constitution. But ideology affects that constitutional interpretation, and a court interested in compliance with its rulings – as it should be – needs to look beyond ideology and consider some facts about the real lives of Americans.
Here’s one: A 2017 study found that one in four American women will have an abortion. What happens when our government tries to enforce a law that offends a large majority of citizens? Well, we have experience with that in Prohibition.
Prohibition arose because of pressure from evangelical Christian groups, who considered alcohol to be the devil’s tonic. Because the zealots claimed to speak for God, politicians found them hard to oppose. But almost immediately after Prohibition was ratified in 1920, it was obvious that it was a disaster. John D. Rockefeller Jr. noted this in 1932: “Instead, drinking has generally increased,” he wrote. “The speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened, and crime has increased to a level never seen before.”
Still it took 13 years for Prohibition to be repealed. And alcohol remains tightly regulated today. But get this: A CNN nationwide poll in 2014 found that 18 percent of Americans still “believe that drinking should be illegal.” That’s about 10 points less than the tiny minority who today want to ban abortion – which most Republican presidential candidates support, anyway, and which is happening in one state after another where Republicans are in charge.
You might think, in any case, that the will of the majority would somehow prevail in a democracy. But American democracy is a bit, well, funky: That conservative court majority was appointed by two presidents who both got to the White House despite losing the popular vote — George W. Bush and Donald Trump — and the justices were confirmed by senators who represent a minority of Americans. That’s because our Constitution gives extra weight to less populous states, which these days tend to vote Republican.
So what might the minority’s triumph bring, in this case? Two unhappy consequences seem to be already appearing.
First, we’ll see widespread disregard for the new laws targeting abortion, and a lot of people will find a way to work around the rigid anti-abortion standards that are coming in a majority of states.
That will lead to a second consequence: rising disrespect for the law in general, and the Supreme Court, in particular. It’s not good for America’s system of laws for people to believe that the Supreme Court is just a tiny legislature, or another squadron in the Trump Reserve, run by partisan ideologues.
Of course, the Supreme Court is also drawing scorn from citizens for its lax ethical standards, notably in the obvious conflicts of interest of Justice Clarence Thomas – revealed recently, of course, only by investigative reporting. Interesting: Those business professors also taught me that high ethical standards are among the other key attributes of great leaders – along with one more thing: vision, in the sense of having insight into what might follow your actions. There’s not a lot of that around either, is there?
It almost seems that a lot of people in key positions of public trust care more about sounding like a leader than behaving like one. They might want to start by listening to us.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.