Terry Newell is currently director of his own firm, Leadership for a Responsible Society. His work focuses on values-based leadership, ethics, and decision making. A former Air Force officer, Terry also previously served as Director of the Horace Mann Learning Center, the training arm of the U.S. Department of Education, and as Dean of Faculty at the Federal Executive Institute. Terry is co-editor and author of The Trusted Leader: Building the Relationships That Make Government Work (CQ Press, 2011). He also wrote Statesmanship, Character and Leadership in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and To Serve with Honor: Doing the Right Thing in Government (Loftlands Press 2015).
All in Civic Virtue
Government workers, business leaders, financial titans and everyday citizens increasingly shout to politicians to "get off my back." Yet those politicians are often there because responsibility is not.
People divide across police lines, air waves and cyberspace. In so many ways we separate ourselves from each other, often loudly, sometimes violently. If this is not the America we want, we need to change.
Today, most Americans associate honor with military service but tend to view those who enter civil service as "feds" and "bureaucrats." They think "the best and the brightest" are or should be in the private sector. This is healthy neither for the nation nor the public service.
In society today, every group seems angry at some other group. Instead of collaboration we get condemnation. Welcome to tribal America.
In many other cases, the world is blurry before it comes into focus. By giving our opinion too soon, we harden our thinking and hearts when we would be better served by pausing to learn more.
It is worth asking if we are meeting the test of civic virtue George Washington set in his Farewell Address. Do we have sufficient centripetal forces in our public life to maintain what he called “union and brotherly affection.”
Americans hold many of their public officials in low esteem. Could the reasons include that they detect a lack of honor in those who serve them?
Market values, exemplified by the use of money as a key measure and medium of political efficacy, have gained increasing impact on how campaigns are run and on how those who are elected govern. Civic values need to play a larger role.
Is FedEx Field, where the Washington Redskins play, as meaningful a symbol of civic culture as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium where the team formerly played? Outsourcing citizenship, while saving money, can weaken social bonds essential for effective governance.
Money’s influence in politics seems here to stay, but for those who feel we need to change that, there is a solution. It’s called voting. It might seem naive to say it, but democracy can actually solve this problem with democracy.
When we look for reasons to explain poor student achievement, there is one we seem reluctant to cite: the students themselves. If we were to make a list of who’s responsible for ensuring they do well in school, the first group on the list should be students.
If America is the land of opportunity and optimism, why, from one area to another, do we seem driven not by the soaring rhetoric of hope and promise but by the sinking call to lower our expectations?
In the contract society, “citizens” have become government’s “customers,” and they judge government by how satisfied they are with what they get. That’s not a prescription for healthy governance.
Our problems and possibilities are too many and too complex for one human being to understand and address. Leadership in a republic demands something other than a “Lone Ranger” on a white horse.
Good solutions to complex societal problems are rarely quick. Until we lend more patience to understanding them and nurturing the relationships that allow us to act with consensus, we will stay captives to our current frustration.
A child of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson saw a future pregnant with human happiness as long as conscience and reason remained unfettered. America, of course, has not always lived up to Jefferson’s epitaph. This is one of those times.
What we need is less effort in pronouncing the other side wrong and more in questioning whether we are right. We need a dose of humility to calm the curse of certainty.
