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).
Government is inherently a matter of trade-offs, in values and policies. How to make those trade-offs is, in fact, one of the chief functions of government and one of the chief sources of contention in a free society.
America has always prided itself on the fact that we are, as John Adams first put it for us, “a government of laws, and not of men.” Indeed, law is a barrier to widespread abuse against human rights. But, if we are not careful, it can be a smokescreen as well.
What does James Madison, a product of the eighteenth century, have to teach us about the practice of politics in the twenty-first? Simply and profoundly this: he knew how to lose, and he knew how to win.
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.
This is not Lake Wobegon. Not all of our children will be above average (though each can be above average in something). But a society that does not encourage mastery gets mostly average performance. For our children, for ourselves, for our society - we need more.
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.
In our lives, the political differences that separated Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton still survive. Though both their philosophies shape how we govern ourselves, they exist as uneasy, conjoined twins. We should be thankful.
A balanced life is a mixture of prose and poetry. We all have both in us. We are all writers and poets of life. Some of us - I count myself among them – tend toward the planned life, much as prose is planned. Others live lives that are more poetic.
Simple solutions on this side of complexity are partial at best and dangerous at worst. They mislead us into thinking they will actually work and breed cynicism when they inevitably fail. But simplicity on the other side of complexity is valuable and essential
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.
When people protest the building of a mosque in their community, they dishonor the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
Long-time Detroit Tigers play-by-play announcer, Ernie Harwell, said that “baseball is a lot like life.” But perhaps life should be a lot more like baseball, for the moral lessons it can teach us.
A society that feels it can safely ignore science can create far more havoc than science itself, and it will then be woefully ill-equipped for the twenty-first century.
While shouting at each other, both the political Left and Right hardly recognize a shared concern: the sense that they are caught amidst economic forces that threaten the self-sufficiency and control over one’s destiny so central to what we have always believed was the promise of being American.
