As 2024 draws to a close, it is becoming clear that extraordinary times call for extraordinary political leadership. Candidates running on a program of normalcy, of maintaining the status quo with a few minute adjustments, only elicit exasperated looks from a decisive part of the American electorate. Too many of us feel beleaguered, pessimistic, alone, anxious and distrustful. Among young adults, 58 percent report lack of meaning or purpose in their lives. Our people are facing a slowly evolving crisis. Pointing out that inflation is no longer rising as fast and that unemployment is quite low is a path to electoral irrelevance. The future belongs to a different type of politics.
Some who grew up in an era of relative stability and optimism are skeptical that politicians can do everything in their power to restore Americans’ sense of meaning, purpose and belonging. When U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Ct.) proposed that the government pay attention to these issues, Policy responded with the gently sarcastic headline “Senator Murphy Wants to Help You Make Friends.” The day after, National review followed by one of his own: “The government won’t keep you warm at night.”
Such pessimism rightly applies to politicians who do not aspire to be leaders at all, but rather to be smooth-talking product managers, serving as liaisons between their customers (voters) and engineers (enthusiasts). of technocratic politics). If this is all political leadership is, skepticism is justified. But real leadership is something else. This involves drawing a unique and compelling vision of the future, one that the rest of us can rally towards and, in doing so, call upon all of those most natural human capacities: solidarity, mutual care, a deep sense of meaning and purposeful work that can help shape a life and a community.
These visions can take many different forms: a spiritual tradition, a shared mountain to climb, a world to discover, a problem to solve. Too often, however, the quickest shortcut to understanding who we are and what our common task might be is to find someone else to demonize. This strategy temporarily brings people together around a shared animosity – perhaps toward woke academics, MAGA supporters, immigrants, Russians, or some other enemy, real or imagined. This can lead to truly horrible results and really only offers a simulacrum of belonging and meaning. But until something better comes along, this option will become increasingly attractive to potential leaders.
Indeed, the vision that has animated our common life over the past decades is now outdated. It has been called the “Washington Consensus,” “Neoliberalism,” “competitive individualism,” and many more. We might summarize this as a kind of laissez-faire utopianism, the idea that a society in which every individual and institution simply seeks private gain, competing as ruthlessly as possible, and where each individual amasses as much loot as possible will contribute in one way or another to a good society. for everyone. In this type of society, “it’s just business, nothing personal” seems to be a reasonable explanation for corporate cruelty. Teachers teach their students that each of us is responsible for constructing and pursuing our own private vision of what is valuable and desirable. Shared visions, in which we might find a sense of common purpose and identity, have no real place.
It turns out that this vision is not oriented towards human flourishing. This leads, over time, to the perception that we live in a dog-eat-dog, go-it-alone world, where meaning and purpose are either soothing fictions or masks for rapacious self-interest. There are strong arguments that the temporary appeal of the laissez-faire model depended largely on the existential threat posed by the Soviet Union; as long as we could say that all this frenzied competition contributed to the triumph of the free world over the forces of repression and tyranny, we could feel that it meant something. Many of us no longer feel this way, especially those born too late to remember the terrifying specter of what Ronald Reagan called “the Evil Empire.” We are faced with the nagging question of who we really are and what we care about.
Our times call for a new generation of political leaders. There is no single path to a new policy. Different leaders will, by definition, offer different visions; these things are deeply personal – something the leader feels in their gut. But we can say a few words about the structure that a workable vision should take.
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Any new plausible vision must represent more than just an “opportunity” or a lack of constraints. This must offer a beautiful picture of where we could go, of what we could be together. Think here about Martin Luther King Jr.The US president’s call is not only to eliminate racism, but also to make American society a “beloved community”.
Such an image will raise profound human questions. The idea that questions of values and spirituality are private matters, inadmissible for public conversation, is a relic of a dying system. He has facilitated many evils, for example by suggesting that businesses and governments should simply “follow the numbers” to maximize profit and individual choice. A humane society demands that we ask eternal human questions: What does a human life mean? What does it look like to live it well? What kind of world do we want to leave to our children and grandchildren? Leaving these questions unanswered opens the door to a mercenary and amoral public life.
A new vision would reject the provider-consumer model of politics and transcend the electoral horse race. Voters are not passive consumers and true leaders are not product managers. Leaders call ordinary people to action, to virtue, to service, to rolling up their sleeves and building something good. Their values are so central to their identity that they would fight and even risk losing an election to stick to their principles. The conviction is charismatic. Group complacency is not.
Real leaders think beyond GDP. On the contrary, high-GDP countries tend to perform worse than low-GDP countries on many key indicators of human flourishing, including a strong sense of meaning, purpose, and community. The next generation of political leaders must aim higher and set a course that values the flourishing of our communities, not just the overall production of wealth.
A vision of the future will also direct policy efforts toward dismantling community-destroying infrastructure that has been built over decades. Many aspects of American life—from our blandly technocratic education systems to wages and work patterns that leave workers overwhelmed and desperate—reflect and encourage a society based on individual competition. We have to remember that we created this system and we can make it again.
Policy that empowers American communities to exercise shared action can and should take a million forms and vary greatly by location. American communities have experienced a growing concentration of power in their professional, financial, political, and technological lives. We must resist these monopolistic tendencies and return more control to the local level.
This may all seem like a pipe dream, but our times require large-scale change. Small policy adjustments may seem like a more realistic path, but this is actually not the case. The old system is losing its credibility and something truly new is bound to emerge. Times of transition like this can seem disorienting and even dangerous (because they are), but they are also times of great possibility. The most important political leaders of the coming decades will be those who have the willingness and ability to think creatively, to think big, and to lead, with courage, toward a future we have not yet imagined.
Ian Marcus Corbin is a senior fellow at the think tank Capita and a philosopher and faculty member at Harvard Medical School.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.