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Not a day goes by in American public life without cries about the
"crisis of leadership" that plagues us. These laments may be fair,
but they're not the full picture. If we're honest, we have to admit
that America suffers from a crisis of "followership" as well. In a
democracy, after all, we get the leadership we deserve. And, as I
argue in The Two Percent Solution, in the end there's only one way to
get the leaders we need: by becoming the kind of citizens that produce
them.
On the issues at the heart of the Two Percent Solution --
the uninsured, the working poor, high-poverty schools, and money-drenched campaigns --
the citizen's job is to make the world safe for
leaders to do the right thing. Today, the dialogue between them
that lies at the heart of democracy has broken down. Citizens,
fed up with today's dysfunctional debate, essentially tell elected
officials, "We don't trust you because you don't tell the truth."
Officials, in essence, reply: "We don't trust that if we tell you
the truth, you won't throw us out." This mutual distrust between
leaders and citizens may define the ultimate American gridlock --
a stasis more crippling and fundamental than that produced by
party differences or electoral parity.
We can only move past this impasse if citizens become engaged in the
biggest choices we face. The good news here (as the poll and focus
groups I conducted for the book suggest) is that people are ready. As
I've given talks around the country on the Two Percent Solution, I've
had this sense reinforced. People of all political persuasions are
hungry to be brought into the problem-solving process by their
leaders, rather than condescended to as passive recipients of the same
old symbolic appeals.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, Pericles described the culture that
produced Greece's golden age. The secret of Athens' success?
Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in
the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied
with their own business are extremely well informed on general
politics - this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who
takes no interest in politics minds his own business; we say that he
has no business here at all.
To be sure, this is not a call for overworked moms and dads to start
studying up on domestic policy each night after tucking the kids into
bed. But it is a reminder that without a threshold level of
engagement in public questions, citizens can't form the constituency
for sanity that makes elected officials decide it is safe to be sane.
That's just the way it works. The fascinating thing about democracy
is that good leaders are produced by good followers, and good
followers are produced by good leaders. Of course, this dynamic works
in reverse to produce bad versions of both as well. It's a virtuous
or corrosive cycle. The press, as I argue elsewhere in this site and in the book, has a central role in making engaged
citizenship possible, making it likelier that virtue prevails. But
the ultimate responsibility is ours.
The bottom line? Since today's dysfunctional debate is manmade,
we can unmake it. If you're ready to help build a constituency for
change, we need your help. Click here to get involved.
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