As the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency recedes into history we are confronted with an objective reality that is larger than the President’s outsized personality and media dominance: do we as a species have political leaders fitted to the times? As of this writing Najib Razak and his Barisan Nasional party have been unceremoniously booted from office after more than 60 years in power; South African President Jacob Zuma has resigned, his tenure buried by 783 graft charges; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government reels from the police’s findings of sufficient grounds to indict him for graft; Britain’s Theresa May lurches about her nation’s landscape like some malfunctioning automaton, incapable of demonstrating that she commands any issue, much less her own cabinet; Angela Merkel in Germany has spent six months cobbling together a shaky coalition that might replace her in two years; Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron find themselves becalmed by electorates impatient for change yet as unsatisfied with what they’ve seen thus far; India’s Narenda Modi seems bent on wrecking his own parliamentary majority with well-conceived but ill-executed devaluation and fiscal policies while turning a deaf year to his nation’s parlous record on rape; even Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, neither of whom make any claims towards even a false egalitarianism, are looking more like the closet tin-pot dictators they really are as their bullying acts against opposition figures (Alexander Navalny), Nobel laureates (Liu Xiaobo), and territorial acquisition (the Crimea, eastern Ukraine and the South China Sea) become more overt.
It’s time to remind us of what exemplary leadership means beyond the slogans and to renew our faith that, while things may look grim now, history has, time and again, brought forth individuals that show us the way.
1.Enter Honest Abe
Whenever academics and scholars tickle their fancy by putting forth yet another poll of historians on US presidential rankings, there is little doubt about who will top the list -- Abraham Lincoln. In the numerous such polls executed since Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. essentially created the genre in 1948 for 'Life' magazine, Lincoln has come out as number one in nearly every one.
In these volatile times, it might be fitting to ponder just what constituted Lincoln’s greatness. Lincoln, wrote political historian Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford in 1966, was “undeniably a great man…in spirit, in humility, in humanity, in magnanimity, in patience, in Christlike charity, in capacity for growth, in political instincts, in holding together a discordant political following, in interpreting and leading public opinion and in seizing with bulldog grip the essential idea of preserving the Union.” What Bailey seems to be saying is that Lincoln was a political genius who also happened to be saintly.
That is an case all too easy to make. But presidential greatness ultimately is a matter of performance. Greatness is as greatness does. And it might be worth speculating on what likely would have happened to Lincoln’s historical standing if he had lost his 1864 re-election bid.
It was a near-run thing. In fact, that's precisely what he expected just ten weeks before the election. He wrote a note to himself, sealed it in an envelope, and stashed it away for reference only after the ballot results were known. He wrote: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be reelected. Then it will be my duty to cooperate with the president-elect so as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his selection on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.” These, like JFK's secret speech in the event of nuclear war as the result of the Bay of Pigs crisis, are words of near desperation.
The central reason for Lincoln’s besieged state was the war-- four long years of the worst, most grueling carnage the country had ever seen (or likely would ever see again), with little apparent prospect for victory.
Then, as history is wont to do, things turned around with stunning force. On September 3rd, official Washington got word that General Ulysses S. Grant had taken Atlanta -- the first significant Union victory of the campaign year. A month later General Philip Sheridan took complete control of the Shenandoah Valley, the Confederacy’s leading supply source. Then the South’s last ironclad was sunk, securing the economic strangulation imposed by the North’s naval blockade.
Immediately, Lincoln’s political standing soared. “It is now certain that Mr. Lincoln will be reelected,” declared Salmon P. Chase, the Treasury Secretary and a leader of the Republican Radicals who had nearly given up on Lincoln as he headed into the campaign home stretch. Without these military victories, 'Honest Abe' likely would have been defeated and the Union would have been dissolved, at least for a time; with them, he scored a 55 percent electoral triumph, the Union was preserved, and the first steps of slavery's eradicaion were taken.
Thus, it could be argued that an element of Lincoln’s greatness was the sheer tenacity he brought to bear in attempting to get the nation through its crisis. Yet that doesn’t truly capture the significance of the Lincoln vision that emerged in the late 1850s as the slavery issue engulfed the nation. Democrats had sought to calm the passions of the slavery issue through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but it had precisely the opposite effect. Lincoln not only saw this, but crafted a rhetorical concept of both the crisis and a pathway for getting through it. “Under the operation of that [Kansas-Nebraska] policy,” he declared, “that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed.” Then, drawing from Scripture, he spoke one of his most famous lines: “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’” He explained: “I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
This was breathtaking candor in the midst of conflicting sentiments so powerful and emotional that a clear-headed vision of the situation was rendered nearly impossible. It reflected a crucial element of his civic genius -- his understanding of the power of political rhetoric that stings and disarms with its stark realism. His depiction of the situation facing America as crisis descended upon it, coupled with the moral sensibility he brought to the slavery issue, positioned him to squeeze out his 1860 presidential victory with less than 40 percent of the popular vote against three other candidates.
What renders this all the more remarkable is that Lincoln possessed few other attributes likely to propel him into the White House. He had served merely a single term in Congress nearly 15 years before his 1860 presidential bid. He had never operated upon the national stage of politics in any significant way. (His fiery antiwar speeches during the Mexican War are often cited by biographers as a serious foray into the national consciousness, but this overstates the case and ignores the fact that his irreverent assault on a sitting president contributed to his becoming a one-term congressman.) Though a deft self-educated lawyer with a solid regional reputation, he had never gained national notice through his legal endeavors. He was not particularly prepossessing in appearance, with a visage, gait and presence considered odd even for the times. Quite simply though, he captured the essence of the country’s enveloping crisis with greater clarity and vision than any of his opponents.
Then, through a crisis-filled first term, he persisted in his pursuit of his vision in the face of what seemed like devastating odds -- in the process revealing a remarkable political adroitness and capacity for deft maneuvering of events and people. He exercised his war powers with such force as to become almost an elected dictator -- but without ever taking on a dictatorial mien or seeking to embed those powers institutionally in the American polity following the war crisis.
More than any other president, Lincoln left behind a nation transformed. All the great presidents set the country upon a new course at a time when the old direction no longer inspired confidence among citizens and voters. Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- all fulfilled this necessity of presidential greatness; all defined the country anew by fashioning fresh political idioms that pulled together new political coalitions, thus allowing the country to move forward into new eras. But the Lincoln transformation was the most profound and most long-lasting. Thus, does he get that top position in nearly every poll of academics with the temerity to rate the presidents. Thus also does he continue to occupy a special locus in the hearts and minds of his countrymen down to our day.