America at Risk: Threats to Liberal Self-Government in an Age of Uncertainty

The Corruption of Democratic Leadership

The Corruption of Democratic Leadership Hugh Heclo A great danger is something that is more than merely important or attention -grabbing. Such a danger reaches into the deep structure of things. In fact the peril may be so deep and slow-moving that, focusing as we do on what is momentarily noticeable, it might scarcely seem noteworthy. As with diseases in our physical bodies, so with the body politic—the gravest threats are likely to have a sinister hiddenness to them. Authentically great dangers entail a disintegration that takes time, or as Emily Dickinson put it,“Crumbling is not an instant’s Act . . .”1 The great danger this chapter discusses is an organized decay that I will call the corruption of democratic leadership. Given the political scandals recurring in the daily news, this phrase immediately invites a very natural misunderstanding. So we should begin by emphasizing that the corruption under discussion here is not about politicians being “on the take.” The bribery and similar vices found among political leaders—as among the rest of us—are important and certain worthy of correction, but these do not rise to the level of greatness. As a danger, venality is all too commonplace and seems part of our normal functioning. In the following account, corruption is to be understood in the sense that would have been familiar to our Founding Fathers. Dr. Samuel Johnson ’s eighteenth-century dictionary tells us that corruption is ‹rst de‹ned as the principle by which bodies tend to the separation of their parts. Corruption is a loss of wholeness, a falling apart from the inside. And from this disintegration of what should be complete in its parts, comes rottenness. Thus in the following discussion I am speaking of corruption and loss of integrity, not as a character ›aw in venal people, but as the decomposition of a healthy, integrated state of wholeness. Likewise, it helps if we scrape away modern incrustations from the term democratic leadership. In the following account, leadership is not referring / 249 to a role or personal quality of people who are somehow in charge. Here too, eighteenth-century terminology can offer a clearer understanding of the subject. Discussions and arguments leading up to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution said very little about democratic leadership as such. This is because America’s political Founders sought to create, not a democratic, but a republican form of government. This “republicanism” meant that while the government derived all its powers (directly or indirectly) from the great body of the people, the governing would be done by a small number of citizens chosen (again, directly or indirectly) by the people.2 On this issue the Founders did have a great deal to say because they saw leadership in republican government as a problematic, complex—indeed fateful—transaction between the people and their representatives. Both elected“leaders”and electing“followers”were citizens engaged in a deliberative transaction of mutual consent, both guiding and being guided by each other over the long term. Republican self-government would be not just a top-down eliciting of consent or a bottom-up instructing of leaders, but a bottom-up/top-down transaction of reciprocal in›uence spread over time. The result would be to produce the governmental rules/decisions/policies by which everyone has to live. Stripped to its essentials, this reciprocating type of republican leadership is what I think America’s Founding Fathers hoped for and tried to design with their daring experiment in self-government . Thus in what follows, the phrase corruption of democratic leadership means this: a disintegration—loss of healthy wholeness—in the republican leadership transaction between the body of citizens and their governing representatives. It is not democratic leadership that is being corrupted. It is the modern system of democratic leadership that is doing the corrupting of republican self-government. The Stakes of Republican Leadership We should take very seriously the Founders’ abiding fear that failure in the republican leadership transaction posed a great, indeed mortal, danger for America. They were not without hope. If the system of mutual consent and guidance in republican self-government worked properly, the rules/decisions /policies would serve the shared long-term interests of all citizens in such a political society.3 However, it is accurate to say that the American Founders’ fears far outweighed their hopes. If republican leadership did not 250 / america at risk work properly, the result would be not just an unfortunate shortfall in pursuit...