Questions of Leadership
Conversations with Michael Greenberg, George Packer, and Nathan Robinson about a crisis in leadership during the coronavirus pandemic. Listen today at 2 pm EST or anytime at our site.
Over 25% of the world’s coronavirus deaths have been in the United States, which has only around 4% of the world’s population. Something is peculiarly wrong here. Measures could have been put in place earlier to prevent thousands of deaths, according to epidemiologists writing for the NY Times. But in the place of swift and competent decision-making, we have leadership that recently pondered plainly destructive acts as possible coronavirus treatment methods, which was followed by an uptick of poisoning cases.
On this week’s show, George Packer blames our problems in part on a uniquely American self-undermining, a failure he wrote about over at The Atlantic. On our show he describes
an assault on government that has been the dominant noise in the in the political sphere since 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected. And that has been going on for a long time, and lately has become so nihilistic, so that it’s gone from “we want government to be small” to “we want government to be incapable, and we want it to be stupid, and we want it to be corrupt.” When something as dire as the pandemic arrives, it shouldn’t be a surprise to find out that you needed those institutions, because nothing else can handle it except on a national scale. And if you have been assaulting them and de-funding them and demoralizing them for years and years, imagining you will never pay a price, then you’ve been naive.
There are other kinds of executive power in the U.S. beyond the president; there are, for instance, governors, some of whom have become relatively reassuring in this crisis. Michael Greenberg recently wrote in praise of New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, who’s become a leading national voice on the crisis.
Cuomo has emerged onto the national stage from the Governor’s Mansion in Albany, the city that launched Roosevelts onto the national stage. Greenberg notes other presidential qualities:
He managed to show an understanding, first of all, of government. A managerial expertise that we rarely see nowadays. And I think this is what the country was really responding to, this competence, this understanding of the hospital system, of how stretched it was. He was like a quartermaster, if we’re to extend the war metaphor in the sense that he was gathering war material, ventilators, masks, beds. He was strong-arming hospital administrators. He was gathering volunteers. He was working on this in his frenetic pace.
This comeptence even inspired the “Draft Cuomo 2020” buzz a few weeks ago. Compare that competence to what George Packer says on our show of Trump:
Trump came into office at war with his own bureaucracy. His first big move was to fire his FBI director for being honest. That was a sign that this was a man who is going to bend the government until it broke and became a tool for his own personal interests, which is what it is now, which is why we don’t hear from the CDC anymore. Throughout this pandemic, he shut them down because they weren’t saying things that were useful to him.
And yet, as Joe Biden is poised to become the Democratic nominee for president, it’s not clear what voice we’ll hear opposing Trump in the fall. Biden hasn’t been doing much press.
Nathan Robinson has warned against nominating conservative Democrats for some time. In 2016, he wrote as early as February that Hillary Clinton would not defeat Trump. Now, he sees a similar situation developing with Joe Biden.
There is no coherent message for Joe Biden to utter, because, in fact, he’s been quoted as saying he didn’t want to be “too political” in his response to Donald Trump. He subscribes very, very strongly and deeply to the kind of ideology of civility, right, where the idea of criticizing a sitting president in a crisis too harshly is something that he’s uncomfortable with doing. But also, the central fact that an opposition leader needs to be pointing out right now is the colossal mismanagement and failure of leadership coming out of the Trump administration.
Support Us on Patreon and Get to Know Hearty White
The news stays bad, because our actuality really is daunting, but that’s not the whole story. On our Patreon, you can find interviews with people trying to make something better with what we’re given. For our ongoing weekly miniseries, Close Reading at a Social Distance, we’re talking to writers and storytellers about invention and creativity in bad times.
This week, producer Adam Colman talks to Hearty White, the radio host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU, a show that combines absurd sketches, comic musing, philosophical depth, poetic riffs, and the cadence of a radio preacher. Adam and Hearty had a conversation about radio’s power in a time of isolation, about getting beyond the self. Hearty is as profound as he is funny. He tells Adam about why he took his name from a loaf of bread, and he has such clarity on radio’s interpersonal work:
The weird thing is I’ve been treating the whole time as if the person listening is going through social isolation. Because radio is one of those things that’s always been a therapy for that. When people are lonely, they listen to the radio, right, there are people that don’t leave their apartments. So I’ve always kind of pictured them, anyway. That’s one of the beautiful things about radio. The minimum of what you can do is just merely to be there, to keep someone company, just to hold their hand . . . Radio does that really really well.
You should also listen to Miracle Nutrition. It’s surreal and inspiring; it’s philosophically exploratory and hilarious. There is nothing like it.
Listen: Roland Young (and other things on WFMU)
Every week, you can hear Hearty White on WFMU in New Jersey and New York. And it should be clear from that show alone that WFMU is a magical radio station (as filmmaker and past Open Source guest Jim Jarmusch has said, it’s a completely listener-supported station with “no evil corporate overlords”). Go to wfmu.org at almost any time of day, and prepare to hear something that will not be boring. Something like the music of Roland Young, who you can read about and hear over at the WFMU blog:
Roland P. Young was a huge advocate of underground music, culture, politics and radio, DJing in the Bay Area in the 1960’s and 70’s before creating the amazing Isophonic Boogie Woogie LP in 1980. Here, an entire realm of free sound gets channeled through Young’s mind into what can best be described as “afro-minimal-free-electronic-drone music” . . . It’s a stunning statement indeed, with Young crafting his out sound with kalimba, sax, clarinet, bells, electronics and assorted other instruments, all flowing in their own space to amazing result.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library:
Read about listening adventures you might take: see the Bitter Southerner on Hearty White, read about the Met’s Opera-at-Home.
Talk to people in Albany and NYC, and you’ll hear about other sides of Andrew Cuomo, too: Ross Barkan says Cuomo “helped get New York into this mess,” and the Albany Times Union has criticized the governor’s authoritarian wielding of executive power over the state legislature. Tom Frank is back with a new book and an excerpt in Harper’s: The Pessimistic Style in American Politics.
In COVID writing: consider why some people get sicker than others; the case for drafting doctors; and how Seattle let scientists lead, while New York did not. The Kitchen is Closed. The Pandemic isn’t a Black Swan says Mr Black Swan.
See you next week! Take it easy, but take it, as the great Studs Terkel said.
The OS First Responders.
