HOLLOW AT THE CORE : Leaders Appear Morally Bankrupt

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” Abraham Lincoln declared on Dec. 1, 1862, in the midst of America’s greatest catastrophe--the Civil War. So saying, Lincoln proposed legislation providing for gradual, compensated emancipation of slaves, with full abolition by 1900.

Lincoln did not scruple over the unconventionality of his proposal. “As our case is new,” he explained, “so we must think anew and act anew.” Neither did he balk at its formidable cost. “It is easier to pay a large sum,” he said, “than it is to pay a larger one.”

Lincoln’s proposal was at once too bold and too modest--and too late. The border states opposed his plan as confiscatory. Abolitionists condemned it as a moral compromise with the evil of slavery. The war rumbled on. Eventually, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment abolished slavery immediately and without compensation. Lincoln’s moderate, temporizing voice had been drowned out by the cannons’ blast.

But in making his daring proposal, Lincoln gave voice to the kind of political imagination that is the ultimate test of leadership. That even his supple intelligence was overruled by events is a sobering reminder that no rider can fully tame the tiger of history. Yet the voice is key. It may not have totally controlled events, but it was creative, candid and courageous--and, for those reasons, it was credible.

Another kind of civil war threatens America today. What may be its opening skirmishes have just been fought on the streets of Los Angeles. It is a complex war that pits rich against poor, black against white, Asian against black and, perversely enough, poor against poor. In the face of this gathering calamity, who has heard an authentic and imaginative word from any political leader? As what’s left of the American social contract unravels, we seem paralyzed both by the muteness of our politicians and our own sense of resignation and powerlessness.

It was not always so. Just 30 years ago, we had leaders unafraid to challenge convention and to ask us all to bear the burden of necessary change. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson may not have had all the answers, but they were ready to tackle the tough questions, and their energy and commitment gave us hope.

Where are that energy and hope today? The insipid mewling of our politicians is a mockery of leadership. Especially when it comes to the volatile issue of race, creativity has grown so rare, candor so difficult and courage so costly that we are condemned to hear nothing but banalities. Whether they sing of “racism” or “law and order,” almost all commentators on the Rodney G. King trial and aftermath take their lyrics from familiar songbooks of the last 20 years: white bigotry, police brutality, crime in the streets. They’ve played for a generation or more--it’s no wonder we scarcely hear them now. They have become background noise, a chorus of cliches behind the awful reality that race relations in America are fast becoming.

The music is familiar in part because we have long since run out of money to pay the piper to play something new. It is fitting, perhaps even predictable, that the nation’s worst racial disturbance since the 1960s should explode in the state that gave us Proposition 13 and so initiated the “tax revolt” that helped sweep Ronald Reagan into the White House. The animating spirit of the movement behind Prop. 13--and behind the presidencies of Reagan and George Bush--was selfishness. Reagan’s and Bush’s majorities were largely built on the repudiation of concepts of community, nationhood and the commonweal, and repudiation, as well, of the notion that the federal government, which the Constitution had ordained to “promote the general welfare,” had any business doing any such thing.

The infrastructure whose decay is now widely lamented is but one visible manifestation of our commitment to a shared life. Roads, bridges, schools, safe neighborhoods, a healthy environment--these are material markers of the spirit of common social purpose. Their deterioration provides a measure not only of our degraded physical surroundings, but the dissolution of our national soul. Nothing better symbolizes the anarchy immanent in recent social policy than the images of L.A. store owners firing on looters.

This sorry state of affairs did not just happen. It is the direct result of policies designed to widen the gaps of wealth that separate us and to shrink the powers of government at all levels to provide for the common welfare. The federal budget deficits of the Reagan years constitute a massive obstacle to increased federal spending on public services of all types--from job training to health care. What’s more, Reagan’s “new federalism” saddled the states with expensive obligations that have exhausted their capacity to support social programs--as the current California budget crisis confirms.

So we now have the governments we are willing to pay for. And we are willing, apparently, to pay for relatively little. Perhaps it is inevitable, therefore, that politicians offer the same old tired cliches, even as the nation’s second-largest city turns into an ethnic and radical battleground to rival Beirut. Realistically, what more can they do?

But it is more than fiscal constraint that impoverishes our current national dialogue. If we had the will, we would find the means. If someone could make clear the future costs of our current course we could surely be persuaded, as Lincoln suggested, that even a large bill now would be easier to pay than a still larger one presented later, probably amid chaos and coercion. We want for more than just means--we want for leadership.

Where, then, are the voices that will educate us to the implications of our vexed present? Why are our leaders and would-be leaders so timid and tiresome?

Toward the end of the 19th Century, the British commentator James Bryce asked a famous question: “Why are the best men not in politics?” The answer, he suggested, lay in the fact that politics was an unrewarding career for men of talent because the apparatus of government was so sparse and its powers so feeble. In the far more complicated society of the closing years of this century, we have contrived to convince ourselves again that government, in Reagan’s words, “is not the solution to our problem. Government is our problem.”

As voters, we have repeatedly ratified that philosophy at the polls in recent years. We have little right to express indignation, therefore, when it is revealed that government is inadequate to the tasks of providing quality education, ensuring public safety, solving the crisis in health care, cushioning unemployment, ending the recession or even keeping the streets in decent repair--not to mention sustaining the kind of overall social environment in which the historic hatreds arrayed along the frontiers of racial and ethnic difference will not erupt into Lebanon-style civil war. Yet the vision of a multiethnic, multiracial society, living in harmony, was once--and not so long ago--an essential component of the American dream.

As recently as the 1960s, there were leaders who could, without sham or embarrassment, invoke that dream--and who had some concrete plans for making it a reality. Whatever their various human failings, now obsessively emphasized by a public conditioned by a tabloid-press mentality, they spoke with conviction and authenticity--and they had an attentive audience. Robert Kennedy, Hubert H. Humphrey, King, even the much maligned Johnson, had this in common: They all knew, like Lincoln, that the nostrums of the past were obsolete in the urgent present; they all believed government must be the instrument of common social purpose--”the machinery through which such mutual aid and protection is achieved,” as Franklin D. Roosevelt described it; they were all convinced that no financial price was too high to pay for justice and comity, and they all excited a resonant chord of agreement in varied American communities--white, black, brown and yellow.

If ever we needed voices like theirs, we need them now. And we need to be able to hear them--to clear our ears of the shibboleths and cant of the last decade, whose moral bankruptcy now stands grotesquely revealed. We need imagination. We need hope. We need a government faithful to our trust. If we have these things, we will find the resolve to pay the bill when it is tendered. Like Lincoln, we may not solve all our problems. But if we refuse to address them, we shall surely perish--and deserve to. As Lincoln said on that December day in 1862: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”