The Opinion Leadership Revival

Chip-snatching seagull, Bridlington, Yorkshire, via BBC.

David Brooks writes:

If you're in politics or public life, like so many of my readers, because I can assure you they are not all New Jersey dentists and financial advisors looking for reasons to vote Republican that won't make them feel like Visigoths and Vandals, then I imagine you experienced some moment of mystical transcendence [jump]
at some point in your life when you were reading or watching TV on the subject of some famous historical moment—I'll just mention a couple of liberal ones, speeches by Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, so you'll have a clear sense of the generously nonpartisan standpoint I'm writing from here.

Simple cathedral floor plan. From Simple Wikipedia.

Your spine undoubtedly tingled, your imagination burst into uncharacteristic flame, you saw the light, you heard the call, and you started possibly dancing uncontrollably, experiencing mild fever or headache, and in rare cases bleeding at the ears, enveloped in a sense that you yourself were meant to be a character in a TV show. If you have an erection lasting more than four hours contact your physician. Mine was when I first read Edmund Burke's Speech to the Electors of Bristol

As for the trifling petulance, which the rage of party stirs up in little minds, though it should shew itself even in this court, it has not made the slightest impression on me. The highest flight of such clamorous birds is winged in an inferior region of the air. We hear them, and we look upon them, just as you, Gentlemen, when you enjoy the serene air on your lofty rocks, look down upon the Gulls, that skim the mud of your river, when it is exhausted of its tide.

and realized that you could parlay a well-chosen metaphor into an entire way of life.

But what a bummer (as we pharmaceutical experimenters used to call it in my fortunately abbreviated youth) when the verse monologue of your intentions needed to be footnoted in the prose dialogue of discussion; when the airplane of your ambition came into striking distance of the cliffs of reality and you found yourself in a government, but a government that wouldn't do what you told it to do. When you bumped into the problem of what I will call leadership, because I totally forget what I was setting out to accomplish here when I started laying out my index cards in a pleasing pattern on the carpet, other than that it has something to do with government not working.

Cocktail muddler. Via Inozemstvo-Posao.

I find the best way out in times like these is to make up for your failure to start out with the "there are two kinds of people" gambit by opening up a listicle of three anodyne prescriptions that could help you turn yourself into a different and more effective person, forming a transept on the essay's floor plan.

First, attach yourself to a master political craftsman, someone who goes beyond the routine rules of the legislative cookbook to those deft little touches that can make a bit of lawmaking unmistakably your own. I can't say I learned to write from old Mr. Buckley after I adopted him but I did learn to muddle an Old-Fashioned (the trick is to use a sleek stainless muddler rather than one of those wooden numbers, which your ex may have used to smash garlic) and drop an innocuous quote by Michael Oakeshott into your mix from time to time:

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.

Second, administer yourself a dose of culture shock therapy: transplant yourself into a world so alien from your own that it shatters all your preconceptions, forcing you to think through things in an entirely new way. For example you could visit the suburbs, where people follow the Nascar races and eat in restaurants where all the entrées are under $20. I totally thought of doing something like this years ago, and did in fact have an outdoorsy job at the City News Bureau in Chicago, for literally months between graduating from college in 1983 and starting out opinionating for Reverend Moon at the Washington Times in 1984.

Third, learn to reject invitations. Don't keep your options open, your dance card hedged, or your eggs in a selection of baskets in contrasting colors. Don't give up that radiant vision that inspired you in the first place on the inevitable detours of a career. Only if you burn your ships can you commit yourself completely to the land route, though of course you might prefer to go by sea. Or what is it you're supposed to burn?

I'm not sure if any of these ideas will help you improve your leadership, but undoubtedly something will, and if you just keep looking under that lamppost you're sure to find it, unless it's somewhere else. I always have.

Burning bridges. Image by WhiskeyMonday.