Spend five minutes on social media and you’ll discover America suffers from an epidemic of terrible leaders.
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Politicians are corrupt, CEOs are exploitative, pastors are compromised, police chiefs are incompetent, university presidents are ideologues.
Apparently we’ve managed to elect, hire, appoint, or promote the worst human beings in recorded history. What remarkable luck! Maybe… or maybe we’re thinking about it myopically. I’ve become convinced that America doesn’t primarily have a leadership crisis, but a followership crisis too.
Leadership has become the political equivalent of a piñata. Everybody enjoys taking a swing at it. Followers, meanwhile, somehow escape all responsibility, as if institutions simply malfunction on their own. They don’t.
Institutions reflect the incentives created by the people inside them.
Politicians keep making outrageous promises because voters reward outrageous promises.
Cable news keeps manufacturing panic because panic keeps ratings high.
Social media influencers keep posting intellectual junk food because millions of us consume it like it’s Thanksgiving dinner.
Markets generally produce what people repeatedly buy.
Politics is no different.
One of the stranger developments in modern America is our obsession with charismatic personalities. We no longer evaluate leaders primarily by competence, but by performance.
Can they deliver a viral moment?
Can they humiliate an opponent?
Can they dominate a debate clip?
Can they “own” the other side?
We’ve confused political entertainment with political excellence—a dangerous and foolish trade.
As someone who’s worked in nonprofit leadership, I’ve learned something simple: organizations rarely rise above the expectations of the people supporting them.
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If a board rewards drama, drama becomes the culture.
If donors reward publicity instead of results, publicity becomes the mission.
If followers reward outrage over wisdom, eventually wise people stop volunteering to lead. Why would they? Who signs up to become tomorrow’s punching bag?
One of conservatism’s enduring strengths has been emphasizing personal responsibility. Yet we’ve quietly exempted ourselves whenever elections don’t go our way. We blame politicians, the media, the bureaucracy, the deep state, the establishment. And often, those criticisms are totally justified.
But there’s a harder question.
What behaviors are we rewarding?
Every click.
Every donation.
Every share.
Every vote.
Every standing ovation.
Those are incentives.
Leadership follows incentives the way water follows gravity.
If Americans begin rewarding seriousness again, serious leaders will appear. If we continue rewarding spectacle, don’t be surprised when politics increasingly resembles reality television with better lighting.
One reason our founders distrusted concentrated power wasn’t because they assumed leaders were uniquely evil. They understood something even more profound. Human beings are imperfect. Followers included. A republic only functions when citizens possess enough character to demand character from those representing them. Otherwise democracy slowly becomes a marketplace where politicians simply sell whatever emotional product voters are currently buying.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Bad leaders don’t survive because they’re brilliant; most survive because enough people decide accountability is less important than victory.
We’ll overlook almost anything if it advances our team.
The Left does it.
The Right does it.
Human beings do it.
That’s why this isn’t really a political problem, but a moral one.
Character begins much closer to home. The easiest thing in the world is blaming whoever occupies the podium, and the harder task is asking whether we’ve become the kind of citizens who deserve better leadership. The leaders we elect reflect our appetites, our standards, our patience, our integrity, and our willingness—or unwillingness—to reward truth over theater.
America doesn’t need perfect leaders; no such people exist. But it does need citizens mature enough to stop demanding political celebrities and start demanding public servants. Until that happens though, we’ll continue replacing personalities every election cycle while wondering why the culture never really changes.
The mirror has always been a more honest political consultant than the television. Perhaps it’s time we looked into it.
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Image generated by ChatGPT.