First, let me just say I think I need to give up any pretense of a schedule. I enjoy writing but my day job has taken over pretty much everything for the moment. Hopefully I’ll get some quieter time in the near term but as it is now, my writing will basically be when I feel like like it. Sorry for anyone looking for regularity, but my obligations are first to those who pay me.
So I’m writing this after the news that it’s likely that the US Supreme Court will likely overrule the guarantee to a right to an abortion. While my views on the issue are long and nuanced, I’ll leave that to people who are far more qualified to talk of the legal and political issues at play. My interest in it is seeing the institutional cracks that some of this is revealing.
The first is a failure of leadership to actually be leaders. Again, this column is explicitly NOT staking out any sort of position on the issue
As I like to ramble about theories and big ideas, this is no exception. It seems that too many thought leader just don’t see the issue as a problem at all, but rather a simple idea the other side is obstructing. Thought leaders in government, media, activists, etc.… just talk as if it’s not a problem at all. Just something to worry about with other people being obstinate.
So it gets us to why problems are problems in the first place. Abortion is a good issue to illustrate the point because it has such clear and mutually exclusive moral principles. The thing is neither side really disagrees with either of the basic principles that people should have bodily autonomy and that children should have rights. But somehow when distilled into political rhetoric, the fact that these two are in direct competition doesn’t seem to matter.
There is plenty of polling but it’s basically that the extreme position has around 10% support for either side which means 80% of people understand that there are things to be balanced and weighed and it’s hard. The other thing is for everyone looking for a solution, there isn’t one. It’s a question of values and we have to understand that people can have different weights on values and come to those disagreements honestly. The idea that people that favor more restrictions “hate women” or that people that favor fewer “want to kill children” just completely misses the point for the vast majority of people.
The main issue is that the people that need to be leading the issue and who make the laws around it are completely failing at their job. I’ll just reiterate, this is not about taking a position on the contentious abortion debate, it’s about illustrating a complete and craven inability of people who should be in charge and understand how complex things are to actually address that complexity. If it can’t be boiled down to a 3 second clip1.
Now to the failure in followership:
The reason this is being talked about at all is because someone entrusted in the court violated that trust in order to get a draft out. Regardless of the political implications of the leak, it shows to me another great crack in institutions themselves.
An important point often made by Yuval Levin is that it seems many young people entering institutions are more concerned with having that institution change than being changed by the institution. A very general concept, but it’s applicable to newsrooms, other media organizations, corporations, political parties, and now, it would seem, even the courts.
I see this as a failure of followership as it really is important to let the institutions we are a part of form ourselves as well as understand the obligation, even if temporary, of loyalty to those institutions. The system of conflicting interests works as a system of various collectives, not just a bunch of petty individuals sniping at each other. And part of that is understanding a role in promoting your collective group.
It’s admirable to try and change an institution, but it needs to be done from a position of leadership. It seems people who have no real understanding of the nuances and roles institutions play, being from the role of courts or newsrooms being a check on power rather than ideological want to remake them in their image before spending a couple decades of learning exactly how everything fits in together.
Personal Update
As mentioned, I’m up to my eyeballs in work for my day job and seeing as how this pays in feel goods, it gets second priority. I will try to keep jotting things down and hopefully expanding a bit more but it might be a couple months while I’m in the thick of it.
Seriously. Try to time clips of statements made that are put on the news. It’s nearly always under 5 seconds. Hardly a way to actually deal with issues.