The United States of Limited Leadership

Louis René Beres, a professor of international law at Purdue University, is author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law.

"I believe because it is absurd." Everywhere we look, America is battered and broken. Still, we expect that our new president will rescue us.

But our country's problems are irremediable in politics. No new president can halt the corrosive withering of heart, body, and mind that now diminishes and imperils these United States. No matter how well intentioned and capable, a president's rescue program can only tinker at the edges of what is truly important.

Real renewal can never come from our leaders. Every society is ultimately the sum total of individual souls seeking redemption. These souls can never be mended by government or politics.

We Americans now inhabit a society so numbingly false that even our own melancholy is gloss. Wallowing in the dim twilight of conformance, we the people have shown infinite forbearance for imitation and falsehood. Our obsession with easy answers and half-knowledge augurs badly for necessary improvement. Consider, for example, that almost an entire nation now finds "wisdom" in the buffoonery of talk radio.

We the people should not express surprise at the breadth of our failures. American well-being and "democracy" had sprung from a conspicuously engineered consumption. In essence, today's financial scandals are the product of a society where unheroic lives are measured out in coffee spoons, and where feelings of self-worth depend upon what one can buy. What really animated the Wall Street and banking scandals was not greed, but fear of insignificance.

Ground down by the babble of pundits and politicos, we the people are still not motivated by courage and purpose. We even have yet to understand that our badly limping American economy—like the broader society from which it stems—was built entirely upon sand.

In these United States, an authentic individual is little more than a quaint artifact. More refractory than ever to intellect and learning, our mass society still has no intention of taking itself seriously. Headpieces filled with straw, an embittered American herd marches in lockstep toward ever-greater unhappiness, impoverishment, and alienation.

We the people may wish to slow down and smell the roses, but our battered and broken country now imposes upon its exhausted people the breathless rhythm of a vast machine. Witness, each day, the endless line of trains, planes, and automobiles, transporting a weary America to yet another robotic workday bereft of pleasure, without reward and possibly without hope.

What can be done now to escape the pendulum of our own mad clockwork? We pay lip service to the high ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution, but almost no one cares about these musty old documents. We the people lack any genuine sources of national cohesion except for celebrity sex scandals; local sports team loyalties; and the always comforting brotherhoods of war. As for the more than 7 million people stacked cheek to jowl in our medieval prisons, two thirds of those released return promptly to crime and mayhem.

Oddly, we inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once, we even had a unique potential to nurture individuals to become more than a crowd. Then, Emerson had described us as a people animated by industry and self-reliance, not by paralysis, fear, and trembling.

In spite of our proudly cliched claim to "rugged individualism," we Americans are shaped by visceral conformance. Literally amusing ourselves to death, our fragmented society bristles with annoying jingles, insistent hucksterism, crass allusions, and telltale equivocations. Surely, there must be something more to this country than imitation and crude commerce: "I celebrate myself, and sing myself," said the poet Walt Whitman, but today the American Self is created by stupefying "education," far-reaching tastelessness, and a pervasive culture of obscenity.

In the end, credulity is America's worst enemy. Our inclination to believe that societal redemption lies in politics and the presidency remains a potentially fatal disorder. Social and economic issues do need to be addressed by government, but our deeper problems must be solved as individuals.

A diseased civilization compromises with its afflictions. To restore long-term health and prosperity in America, we the people must first look beyond a futile faith in politics. Only when such a necessary swerve of consciousness can become an irreversible gesture—only when we can restore a meaningful, central, and deserved faith in ourselves as individuals—can we the people ever hope to fix a badly broken land. To begin, we can acknowledge the stark limitations of any democracy based upon inane slogans, and insist instead upon the expanding sovereignty of an authentically thinking citizenry.