My most recent book – Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers – concludes with this brief paragraph.
In the end, then, this is a book about time. About what happens, and does not happen, when leaders begin to go bad and then get worse. About how time is finite. About how time is of the essence.
Why does time matter as much as it does? Because once bad leaders and their followers dig in, they dig in deep and then deeper, making them finally exceedingly difficult to excise or extract. In other words, the more time passes the heavier the lift.
Bad leaders and their enablers understand this. On the assumption that President Donald Trump is a bad leader – a leader who is less competent and ethical than he is incompetent and unethical – the best example of an enabler who grasps the importance of time is his longtime advisor, Steve Bannon.
In a 2019 interview Bannon famously talked about “flooding the zone.” By which he meant that as soon as Trump again became president – which Bannon devoutly and, as it turned out, correctly believed he would – he should act and enact whatever he could as fast as he could. So fast that the opposition would never know what hit them. “All we have to do is flood the zone,” Bannon said. “Every day we hit them” – by “them” he meant the media and the public – “they’ll bite on one and we’ll get all our stuff done. Bang. Bang. Bang. These guys will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
Which is precisely what happened during the three months since Trump moved back into the White House. Muzzle velocity not only at home but abroad. Muzzle velocity to which other leaders everywhere are scrambling to respond. Muzzle velocity which to the opposition is as destabilizing as stunning.
The straits we’re in were foretold by a few but missed by the many – for example by most of America’s most prominent chief executives. It’s why this moment in American history is fraught with anxiety about the future of democracy. It’s why most of the best and brightest – for example, partners in the nation’s most prestigious law firms, and administrators in the nation’s most prestigious universities – have been caught flatfooted. It’s why most of the best and brightest seem to have no idea how critical, how essential, they stand up to a bully with a bully pulpit.
What’s happening in the United States right now is not unique. It’s happened before – repeatedly. Problem is most of America’s leadership class seem never to have cracked a history book.
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Note: For more on fighting not following see the two posts below.