Ashcroft on Leadership

I came across this quote by John Ashcroft speaking on the Freakonomics Radio Show.

"Leadership in a moral and cultural sense may be even more important than what a person does in a governmental sense. A leader calls people to their highest and best. ... No one ever achieves greatness merely by obeying the law. People who do above what the law requires become really valuable to a culture. And a President can set a tone that inspires people to do that."

Ashcroft is right. Great leaders will rise above the laws in crisis. They will call us to our highest and best. Plato distinguishes between shepherds and kings. Shepherds care for their flocks. Kings lead. There is an important distinction to be recalled.

What Ashcroft doesn't say is that there is a thin and yet all-so-important line separating great leaders from criminals. Both break the law. But only the leader's act shows itself to be right and thus re-makes the law. A great leader shows the earlier law to have been wrong and forges a new moral and also written law through the force and power of moral example. Raskolnikov knew that leaders and criminals were of a kind; he also knew he was not the great man he wanted to be.

Ashcroft also forget to mention that it is one thing for a President to call on people to reach their highest selves beyond the law. It is another thing altogether for the Attorney General of the United States.

Our problem today is that we are too afraid of Presidents who might lead, and for good reason. The quality of our leaders is weak. They cannot be trusted to lead us without constraints. The result is we recoil from leadership and our politics loses all spontaneity, all freedom, and all possibility of starting something new.

—RB