Sane Leadership
The title of Margaret Wheatley’s new book, Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity intrigued me enough to read it. Facing reality means knowing where we are now and how we got here. Claiming leadership means determining the role of leaders now. And restoring sanity means creating islands of sanity. As with her prior books, one cannot easily summarize it. Rather, I will try focus on the leadership core of her book.
Sane leadership and local leadership comprise the major threads of her leadership discourse. If I had to pick out her core focus it would be this: Sane leadership is the unshakeable faith in people’s capacity to be generous, creative, and kind.… Read the rest
White Evangelicals, Power, Fear, and Trump
An earlier post mentioned that differentiating the subcategories of category 2 () was very difficult. This post, the first of several on the Christian Right or evangelicals, illustrates this difficulty. I place this post under the category of Christian Right although it mentions the 2016 election in which 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Since the late ’70s the Christian Right has significantly and continually affected our society and polity. I believe this makes it worthy to treat as a separate subcategory. At times, however, I will treat the Christian Right within the context of Trump’s nomination and election.… Read the rest
White Voter Support for Trump
Two frameworks are useful in trying to explain the surprising 2016 election, and even the surprising nomination, of Donald Trump. One framework focuses on the macro level, covering the larger circumstances and conditions that permitted if not facilitated Trump’s election. The other framework focuses on the micro level, on the specific variables that resulted in Trump’s election. One can justly see Trump’s election as a perfect storm, a combination of many things that permitted his razor edge victory, about 70,000 votes total in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
American voters have gone to the polls five times in this young century to elect a president.… Read the rest
Liberal and Conservative Ideological Identities
Political polarization may be the most fundamental problem in contemporary American democracy. Much of the literature on democratic backsliding centers, for example, on intense political polarization as the primary cause of this backsliding. Recent research suggests that ideological self-categorization underlies affective political polarization. A very recent paper by Kristen Hanson, Emma O’Dwyer, and Evanthia Lyons make this point very clear.
Social identity and political ideology
Using social identity theory and self-categorization theory Hanson et al. explore the subjective meaning people attribute to liberal and conservative labels. Social identity theory posits that politically polarizing behavior is a consequence of self-categorization. Self-categorization creates a social identity that forms a person’s self-concept.… Read the rest
Leading through Wise Reasoning
Wisdom and leading might seem an obvious pairing. However, the subject index in the Sage Handbook on Leadership (2011) identifies the word “wisdom” exactly zero times. Perhaps scholars and practitioners just assume that effective leaders are also wise leaders. Perhaps the difficulty of either measuring the concept or even having near consensus concept’s dimension prevents scholarly research on the possible link between leading and wisdom. (A good overview of these issues can be found here.) Yet most people possess a certain understanding or view of wisdom. Wisdom in this common sense often means knowledge and experience that produces a set of abilities in a person.… Read the rest
Ideological identities and wise reasoning
This post continues the comment portion of the last post on liberal and conservative identities. The comments here primarily focus on the summaries drawn by the research authors on those participants who self-identified as conservatives. The conservative participants equated conservative beliefs with American values. Many equated liberals with socialism or as heading toward socialism. They saw the liberal outgroup as un-American. Although none of the self-identified liberal participants used the word socialism, many conservative participants thought socialism was a threat. Conservatives saw political conflict in the United States as a battle between two ideologies, American and non-American. They perceived themselves as defending America against an un-American liberal aggressor.… Read the rest
Obama to Trump Voters
People who voted for Obama in 2012 and for Trump in 2016, about 5.7 million voters, played an essential role in Trump’s victory. A research paper by Stephen Morgan and Jiwon Lee explore the characteristics of these voters. While their research focuses primarily on white non-Hispanic “crossover” voters they also discuss the characteristics of white non-Hispanic voters who did not vote in 2012 but voted for Trump in 2016. The authors also generate some comparisons between these two sets of voters and Romney-Trump voters.
Cross-pressured voters are those voters who are subject to conflicts and inconsistencies in whom to vote for.… Read the rest
Aquinas: Truth-Telling as a Moral Virtue
I recently came across a paper on Thomas Aquinas and truth-telling and wondered whether a medieval theologian/philosopher could say anything to an increasingly post-truth world. The author of the paper, Fainshe Ryan, quotes some lines from Michiko Kakutani’s book, The Death of Truth: “…cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e.… Read the rest
U.S. Census and Voter Suppression? (1 of 2)
A recent University of Memphis Law Review article fleshes out how routine U.S. Census undercounting or possible miscounting facilitates voter suppression and gerrymandering. The article, by Molly Danahy and Danielle Lang, provides context to the recent controversy over the proposed addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. Census.
The authors beleive the Census undercounts and distorts the representation of minority communities and has done so throughout its history. Some of the reasons for this concern the ongoing problem of counting hard-to-count populations and how the Census deals with prison populations. This post focuses on “prison gerrymandering.” The next post will cover census undercounting.… Read the rest
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