Does America Want Submissive Leaders?

In the wake of the George Floyd riots, Democratic Party leaders have assumed extraordinarily submissive postures, apparently on the theory that they are guilty in Floyd’s death.

They said it, I didn’t.

Here, the Democratic Congressional delegation (or a significant part of it) knelt for eight minutes and 43 seconds in honor of George Floyd, the armed robber, while wearing black separatist garb. I think that is Nancy Pelosi front and center, but she looks only around 70 years old, so I could be wrong:

In this shot, a whole bunch of white people, including Police Chief Michael Shaw of the Webster, Massachusetts, police department, lie face down as encouraged by a group of Black Lives Matter activists.

According to the Webster Telegram, Chief Shaw joined a crowd of several hundred demonstrators “in laying [sic] on the ground for 8 minutes while screams of ‘mama’ and ’I can’t breathe,’ the last words of George Floyd,” were yelled out.

Here is another one: white people wash the feet of black activists in Cary, North Carolina:

For the moment, let’s put aside the moral question of whether such submission is appropriate. My own view is that liberals are always happy to apologize for something that someone else did–usually someone who is not here to defend himself–while stubbornly resisting any accountability for their own disastrous actions.

But let’s ask a different question: do Americans want political leaders who are, by personality, submissive? Who kneel to people who hate them, and adopt those haters’ symbols? Whose first impulse is to apologize, prostrate themselves and wash someone else’s feet?

I doubt it. Submissive people generally don’t get far in politics. The closest analogy I can think of is Jimmy Carter, whose demeanor was sometimes apologetic, but who didn’t begin to approach the pathological level of submissiveness that we see from Democratic Party leaders today. Yet he was destroyed by the entirely non-submissive, non-apologetic Ronald Reagan.

Through human history, people have never chosen to be led by the ashamed, the inadequate, the inferior. If that is the posture the Democratic Party wants to assume, welcome to it. Americans will vote for the strong, the confident, the forward-looking, the unabashed. Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like Donald Trump.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses