Weekly Digest: The Decline of Local Leadership Culture
Weekly Digest: The Decline of Local Leadership Culture
Where are the leaders we need for today's challenges and opportunities?
Welcome to my weekly digest for August 25, 2023, with the best articles from around the web and a roundup of my recent writings and appearances.
Where Are Today’s Effective Civic Leaders?
On the occasion of the death of Richard Ravitch, one of the key figures who brought NYC back from the brink of ruin, I discuss the downward trajectory of local civic leadership over the past three decades in my most recent piece in Governing magazine. I attribute this primarily to structural forces.
Changes in cities over the course of the last 30 to 40 years have greatly undermined local leadership cultures like the one which produced Ravitch, a lifetime New Yorker. Among the biggest culprits was deregulation that led to corporate consolidation, particularly in banking, utilities and retailing. Back in 1980, the banks in most cities were locally owned and were limited by law to their home markets. Their CEOs were extremely powerful both in their companies and communities. And their personal professional incentives were aligned with those of their locality. The only way to grow their banks or electric utilities was to grow the community where they were based.
Today, many CEOs of once-local companies are branch managers of global firms. Their job is to sit on local boards and dabble in community relations, but they don’t really call the shots anymore. Companies that have remained locally based now typically have national or global reach, so the local market is just one element in a vast portfolio. In a more nationalized and globalized business culture, those who aspire to high corporate positions must take great care to echo standardized positions, particularly around ESG (environmental, social and governance goals) and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). They are constrained by career considerations from taking any truly independent positions or actions.
Click through to read the whole thing.
Best of the Web
Leonard Sax/IFS: Are All-boys Schools the Answer to the Boy Crisis?
Samuel T. Wilkinson/IFS: Marriage Makes Men Better - Yet another Gilderesque portrayal of marriage as a domesticating device for men.
You may be familiar with the fascinating web site WFT Happened in 1971?, which shows how a ton of economic and financial indicators went haywire starting at that time. This person says 2012 is for social indicators what 1971 was for financial and economic ones. It’s a very interesting read, and of course aligns very well with my three worlds of evangelicalism thesis.
Rob Henderson: Without Belief in a God, But Never Without Belief in a Devil - Rob takes a look at Eric Hoffer’s classic book The True Believer.
Salvo: A Tyranny of Managers - An interesting synopsis of a much longer article on managerialism.
WaPo: Where do socioeconomic classes mix? Not church, but Chili’s.
New Content and Media Mentions
Joel Carini discussed my look at Russell Moore’s new book over at his Substack. I also got a mention in one of Paul VanderKlay’s new videos, and at American Reformer.
My guest on the podcast this week was Christine Emba, columnist and editor at the Washington Post. She joined to discuss her blockbuster article “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness” and its follow-up piece.
Paid subscribers can read the transcript.
You can subscribe to my podcast on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
Also new this week:
A look at my new think tank report on the future of Appalachia.
A review of the state of my newsletter, with statistics on readership and the results of my recent reader survey. Thanks to all of you who participated
Post-Script: Radicalizing the Romanceless
This 2014 article from Scott Alexander is a good look at what was and was not driving the rise of the manosphere. Keep in mind, 2014 is when the manosphere started to get big and cross over into public consciousness. You could think of it as a sort of “golden age” (if one could use such as a term for it) of the manosphere.
We will now perform an ancient and traditional Slate Star Codex ritual, where I point out something I don’t like about feminism, then everyone tells me in the comments that no feminist would ever do that and it’s a dirty rotten straw man. And then I link to two thousand five hundred examples of feminists doing exactly that, and then everyone in the comments No-True-Scotsmans me by saying that that doesn’t count and those people aren’t representative of feminists. And then I find two thousand five hundred more examples of the most prominent and well-respected feminists around saying exactly the same thing, and then my commenters tell me that they don’t count either and the only true feminist lives in the Platonic Realm and expresses herself through patterns of dewdrops on the leaves in autumn and everything she says is unspeakably kind and beautiful and any time I try to make a point about feminism using examples from anyone other than her I am a dirty rotten motivated-arguer trying to weak-man the movement for my personal gain.
…
I don’t think I ever claimed to be, or felt, entitled to anything. Just wanted to know why it was that people like Henry [a low life and admitted physical abuser of women] could get five wives and I couldn’t get a single date. That was more than enough to get the “shut up you entitled rapist shitlord” cannon turned against me, with the person who was supposed to show up to give me the battery of tests to distinguish whether I was a poor minority or a Poor Minority nowhere to be seen. As a result I spent large portions of my teenage life traumatized and terrified and self-loathing and alone.
Some recent adorable Tumblr posts pointed out that not everyone who talks about social justice is a social justice warrior. There are also “social justice clerics, social justice rogues, social justice rangers, and social justice wizards”. Fair enough.
But there are also social justice chaotic evil undead lich necromancers.
Click over to read the whole thing.
It's hard to think of any social problem that was not exacerbated by going off the gold standard.
Not to plug my own piece in First Things (of course I am), but Bullivant points to 2012 as a watershed in the dynamics of nonversion, and a shift from Nones/Atheists/Agnostics being a hard core of fanatically dedicated libertarians, the far-far left, and out-homosexuals. I had someone object to my article on the grounds that everyone they knew in the atheist community in the 90's had thought deeply about religious questions, and I responded that professed-atheists then were a small percentage of the population, rather than the 20-something percent that they are today. We saw a massive swing beginning around the 2010's of people who were atheist without really belonging to one of the tiny pre-2000 subcultures, or what we might crudely describe as "normie Atheists."
Like I said in our interview a while back, I don't really like the term "woke" because it refers to extreme people, and extreme people being extreme is a dog-bites-man phenomenon. Of course people who make a living in HR, run DEI nonprofits, potentially profit from group set-asides, or have deep-seated psychological resentments are going to be attracted to this. What interests me is the "New Ideology," the political religion, the comprehensive belief system that the "woke" and normal people have in common. The man-bites-dog story is when well-adjusted upper-middle class folk with families and normal jobs spout dogmas and doctrines that they hold in common with the so-called "woke," that would have horrified all decent people a mere 30 years ago, and don't understand why anyone would disagree with them. That's where my expertise in totalitarianism and political religions come into play. Arendt is right that most of the time, evil is pretty banal.
And that, I believe, is why it's so hard to actually measure it. What we saw in 2012 was an essentially religious phenomenon. It was a mass-conversion that occurred invisibly because the names we use for beliefs didn't change when the substance of the beliefs changed. Massive numbers of people left Christianity for a new religious system that we don't yet have words to describe, and because it was (perhaps deliberately) left undescribed we cannot adequately articulate what happened. And that's why we have so many people who still use the rhetoric or language of Christianity to defend a profoundly un-Christian worldview grounded in a metaphysics and ontology hostile to orthodoxy. It's like an inverted pseudo-problem: rather than clarifying our language to dissolve the problem, I think a clarification of language would only illustrate the real gulf between Christians and those who converted to the New Ideology. And that would probably be, in the long run, a good thing when people are forced to acknowledge the difference and choose.