1953 and All That: Slouching Towards Tomorrow: The Crisis in American Leadership

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

Why does the United States not have a substantial class of leaders, of whatever party, combining competence with the requisite values and ideals that we share, or aspire to share?

 In this book Professor Don Wallace tries to untangle this absence of leadership, this missing “it,” its causes and the obvious consequences of its absence.

 The book examines two histories: that of Britain from roughly the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, and that of the American upper-class, largely Eastern, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants from roughly the period after the Civil War through the Vietnam era and maybe a bit beyond. The histories serve as templates: America never fully filled the British template—indeed it often sought to abandon it; and America barely filled out the WASP template; America has been too diffuse and variegated. Professor Wallace does not maintain that the past was either better or worse (clearly for many, it was worse) but something different, and possibly not intuitive: that the top coming down has inexorably led to the virtual evaporation of a governing class and destroyed our capacity for leadership, with an inevitable consequent decline in the quality of our public life and our politics. History shows some of the qualities and values of successful leadership: competence, intelligence, and intellectual curiosity; high character and ideals; charisma and eloquence; honor, noblesse oblige and a sense of duty; pragmatism and idealism; and a measure of stoicism. While no individual can embody all of these, a governing class can, and the British and American ones in the past, to some considerable degree, did so. The evolution over recent centuries of the condition of “it,” which embodied those qualities and values, is the heart of the book, and at that heart, stands a mechanism which the author calls the Moral Dialectic. The Dialectic explains why history has brought us to the condition we are in today, and hopefully, how we may extract ourselves from it.