As Trump and his goons strip Americans of our constitutional rights, the silence of the nation’s leadership class is deafening.
I’m old enough to remember when, during the Vietnam war, university presidents utilized their bully pulpits to remind America of its moral center.
Today, university presidents are cowed. I recently talked to one young female college president who told me, point blank, that “university presidents have no business speaking out on public issues”.
The chancellor of my own university, the University of California at Berkeley – the very place where the “free speech movement” began in 1965 – still hasn’t explained why Berkeley last week handed over to the regime the names of 160 students, lecturers, and faculty members who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Some are here on visas and terribly vulnerable. Others lack tenure and are vulnerable in different ways.
It’s not just university presidents. Whatever happened to America’s religious leaders?
During prior crises of conscience, such as the struggle for civil rights, the voices of the nation’s religious leaders were loud and confident. They brimmed with moral power. Today, we hear only the strident voices of the religious right.
What happened to America’s business leaders? They’ve never been especially reluctant to speak out on public issues.
For years Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, has acted as a self-appointed spokesperson for American business, sometimes reminding CEOs of their social responsibilities. This time? Utter silence.
Other CEOs have gone over to the dark side, competing to suck up to the tyrant-in-chief, eager to lavish him with praise, gush over his accomplishments, even hand him gifts of solid gold bullion.
The leaders of America’s legal community? “I want to keep my head down,” the senior partner of a large firm told me. “We have too much to lose.”
The leaders of the media? They’re busy consolidating their ownership over ever more of the nation’s media and dare not upset Trump’s FCC and its Trump toady Brendan Carr.
What of their responsibility to protect free speech? They’re far more interested in maximizing the value of their shares of stock.
And whatever happened to the nation’s political leaders? Where are their voices in this time of democratic crisis?
Most Republicans are zombies and most Democrats wimps.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, won’t even endorse Zohran Mamdani for New York mayor – even though Mamdani is among the most popular young politicians with young voters.
We have to wait for Ted Cruz – Ted Cruz! – to sound the alarm about the FCC’s attack on freedom of speech?
The sad fact is that, like so much else Trump’s reign of terror has revealed, it is showing us a reality we should have known years ago but many of us didn’t want to see: America’s leadership class no longer leads. It hides.
Its obligations to the common good – to the freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom from government arrest and imprisonment without due process, freedom to vote and participate in our democracy, freedom from arbitrary and capricious government decisions – have disappeared.
Instead, people in positions of significant responsibility have succumbed to greed, small-mindedness, insularity, and cowardice.
During a crisis like the one we’re now in, these so-called leaders have abdicated their moral responsibility.
It’s not all bad that America no longer has a leadership class.
True leadership doesn’t necessarily require high office. It doesn’t require a fancy title. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, and countless others who have moved the world held no formal positions of power. Their power came from their moral authority to tell the truth and mobilize others.
The disappearance of America’s leadership class at a time like this means that the rest of us have to be leaders. You must be a leader.
We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now
