How can that be one might ask? Autocrats are currently having their day with their followers and it is becoming obvious to even a blind mouse what a mess we have. Just one example is wars that have no end because the soul of the autocrat is full of holes and can never experience completion. But as we have learned in the United States, it is followers who elect the autocrats. The followers hear the Pied Piper Promises of the wanna be dictator, set their minds and life on a shelf and begin the business of submission as a follower. Autocrats and followers lock in into the transactional sale of personal agency when personal agency in community is the central stuff of democracy. 

Good leaders lead from one step behind the people they are leading. In a crisis they may stop forward for the emergent response, but always realizing the risk of such a maneuver. Democracy is a arrangement of consolidating the individual agency of the citizens into a community consenual force of power. Democratic leadership reads the room in terms of the needs of the people in the room and responds to find ways to meet a collective need. To fully understand the difficulty of leadership, try to lead a cat on a leash. The feline is the perfect example of individual agency. You will find your self mostly just dragging that cat to where you thought the two of you should go. Right now America is waking up to find itself being dragged and drugged on the autocrats leash to places they don’t want to go. Unlike the resistive cat we can cut the leash.

Modest Proposal for Good

In a democracy, you, the citizen are not asked to be a follower. You are asked to live your life in response to the needs of the times you are born in expressing personal agency responsibly in community. Living the reality of your times and creating solutions to problems is your job, and your leaders are required to respond by constructing the consensus values and morality serving from one step behind. In a democracy the people set the direction and the politician builds the track to serve the direction. Not complicated but very hard work. Hard work works. Lets get to work. That would be good.