Our search for leadership
How we look for leadership matters. Replacing Sen. Schumer as the Senate minority leader might be warranted (even needed) but isn't the right answer to the right question we should be asking about the leadership we need right now.
Amidst the muddy uncertainty of President Trump's ongoing careless, lawless dismantling of the public systems we rely on to support and take care of each other, people are craving leadership. And in the wake Congressional Democrats's failure to coordinate their budget strategy, many are calling for Senator Schumer to step down from leadership. Maybe it is time for new Senate leadership, but even the way we are asking the question (and certainly the way the press is asking and analyzing that question) desperately needs to change.
"Who is leading The Democrats?" – asking this question differently would lead us to different answers and give us back not just the sense of comfort we're seeking, but real agency in this process.
The traditional way to interpret that question misunderstands the moment, plays into President Trump's strongman mythology, and undermines one of our most important sources of strength. "Who" is not singular. And "The Democrats" is not singular, much less comprehensive. The scrambling "somebody should" vibes and the pontificating about this question is focused on singular voices or how the answer to this question will create a hero to President Trump's villain in our modern political-cultural mythology – and even worse is oriented toward the competitive, candidate-centric politics of celebrity that immediately frames the answer in the context of the next presidential race that is four years (and potentially hundreds of thousands of damaged lives) away.
What if we asked this question this way?
What networks of leaders are creating the interconnected communities of power and practice we need to lead America in a new direction?
The question can't be about identifying someone who can out-manhandle American civic life from President Trump or Elon Musk. Reducing the question to a single voice is convenient and simple, but serves the MAGAist frame of the conflict and diminishes the exceptional power of creativity that emerges from the collaboration of the wildly heterogeneous communities that still believe in the possibility of a just, free, creative nation building a future in solidarity and kindness – even when they use different language to describe that shared future.
It's about how the interconnected communities of different voices and perspectives combine in creative, adaptable ways to lead us in new directions. If we don't start being more ambitious and proactive, we are going to keep getting the shitty scraps of what's left over in the process of sacrificing our civic life to a President Trump's self-centered grift.
Instead of looking for a leader, if we are able to see ourselves in solidarity with others and see our duty to others as an invitation, not a debt, we will see ourselves as partial, imperfect, and required components of the right answer to the right question. That there couldn't possibly be a leader to the complex, interconnected network of allies that make up the massive anti-MAGA majority in this country.
Then the next questions become: where are these leaders coordinating and collaborating? And who in my network can I elevate? How can I invite the people in my circles into this better question? And instead of looking to others or embracing fragile magical thinking about any one person as a foil to President Trump, we start to work, to organize, to build diverse communities of power capable of leading and serving and reclaiming our moral clarity – especially when the national levers of power are out of reach, rather than pushing a fragile homogeneity defined in the language and framing of an immoral, un-American American President.
Last updated: 17 Mar 2025
