Moral Leadership Gone Missing: "In today's explosive political landscape, too many politicians seize on issues and glibly translate them into simplistic moral slogans, believing their job is to be moral guardians.".

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: NATIONAL AFFAIRS

WHEN Martin Luther King, Jr., led the civil rights movement, he provided moral leadership, and political leaders followed. Results did not come overnight. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in 1955. Nine years later, Congress passed, and Pres. Lyndon Johnson signed, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Without the moral leadership of Dr. King and other religious leaders, such legislation would not have seen the light of day. They brought moral enlightenment and, eventually, political action followed. In the same decade, religious and educational leaders voiced open opposition to the escalation of the Vietnam War, thus pressuring a pair of presidents, LBJ and Richard Nixon, to seek a political settlement.

It is hard to find such moral leadership today. Instead, we have a bizarre inversion--the political class posits a moral claim, often reduced to a slogan or an acronym, and the religious and educational leaders jump onboard. This inversion distorts a civilized political and cultural dialogue fundamental in a mature democracy. Political leaders should not pretend to be moral philosophers; that is not their business. Democratic politics is about brokering interests--economic, geographic, ecological, and cultural. Ethical issues often are involved, but their genesis and understanding come from outside politics. Complex moral issues require deliberation. Moral leaders can provide clarity in evaluating such problems. Even then, they are not qualified to translate any conclusion into the coin of public policy. That is the politician's job, but theirs is not without a moral dimension. Politics, at its best, becomes a moral activity by reconciling differences and constructing a way of governing a society without chaos, tyranny, or violence. Politics becomes an art when compromises are found where none seem possible.

In today's explosive political landscape, too many politicians seize on issues and glibly translate them into simplistic moral slogans, believing their job is to be moral guardians. This illusion may be understandable since many of their followers are more passionate about political causes than religious faith. As church and synagogue attendance declines, politics sadly takes its place, often as rigid dogma translated into slogans and placed on a placard. Those who do not follow the correct political faith are not merely dissenters, but heretics. Debates become oversimplified or even deadly and can create a Manichean universe. For example, one...