leadership by example • gary e. davis • berkeley


	gedavis.com	campaign 2024

	leadership by example: the appeal of exemplarity gary e. davis	September 4, 2024

Valid leadership exemplifies a balance of receptiveness and responsiveness in
the spirit of good government that I’ve sketched at “avoiding autocracy…” Valid leadership—so well exemplified by Biden—deserves to prevail.

Part of my comment in response to Dionne’s post-Convention aticle on “Harris’s DNC [as] master class” was:

We Americans now have the fleeting chance to show ourselves, as well as the wider world, that American Exceptionalism was always about how we can exceptionally live—as pluralist democratic republic and as cohering republican democracy—not basically as power to prevail. Yet, of course, virtue is an exemplarity which appeals by its example.

As are lives: Trustworthy leadership is infectious. It's the real trickle-down.

Well-directed joy can fuel and sustain progress in history, as well as durable hope.

The 2024 Democratic National Convention is easily regarded as an extended
pep rally which is intended to be soon forgotten. But in good government, values which guide policy are not forgotten.

So, there’s no way to bring demophilic values into meritocratic government other than to insist that their high importance for engaged political life live effectively. “We the people” are the energy that makes good government possible.

I argued four years ago, relative to Biden’s candidacy, that “potential for more democratic engagement in good government calls upon citizens to be more engaged…To Biden’s mind, that life <–> nation bond is a matter of love: of life highly scaled to nation.”

That mattered to Biden deeply. Meanwhile, Harris has been a student of Biden for several years. (Harris, in her DNC remarks, celebrated “the path that we have traveled together.”) No wonder, then, that the DNC was so oriented to binding the lives of citizens with the future of “democracy”—binding notions of family and neighborhood to government as truly communal; binding ordinary virtue (character) with expectations of leadership; binding living values with the values of public policy, binding senses of fair freedom (beyond mere license of liberty) to Constitutional fairness; binding political calling with voter calling; and binding the conception of leadership to the power of American example in global relations.

Word: There can be no good society, no good government, without the sacred-
ness of Our leading words, the language that may cohere us as belonging together across future-oriented time. The Word is conceptual because our grandest values are conceptions of being in Time.

So, when Doug Emhoff calls Kamala “an incredible partner,” that’s about an ability to enown lasting partnership which we all want for all aspects of life: family, neigh-
borhood, profession, and so on. Think about what makes a partnership, and makes it lasting.

That matters. One might take lightly Tim Walz’s wide scale of thankfulness, but that matters. Anyone who has survived tragedy or reached an “impossible” goal
is thankful for the chance, and eager to pay forward through service. That is humanity. That is what we want politics to bring into our lives, being “for the people.”

By the way, what other nation on Earth, what other political party, begins its platform in a spirit of honoring the first gardeners of its continent, as “we gather together to state our values on lands that have been stewarded through many centuries by the ancestors and descendants of Tribal Nations who have been here since time immemorial.”

next—> to be continued