Conservative Leadership - Oxymoron

If you’re a Twitter user, you may occasionally receive emails with suggestions of other Twitter users to follow.  I recently received such an email and one of the suggestions was @ChrisWidener, a leadership expert who happened to be followed by a good friend of mine as well as several others that I follow.  That all sounded appealing to me and I usually like to follow such people on Twitter, so I clicked on the link to check out his timeline.

One of the first tweets I noticed on his timeline mentioned the word “thoughtful” and Charles Krauthammer in the same sentence.  And he was being serious.  I find Krauthammer’s views to be neanderthal-like which kind of makes sense since he actually looks like a neanderthal.  Regardless of Mr. Krauthammer’s physical and intellectual shortcomings, this timeline inspection process was not going well at all at this point.  I’m not sure anyone can recover from the unintentional comedy of that first tweet, but I kept looking, and let’s just say, it didn’t get any better.  It was at this point that I read Mr. Widener’s full profile description which mentioned his conservative politics.  Things fell into place at this point.  That piece of the description was notably absent from the email I received.

This quick foray into the mind of a conservative got my thinking about leadership and conservatism and whether or not these two terms have much of a relationship.  Mr. Widener’s timeline does have some useful advice on personal responsibility and other success principles with which I wholeheartedly agree, but dispensing such nuggets is not leadership.  It’s education.  Is it possible he’s confusing the two?  To be honest, I didn’t delve any further into Mr. Widener’s work because quite frankly I couldn’t stomach it, but “Leadership Expert” does sound impressive and who doesn’t want to be a leader?  No wonder he has so many followers - just not me.

However, when I think of leadership, I think about having to deal with real life situations and getting a group of people through it in such a way that the whole benefits or at least comes out better for it.  Leadership addresses reality while modern day conservatism does its utmost to deny it.  At Conservatism's core is complete self-interest and when you look at who stands to benefit the most from the current conservative platform, you see pure greed from the nation’s most wealthy 2%.  They have no interest in leadership, only power.  They serve themselves and subject the rest of the population to a kind of social darwinism that seems completely ironic given the Republican Party’s total reluctance to believe in evolution.

When I consider the idea of conservative leadership, I struggle to think of even one person on the Right whom I would consider to be a great leader.  Leaders do the right thing, not what’s only in their self interest.  And when I refer to the “right thing”, I mean acting ethically.  Character traits such as respect, compassion, honesty, integrity, fairness, kindness are just a sampling of what great leaders actively display on a daily basis.  Name one conservative who demonstrates these traits - I can’t.