Word: followship
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This is meant to seem admirable. And it is, in a way, I suppose. Before Bush, leadership had fallen out of favor as a political strategy. Followship was all the rage: follow the polls, follow the focus groups, follow your consultants. "Leadership," wrote Dick Morris, the Iago of the Clinton era, "is a dynamic tension between where a politician thinks his country must go and where his voters want it to go." And guess who usually wins that tug-of-war? (Actually, it's neither the voters nor the politician; it's the consultant who massages the data and advises...
...thing to understand may be that the nature of the followship has changed, or has seemed to change. Expanded democracy and cultural diversity have conspired with good economic times and the fantastically proliferated electronic democracy of information to make leadership in the old presidential sense seem somewhat obsolete. Clinton saw the change and adjusted to it brilliantly...
...moment, the American danger may lie in the opposite direction - leadership weakened by fractured followship and a shadow of illegitimacy. We inaugurate a new president who has been ambiguously fifty-fiftied into the White House. His enemies wish him ill with an almost unparalleled ugliness and intensity...