For the past eight years, America has been swept up in the fervor of personality cults. First it was the cult of Barack Obama, a Messianic figure who shattered the White House color barrier and drew adoring fans to project onto him their highest hopes of racial unity, hope, and economic progress. Yet throughout his presidency, Obama did not, do what Harvard leadership professor Ronald Heifetz calls “give the work back to the people.” He used government as the means to achieve his agenda rather than fulfilling his campaign refrain that “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” Obama used the cudgel of federal authority to impose external mandates when many of the changes he sought could be significantly improved through behavioral, cultural changes and the free market.He was seeking for what Heifetz calls “technical fixes” for “adaptive problems,” e.g. expanding Medicaid and assuming that would improve outcomes without acknowledging the behavioral changes of diet and exercise would be much more effective at improving people’s health. Expanding the welfare system is a technical fix that does not address the systemic, chronic problem of unraveling family structure driving the cycles of poverty, high school dropouts, gangs, and incarceration.America’s new…
See original post: America’s Strength is in Her People, Not Cult Personalities