Reviving Leadership’s Standard — Peggy Noonan on Modernity and “The King’s Speech”

09 January 2011

One aspect of where we’ve gone culturally wrong in America is that leadership is not actually about being “common”

“Common” is a loaded word. But using it in the context that follows embraces an essential concept about leadership.

Leadership is not about keeping, or displaying, oneself at the level that everyone else occupies in our graceless, attention-seeking, hedonistic culture.

Making the distinction between “common” and “leader” may define old-fashioned Conservatives

At a fundamental level, the distinction between (a) being one of the boys and girls and (b) becoming an example of what human beings should aspire to characterizes an essential difference between old-fashioned Conservatives and liberals.

Conservative Peggy Noonan’s insight about the standards of leadership

Noonan wrote about qualitative differences in leadership, as displayed between:

(a) U.S. Navy Captain Owen Honors (who allegedly showed the crew lewd and bigoted videos, while second-in-command of the U.S.S. Enterprise in 2006 and 2007)

and

(b) King George VI (who overcame his stammer and his reluctance to be King in the movie, The King’s Speech).

Noonan introduced her theme by addressing America’s cultural confusion:

A lot of our leaders—the only exceptions I can think of at the moment are nuns in orders that wear habits—have become confused about something, and it has to do with being an adult, with being truly mature and sober.

When no one wants to be the stuffy old person, when no one wants to be "the establishment," when no one accepts the role of authority figure, everything gets damaged, lowered.

The young aren't taught what they need to know. And they know they're not being taught, and on some level they resent it.

She provided two examples of the bad behavior that we need to get away from

The first was Captain Honors:

He has to uphold values even though he finds them antique, he has to represent virtues he may not in fact possess, he has to be, in his person, someone sailors aspire to be.

The second example was the British Royal Family, its admirable Queen aside, who made a mistake in taking public relations advice encouraging them to show their “humanity”:

And so they showed their human side, and revealed over the decades that they were not better than anyone else, not more disciplined, serious, patriotic, faithful or self-denying.

This is royalty? Then what are slobs for?

Noonan’s conclusion is that leadership’s rank requires following some simple guidelines

Stay boring, strive to appear to be persons of rectitude and high morality, don't be modern, stand for "the permanent against the merely prevalent," love God and his church, don't act out and act up. Be good.

Which brought her analysis to the worth of the movie, “The King’s Speech”

The movie is about the Duke of York’s struggle, during the 1930s, to overcome his stammer, shyness, and childhood abuse, at a time when England’s crown is forced on him via his brother’s abdication of the throne. It is increasingly clear that England will have to war with Hitler.

The Journal's Joe Morgenstern called the movie "simply sublime," and it is, for some simple reasons. It's about someone being a grown-up, someone doing his job, someone assuming responsibility.

Someone was old-school. Someone wasn't cool.

No wonder at the . . . showing at an uptown Manhattan theatre . . . they burst into applause, and some, you could tell, wanted to cheer.

The Oklahomans I saw the movie with had the same reaction. Oklahoma is about as far from a monarchy-respecting place as it is possible to get in the United States.

“The King’s Speech” masterfully illustrates Noonan’s leadership point

At first glance, The King’s Speech would appear to hold no interest. What’s inspiring about someone overcoming a stammer to give an important, but ceremonial head-of-state speech seventy-one years ago?

As Noonan says, the movie’s inspiration comes from the courageous example the psychically damaged Duke of York sets in accepting the burden that leadership brought with it during the menacing 1930s and into World War II.

The monarchical aspect lends weight to the theme. King and Queen are not for just a few years. They’re for life. When monarchs care about their people (the historical exception), responsibility for demonstrating wisdom, poise, example, courage and action is pressing and “forever.”

With King George VI’s ascension to the throne, England was in a position in which words alone had to formulate the nation’s courage and resistance to Hitler’s evil. Prime Minister Churchill, perhaps more famously, afterward joined the King in carrying the load.

Americans don’t have the historical background to understand the immense threat to survival that England, and later Russia, faced during World War II. In England’s case, national survival depended on the King and Prime Minister’s ability to inspire resistance by displayed nobility and courage.

That’s leadership.

The United States doesn’t have it today.

PeteFree.com

Reviving Leadership’s Standard — Peggy Noonan on Modernity and “The King’s Speech”