The bottomless pit that is Matt Gaetz managed to reach another low this week when he brought his performance art to another sad level. For those that really don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, Gaetz cancelled his membership to conservative hot spot “The Capital Hill Club.” Seems they got under the Congressman’s skin when they started requiring patrons to be vaccinated.

Like just about anyone else, I was enjoying Twitter just for the comments. Dozens retorted back with some making mention of the fact that Gaetz could be enjoying three meals a day at Club Fed in the near future. That of course was a veiled reference to his possible sex trafficking charges that could come some time this year. This story isn’t really about Gaetz. We could go off the deep end as it pertains to leadership. We can talk about moving cheese, personality profiling, communication models and other such nonsense and really talk about nothing.

True leadership is nearly as much about sacrifice and service as it is about any of those other buzz words or phrases. Gaetz happens to be hitting upon pandemic issues and like any crisis, the pandemic has revealed who the leaders are and who the pretenders are. From the get go there have been two effective strategies that have helped deal with the pandemic: vaccines and masks. While not perfect, they have allowed business to continue. If the vast majority would do both we wouldn’t see our hospitals clogged with idiots.

Our beloved governor in Texas has barred us from requiring masks. He’s barred public places and private places from such a requirement. A political philosophy that prides itself in allowing businesses and private entities to run themselves as they see fit is not allowing them to do it. They’ve essentially reduced themselves to governing by temper tantrum.

So, in our schools we are left to simply highly encourage that administrators, teachers, and students wear masks. In a world where you cannot require compliance, you are left to hope that adults will act like leaders and students will be inclined to follow their example. On my campus the administrators can’t be bothered to wear masks. Some of the teachers can’t either. You can’t make them do it and suggesting it would trample on their precious rights.

It’s all a failure of leadership. Really it’s a foundational failure of adulting. Most parents understand that they have to do things they don’t want to do. Most adults understand that we have to do things we don’t want to do. We may think it’s stupid or that it doesn’t really apply to us. We may think it’s a waste of time. Somewhere deep in the recesses of our psyche we know it really isn’t meant for us. Leaders understand this. Those who like to play leader do not.

Those who like to play leader will go to any lengths to avoid the simplest of things. They avoid the simplest of things because they are afraid it will make them look weak. So, they’ll drink their own urine. They’ll take medicine meant for barnyard animals. They may even resort to bleach or shooting sunlight up their butt. They’ll try all of these mind-numbingly stupid remedies and more just to avoid a simple shot and a simple mask. Good leaders lead by example. Good leaders subjugate their wants and needs for the good of the group. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough good leaders.

We were driving home from a volleyball tournament on Sunday and came upon a vehicle that looked like it had the stereotypical Trump flag. You know the one. It’s the flag that is somehow bigger than any American flag nearby. Often these flags are flown above the American flag if there even is one. Below is what we actually saw.

So, obviously we chuckled for a few seconds as we considered the expert troll job that had been done on us and everyone else. Then, it hit me as it has before on numerous occasions. The last five years have been the lowest point in our nation’s collective history. I know that’s saying a lot but it is unfortunately true.

Good leaders lift us up. They make us reach for the stars and if we can’t take hold of the stars we at least can grab the moon. As Lincoln said, they appeal to the better angels of our nature. They manage to somehow inspire us to be more than what we are because they have moments where they are more than what they are. They do this at the worst of possible times. They are at their best when everything seems dark and gloomy.

To say one thing is the tragedy of the last five years is to insult all of the victims of numerous tragedies. You have hurricane victims on Puerto Rico that never got the aid they needed. You have families at the border who were forever separated. You had victims of forest fires that saw aid delayed. We have had over 600,000 victims of the Coronavirus and probably 500,000 of those could have been avoided with simple competent governance.

His trade wars impacted workers in numerous industries and the tax giveaway to the rich also impacted lower wage earners negatively. Meanwhile, people of color, those of various sexual orientations and gender identities suffered as well. So, for me to come on here and say the tragedy of the last five years was anything other than those things could be the height of insensitivity. Yet, that is exactly what I’m going to do.

That is because all of those things could be wrapped into a simple bow. The style of leadership that inspired some to offer more fealty to him than to the country is a dangerous style of leadership. It has made us collectively worse than we have ever been. The flag above is a perfect example. It takes an awful amount of hate to get someone to fork over the dough to buy such a flag and then mount it on their truck. It shows that they want to give out a collective FU to their neighbors that may have supported the ex-president.

Think of the arguments in favor of the “rigged election.” Biden’s crowd sizes were so small. No one flies a Biden flag. How could he have possibly won when there are so many Trump flags out there? How could he have won when so many attended the Trump rallies? It just doesn’t makes sense to them.

I never saw a flag for any other president before this. Republican or Democrat they just didn’t exist. Sure, there were political rallies and sure sometimes candidates got riffing and started spouting stuff that wasn’t true, but with only a few notable exceptions (George Wallace or Spiro Agnew) no one was inciting violence. That is until now.

The tragedy of the last five years is that everyone of us has become the worst version of ourselves. More that death, destruction, economic ruin, and horrible discrimination, that statement is a powerful one that has to be soaked in. We have been made worse. While each of us must contend with our own consciences to grapple with the cold, hard reality it is also a reflection of really bad leadership.

In the most difficult moments of our nation’s history there was always a unity that was established at least at the end. The civil war was dreadful and yet the country found a way to reunite. Natural disasters have inspired moments where we saw the worst of humanity and yet the best of humanity prevailed. Beyond COVID, I’m not even sure what the singular moment of the last five years will bring other than the man himself.

It isn’t even so much deciding whether we are for him or against him. Those decisions were made a long time ago for almost everyone. If people are still on the fence about Trump I can’t even begin to wrap my head around that. The decision we have to make is how we will choose to move forward. Will we hold those grudges against those in the other camp or try to find the piece of humanity that exists in everyone? It’s a hard road to travel down, but we’ve travelled it before and up until now we have always come out on the other side.

I’ve never been a real Democratic party stalwart.  Though my grandfather, who was a Methodist preacher, described himself as a Texas Democrat when I was a kid, I’ve never thought of myself that way until many years later.  In the recent past, I’ve described myself with the same label, but to be honest, I really think of myself more as a Texas Progressive. And, I think some Democratic leaders are idiots.  Sorry if that offends some sensibilities.

I was never very outspoken or political until the late 90s/early 2000s when I got led (lured?) into party involvement, primarily after I was introduced to Nancy Pelosi when she was growing the DCCC and running for Speaker.  In 2001, at my first fancy Washington dinner with Pelosi for the DCCC, I shocked my table mates declaring that I was not a Democrat, nor really anything in particular, and that I thought for myself.  They looked at me as if I wasn’t wearing any pants or something.  Over the coming years, though, I evolved, and then went all-in for Obama very early.  I was surprised by the vitriol about my decision from Texas Dems I had come to know; one even tsk-tsked me about how stupid I was to support that unqualified “guy” over the real leader, Hillary Clinton.  But I was steadfast in my belief that Obama was the right candidate at the right time for the right reasons.  That worked out pretty well.

During the 2008 primaries, though, my dislike and distrust of party politics was strengthened by the behavior of party loyalists.  The campaign was vicious, as we all know.  Hillary hung on long after she lost until the second night of the convention when she finally caved.  After the convention, though, it got even worse. All the Obama haters poured into the campaign, and elbowed out early Obama supporters like me.  And Obama let it happen, trying desperately to get Clinton loyalists into his camp.  It worked and he won, but many of us who had enthusiastically supported him got steamrolled big time by the establishment Dems.  After the election, it was back to business as usual with the same people doing the same thing in local and state parties, and especially the DNC.  It made me sick.  The resulting disaster in 2016 was easily foreseen by anyone paying attention.

Which brings us to today.  Even with the worst president in US history infesting the White House spewing racist hatred and nonsensical tirades, the Democratic party still can’t find itself.  As I’ve written about before, party leadership is so entrenched and calcified that they think their silly slogan “A Better Deal” is somehow fresh new ground in which to plant a crop of new party loyalists, but it’s simply not.  The party is controlled by east and west coast urban elites and social activists, and has really disengaged from its base of working people, unions, and just regular folks.  A new report by Cheri Bustos, a third term Democrat in the House representing northwest Illinois summarizes the problem.  She points out some pretty grim facts:

“The number of Democrats holding office across the nation is at its lowest point since the 1920s and the decline has been especially severe in rural America.”

For example, in 2009, Democrats held 57 percent of the heartland’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Now: 39 percent. In 2008, Barack Obama won seven of the eight heartland states. In 2012, he won six. In 2016? Trump won six.  Of the 737 counties in the midwest, Trump won all but 63. The party has lost the heartland, at least as a reliable constituency.  Repubs control the statehouses in 32 states.  Even with horrible policies, the Repubs dominate the center of the country.  Why?  Because they push the buttons that appeal to the heartland, but not just God, guns, and gays, but government incompetence, “job killing” regulations, and the plight of working class voters.  The Dems’ problem, even when they talk the opposite, is that the party suffers from serious group think, and demands ideological purity in all issues.  There’s no room in the “big tent party” for those opposed to abortion, those who believe in more conservative fiscal policy, or have concerns different from the coasts and urban areas.  Party leadership talks all about diversity, but allows only certain brands of diversity.

As a result, many traditional voters don’t believe the national party speaks to them.  National leaders give lip service to jobs, but then don’t really do anything about jobs when they are in power.  They talk a lot about wage equality, but don’t talk to the problems of that welder from Ohio or that farmer in Iowa.  And because there are fewer and fewer Dems representing the heartland, the problem becomes a vicious circle where the remaining Dems focus on their constituencies rather than those Dems serving life sentences in Red Land by accident of geography.  That’s how you get lifelong Dems voting for Donald Trump.  His lies and promises speak to them better than platitudes from some “Latte-Sipping Panty Waist” from San Francisco.

I don’t have an answer to the problem more than imploring organizations like the DCCC and local parties to stop raising money from Dems in red states to shore up the base in blue states.  Plus, they’ve GOT to talk about other issues besides marriage equality, abortion, and religious tolerance.  Those issues are certainly important, but they’re not the ONLY issues. They’ve GOT to address infrastructure; they’ve GOT to streamline the bureaucracy for businesses.  Being in business myself, I have to reluctantly admit that the federal bureaucracy for certain businesses in glacially slow.  In one of my companies, it routinely took FOUR YEARS to get a remediation plan for a gas well site on federal land approved.  FOUR YEARS?  And the entrenched bureaucrats would take the maximum time to get anything done.  If the time limit was 30 days for them to respond to a permit, you can bet on the 30th day at 5 pm, you’d get another data request or modification requirement that would stretch the time another 30 days.  This kind of bureaucracy, historically favored by Dems, is intended to improve safety and protect the environment, but it’s used as a weapon by unaccountable bureaucrats to make it as expensive as possible for private industry to operate. And I’m speaking from personal experience.  Like it or not, that kind of policy destroys jobs, pisses people off, and shifts votes to idiots like Trump.

The Dems have a once in a decade chance here to make some progress.  But if they don’t stop doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, they will be able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, á la 2016.  And the country simply can’t afford that result again.