We shouldn’t look to a ‘coach in chief’ to rescue us politically from the top down.
We shouldn’t look to a ‘coach in chief’ to rescue us politically from the top down. We should look to those around us to maintain and restore our civic life from the bottom up.
E ven at our most politically cynical, Americans would probably not want to have a king.
Presidential elections can be dissatisfactory. But today ought at least to remind us that the responsibility to determine our political leaders falls to us. Given how that often turns out, Election Day can become an occasion to imagine a better politics. One headed not by a king, but also maybe not by a president. What about a “coach”?
So argued Sam Walker recently in the New York Times. Walker, a scouting consultant for the Los Angeles Rams and the author of The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership, has taken away from his experience in sports lessons he believes apply to politics. “Americans are tired of being led,” he writes. “But they are genuinely open to being coached.” But his attempt to force the coaching model on American politics is not only flawed on its own terms; it also ignores what our civic life really needs.
It is true that coaches have an honored place in our culture. If any title has sneaked past the Constitution’s proscription against titles of nobility — appropriate for a polity that revolted against a monarchy and, in so doing, created a new kind of self-governing republic — it is that of coach. Those in charge of teams at any level of play can earn the term as a veritable prefix, not just to their athletes, but to the wider communities who value their leadership.
Walker believes there is wider relevance for this style of leadership. He leans primarily on the example of Dwight Eisenhower, who among his many accomplishments was once a skillful college football coach. Walker credits Ike’s successful presidency in part to the fact that “he led like a football coach.” Great coaches of Walker’s acquaintance obsess over strategy, but also delegate. They inspire, but “almost never at the expense of projecting consistency and composure.” They “overcommunicate,” but don’t fearmonger. They know that game play is unpredictable, “so you must be prepared to pivot and be willing to compromise, and you cannot be too precious about your principles.” And they let victories feel like they belong to everyone.
Even on its own terms, this analogy, made as literally as Walker does, breaks down. Are voters the players? Who picked the coach? Who gets to fire him? What are the plays? Who is the opposing team? Outside of wars or other emergencies, what does it mean to win? From where does one derive his principles, if not from the act of coaching itself?
That latter question becomes even more pressing when Walker tries to tie in current political figures. He cites the supposed appeal of Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and current Democratic vice-presidential candidate, who was once a high-school football coach. Whatever his accomplishments in that role, when he entered politics, he became subject to the same messiness and constraints that politics imposes on others — and has a mixed record of dealing with them. As governor, he also had the power to impose political constraints on others. He used that power to make life more difficult for coaches and athletes in his state. And let’s not even mention Kamala Harris’s misbegotten attempt to rally the defeated Howard University Bison. Walker’s attempt to cast political figures he admires in the most favorable possible light makes clear the limitations of his framework.
Coaching can be a proving ground for leadership. But it’s unwise to analogize the presidency, a unique and important office, to any other role. Distortions inevitably result. A national coach comes a little too close to a national dad, something Walz has also been cast as. Both designations would appear to be humanizing. In fact, they are aggrandizing to the politicians to whom they’re attached, who take on quasi-mythic proportions when so described. And they are belittling to the citizenry, who are either “open to being coached” in the former case, or children in the latter. Both degradations are unworthy of republican self-government and edge us back toward the monarchical.
These understandings of the presidency are just other forms of the same executive-centric rancor that has plagued modern politics. The growth of the federal government and the administrative state, the atrophying of the legislative branch, and the media’s attraction to the presidency’s convenient singularity have made the office the focus of national life far out of proportion even to the considerable powers the Constitution grants it. I wondered four years ago whether “the executive-centric rancor of today’s national life will only continue to get worse.” It has indeed, and neither side of the political aisle has much of an incentive for restraint should its herald end up in the Oval Office.
Arguments such as Walker’s are a small but real reason why. He fantasizes about a “coach in chief” who “could unite us in ways we have not seen for a very long time.” But “unity” in politics is usually a thinly disguised way that one partisan means “doing what I want,” and imposing that vision from the top down. That is only a recipe for political aggravation, and ultimately, a decrease in the civic comity — which does not always require unity — essential in American life.
And if that’s what we need more of, then we’re better off not looking to a coach in chief, but to the kinds of offices and stations throughout the country of which the coach is but one illustrative example. Coaches have much in common with these other roles. They’re not all perfect; in fact, some are, have been, and will be quite bad. But at their best, they can model virtue for the young. They can impart valuable lessons about perseverance, grit, humility in victory and tenacity in defeat, discipline, and more — lessons that actually are applicable beyond sports in much more direct and less problematic ways. They can even be helpful mentors off the field, and reinforce physical activity as a pillar of community life. If nothing else, they help get kids moving.
This is the sort of figure we need more of. American politics, in its sprawling, federalist expanse, both depends on and cultivates a virtuous citizenry, doing the work of self-government at every level of life. We should look to those around us to maintain and restore our civic life from the bottom up. We shouldn’t look to a “coach in chief” to rescue us politically from the top down. Putting all our hopes in a coach in chief is no better than putting them all in a president — or a king.