America Is in Desperate Need of Moral Leadership

What the country's leaders—past and present—can teach us in this moment.

America is going through an especially precarious period in its history, and many of its citizens are increasingly worried about where things will go from here. Consider these findings from recent surveys:

• The share of Americans who believe the country is moving in the wrong direction is at its highest point of Trump’s term, 60.3 percent, a shift in recent weeks that has come from Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike.

• Over 80 percent believe America has become more divided compared to five years ago, and two-thirds say we are at a “significant turning point” in history.

• Nearly 90 percent agree that political violence is a problem, with 59 percent calling a “very big problem.”

• Americans don’t believe either party’s hands are clean, blaming both equally for political violence in the country today.

• Last year, after the first assassination attempt against President Trump, fully 80 percent of voters in an Ipsos/Reuters poll agreed with the statement that “the country is spiraling out of the control.”

What this data and the broader decaying discourse in America demonstrate is that many people are simply scared right now: scared of their political adversaries, scared that society and social order are crumbling around them, and scared of what is to come. It’s in these moments that the country desperately needs leaders who speak to the better angels of our nature, who seek to calm rather than inflame—and to remind us of what we have in common rather than stoke anger, contempt, and division.

America historically has had no shortage of these leaders, whose cool heads during turbulent times helped the nation persevere through them. It’s worth looking to the past—and present—to consider the reassuring words that some of them offered to a public on edge.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Perhaps no president in the past century guided the country through a rockier period than FDR, whose governing ethos strongly informs TLP’s. One of the most effective ways Roosevelt comforted Americans during the Great Depression and later World War II was by launching his famous “fireside chats,” a series of radio broadcasts that brought him into people’s living rooms to talk about the challenges facing the nation.

As one analysis noted, “For many Americans, the Fireside Chats, delivered in President Roosevelt’s calm, measured voice, were a source of comfort—a reassurance that during the crises of the Great Depression and World War II, a steady hand was on the wheel.”

But arguably Roosevelt’s most memorable moment of calming leadership was from his first inaugural address in which he admonished Americans that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He was of course speaking to panic that had set in around the depression, but his words remain as relevant today as they were then. Fear leads people to react with their emotions rather than clear, rational thought. It drives us to indulge our basest, tribal instincts rather than aspire to more enlightened forms.

Sadly, today our fear often stems from each other. America’s leaders would do well to recognize this and encourage their constituents to fight the urge to lean into hatred and contempt—to not fear our neighbors and instead see their shared humanity.

Lyndon Johnson

Some historians have made comparisons between today’s political atmosphere and that of the famously tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, and there are indeed many striking parallels. In addition to widespread social unrest, the ubiquity of domestic political violence—including the assassinations of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—left the nation deeply unsettled. In a 1968 Harris poll, 57 percent of Americans agreed that “our political process has fallen apart when candidates can't campaign without fear of assassination.”

At the start of the decade, following JFK’s assassination, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, was immediately tasked with calming the public, overwhelming shares of whom said they felt “hopeless” and “fearful.” In an address that came to be known as Johnson’s “Let Us Continue” speech, he said:

We meet in grief, but let us also meet in renewed dedication and renewed vigor. Let us meet in action, in tolerance, and in mutual understanding. John Kennedy's death commands what his life conveyed—that America must move forward. The time has come for Americans of all races and creeds and political beliefs to understand and to respect one another. So let us put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law, and those who pour venom into our Nation's bloodstream.

I profoundly hope that the tragedy and the torment of these terrible days will bind us together in new fellowship, making us one people in our hour of sorrow. So let us here highly resolve that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not live—or die—in vain.

Just days after a tragedy that struck at Americans’ sense of security, their new leader sought to reassure them not by identifying an enemy to blame but by calling for them to come together, despite their differences—including even political ones—for the sake of helping the country move forward.

George W. Bush

One of the most destabilizing events in recent the country’s history was the 9/11 terror attacks. In the aftermath of that day, overwhelming numbers of Americans reported feeling depressed and frightened, with many fearing they would become a victim of terrorism and expecting more attacks on the homeland. A full year after the tragedy, nearly half said they were “more afraid, more careful, more distrustful, or felt more vulnerable.”

At the same time, many Muslim Americans worried they would be scapegoated for the attack and face discrimination. President Bush, who faced the immense challenge of calming Americans’ concerns about their safety, also made an concerted effort to bring down the temperature domestically and reaffirm the country’s commitment to pluralism by defending peaceful American Muslims on the national stage:

I…want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world. We respect your faith. It’s practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends.

He added:

Americans are asking: What is expected of us? I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat. I ask you to uphold the values of America, and remember why so many have come here. We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith.

At a time when some Americans’ distrust in their Muslim brothers and sisters had grown, the president made clear that the nation’s fight was not with them—and that he had their back.

Spencer Cox

Most recently, following the killing of Charlie Kirk, one prominent leader has risen to the occasion: Utah Governor Spencer Cox, in whose state Kirk was slain. From 2023 to 2024, Cox served as the chairman of the National Governors Association, during which time he spearheaded an initiative called “Disagree Better” aimed at reducing hyper-partisanship and polarization.

Whereas leaders of other states might have used the occasion of Kirk’s death to score political points by engaging in rank partisanship, Cox was “the most consistent voice of calm and conciliation in the GOP,” as The Atlantic put it. To be sure, he did not shy away from condemning the attack in unequivocal terms, saying that the assassination of Kirk “is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been, and who we could be in better times.”

Importantly, though, he also added the following:

To my young friends out there: you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage—it feels like rage is the only option…I hear all the time that words are violence. Words are not violence; violence is violence. And there is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody…

And:

We can choose a different path…We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate. And that’s the problem with political violence: it metastasizes. Because we can always point the finger at the other side, and at some point we have to find an off-ramp or it’s going to get much, much worse…I still believe that there is more good among us than evil. And I still believe that we can change the course of history.

Even as Cox expressed that he had spent the days since Kirk’s killing as angry and sad as he had ever been, he still rose to the occasion and worked to calm tensions. It’s a model of what Americans should expect from all of their leaders in this moment.

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As the country enters an uncertain and unsettling period, it’s important to remember a few things. First, the vast majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, aren’t ideologically extreme, nor do they support political violence. Most are normal people just trying to live their lives, raise their kids, do their jobs, and maybe fit in a hobby or two if they have time.

However, there are some factors that lead to increased support for political violence. One is a belief that the “other side” also supports it. Another is social media: a recent study by Financial Times analyst John Burn-Murdoch found that people are far likelier to encounter extremist statements on social media than they are in real life, which can skew their perception of how radical the other side really is. Logging off and correcting misperceptions about others are two great first steps to lower the temp.

And finally, one thing we know will never work is pointing fingers and deliberately ratcheting up conflict. It’s next to impossible to find common ground when a country’s most prominent leaders say they “hate” people in the other party and speak about them using degrading, highly charged terms like “evil” and the “enemy within.”

So if leadership doesn’t come from the top, it must come from Americans themselves. To give Governor Cox the final word: “All of us have an opportunity right now to do something different…Log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community.”