The cult of decisiveness in U.S. politics

We live today in an instantaneous culture that demands instantaneous decisions.

Americans cherish certainty and distinct outcomes. And if certainty is the goal, decisiveness is the prime tool and the president the prime mover.

"We think of ourselves as always being in a kind of crisis requiring decision," says Slotkin, the frontier historian. "Because we're the pre-eminent world power, every situation presents us with a choice to do something about it or to leave it alone."

That still doesn't quite explain why the affinity for decisive leadership is so deeply woven into our cultural fabric. Some possibilities:

• Order from chaos. Is it any wonder that, as Americans negotiate the jumble of a modern democracy, we crave strong decisions to make sense of the muddiness that is life? Bush's message of staying the course worked in part because, in ages of challenge, we look for decisive guidance.
• Ego. A love of strong decisions reflects our history as a society that believed, from the 17th-century days of the shining city on the hill, that it was mandated by God. When Manifest Destiny gives you the heaven-sent right to expand, strong decision-making seems a natural side effect.
• Backlash. Maybe democracy is inherently indecisive. We were founded on the fear that excessive power, consolidated in one man, produces tyranny. Is that why decisiveness is so vaunted — because we need, in our pluralism, suggestions of an absolute power that one person must never have?

Context and experience and thoughtfulness
We began with the premise that American decisiveness is a diffuse notion, difficult to define and even harder to identify in a leader. But what if it doesn't exist at all? Perhaps, as with so much else in American life, style and substance have merged. What if, when we evaluate a potential leader, it's really the appearance of decisiveness that we prize?

Anyone who stops to think for a moment (if that's still possible) realizes that "decisiveness" doesn't exist on its own because the right decisions don't emerge from thin air. As management courses teach today, any daily diet of sound decisions comes from context and experience and thoughtfulness. Nuance, even. When we elect a president, we choose not only for the decisions that lie ahead but for the wisdom of the ones the leader already has made, perhaps long ago.

The American narrative of frontier and individualism and destiny would have us believe that "decisiveness" is a product of the moment; in fact, it's almost all cumulative. And in the end, our perpetual tension between liberty and tyranny, between control and chaos, is effectively a two-century discussion on the nature of decision-making in America — one that renews itself every four years when the time to choose a president is at hand.

But with an assertion that big, that sprawling, it's tough to be sure. Let us mull it over; we'll get back to you after we weigh the options.

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