Ode to Braxton: Some Notes on Leadership

Attempting to define the thing we were all supposed to be

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Ode to Braxton: Some Notes on Leadership

As the man from Larkspur explained what he liked about fascist dictatorships, I began thinking about Braxton Adamson, cystic acne, and the fields where kids win glory.

The man continued, saying that he wanted an authoritarian regime to take over the United States. He was wearing a collared blue shirt. Clean-shaven and husky, he seemed in no way exceptional. He debated his points, and a few people around him nodded in agreement. "So you don’t believe in democracy?” asked the journalist across from him.

“No, I don’t. Absolutely not.”

“What do you believe in?”

“Autocracy.”

“By who?”

“Honestly, quite frankly, anyone who is in line with Catholic teaching.”

The room erupted in applause. The man proceeded to discuss his vision for an ideal leader as the journalist pressed him.

“And if that autocrat kills you and your family, you’re fine with that?”

“Well, I’m not going to be a part of the group that he kills.”

The interaction was part of a video series published by the YouTube channel Jubilee, where people of divergent political views gather in a room to have shortform speed-debates. In this case, the premise was "1 Progressive vs. 20 Far-Right Conservatives," with The Guardian columnist Mehdi Hasan representing the former (link to exact time of debate).

It was rage bait, to be sure, but it was raising serious questions. Again, this was a local guy, and, like many Coloradans, I was invited to extrapolate his views to my neighbors. "They're here! They're already here!" to quote Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Of course, that's true. They are here. But they've always been here, and they always will be. I remember learning as much as a kid. Growing up with deep cystic acne that started in third grade, ears that flared like Alfred E. Neuman, glasses, and braces, I got a more mildly censored preview of human nature. Beautiful people have a lot of advantages, but they're often doomed to be uncritical unless the world beats them up.

Bullied and teased, I became a very critical kid. For instance, I noticed that it was actually a minority of my peers who were cruel to the ugly, poor, or otherwise handicapped. The majority didn't tease or name-call. They would signal that you were an undesirable (excluding you from teams/groups, not wanting you to sit with them, etc.), but they weren't outright mean about it. Instead, they simply detected your status and left you at the mercy of your tormentors.

Finally, there were those kids who would stand up for the less fortunate, who would intervene and even put themselves in harm's way (reputationally or otherwise) to make you feel like you were entitled to human dignity. They were heroic and rare, the slimmest of minorities, not nearly as common as the cruel kids, nor certainly as the passive, self-interested majority. And so they weren't always there for you, and they didn't see everything.

All the while, as you experienced these realities in the classroom and on the playground, you were being taught by movies, TV, and so on, that good eventually prevails over evil, that our culture was righteous, and that historically nefarious cultures, like that of the Nazis, were foreign to our own.

It was also at this time that I was being taught that I should be a leader, and that leadership traits were synonymous with good traits. Right along with generosity and honesty, leadership was touted as an essential virtue. Look above the chalkboard and there it was: Be a leader! Follow your dreams!

And while many in my millennial generation have grown suspicious of our dreams, the pressures of being a leader remain. For instance, I'm not supposed to admit this, but I learned a long time ago that I wasn't one.

As a kid, this was sort of a no-brainer. You can't be a leader if nobody wants to follow you. But also, that's just not who I am. I can manage, of course. I can delegate and collaborate, etc. I have to do all that to run this magazine. But that's just functional duty, whereas leadership, as I understand it, is a matter of character, an archetype, really.

I guess what I'm describing is the idea of the natural-born leader. But that's a subject of considerable debate–whether leadership is learned or innate. Just as controversial is how common leaders are. Gallup performed a study in which it determined that 10% of the population are natural-born leaders, which seemed outrageously high to me. And when I dug into their methodology, a lot of it seemed ripe for human error. To be frank, it's probably all bullshit—because much of the study relied on people's perception of leaders, and our inability to perceive leaders may be our greatest failure as a species.

We just can't figure it out. Generation after generation. Tens of thousands of years, and we still pick the wrong ones. We often select people who are strong and charismatic, only to find they lack basic human decency (to say the least in some cases). Then we'll select people who are benevolent, only to find that they're weak or uncharismatic. We've tried breeding them. We've tried voting for them. We've tried trials by combat and divine right. And we still haven't devised a system that can reliably produce a leader who has the stuff—what we really want, all three of those qualities combined: strength, charisma, and benevolence in abundance.

I can count the number of real leaders I've known on one hand, and I'm probably wrong about two of them. It's very difficult to identify a real leader, partly because those qualities are so rare and partly because there are a lot of imposters out there. Consciously or unconsciously, we know how uncommon real leaders are, and so when we think we've found one, we worship them (literally in some cases). There are plenty of people who want to be worshipped and who don't mind pursuing positions of authority for the perks. And I would confidently hazard that these actors far outnumber the genuine article.

I feel sure about Braxton Adamson though. I can't speak for him as an adult. I don't know what became of him. But from third to sixth grade, there's no doubt. He was the chosen one.

Strength? Braxton was a star athlete, the best or second-best at all the playground sports, which was all we really cared about when it came to measuring each other those days. Basketball, soccer, kickball, it didn't matter. Moreover, he exuded this kind of Michael Jordan-esque moxie when he played. His movements had a wit to them, a verve, a vim, a good-humored fuck you. I tried my best, but losing to him felt like laughter, like we were both in on this cosmic joke, and I was flattered to be sharing it.

Charisma? All the kids loved Braxton Adamson. Teachers too. He was funny without being a smartass. He was smart without being a geek. He was handsome, but blandly handsome, the way you'd want a fire chief to be. And, most importantly, it was clear that he wasn't trying to be anything other than what he was. That was cool, and as exceptional back then as it is now.

Benevolence? Among the people who achieve leadership positions, this is probably what separates the authentic ones from the posers. People with strength and charisma can often project good intentions while doing evil.

But, despite the risks to his position atop the hierarchy, Braxton would go out of his way to make sure the would-be outcasts were taken care of. He would put me on teams I had no business being on. He would stick up for me if I was getting unjustly bullied. He wouldn't be my friend, but he would be friendly to me, which was like getting a stamp of approval on my existence. Who cared what the other kids thought? Braxton was cool with me, and so I must have some value.

And he didn't do any of this because he was trying to groom some lackey or use me for social advantage. I never did a thing for him, and I remember him getting a lot of guff for bringing me into everyone’s reindeer games. No, he just did it.

I do sometimes wonder about Braxton's benevolence. Specifically, I wonder where it came from, which takes us back to the whole nature vs. nurture discussion. Had Braxton thought it through? Was he reasoning out the right thing from moment to moment? Or was he hardwired with this leadership gene, some deep instinct that told him that the group would work better if the losers were taken care of—or that there were hard-won lessons about disgruntled losers that had been passed on to him, like that maybe one loser could go crazy, slip into everyone's teepee one night, and slit their throats if things got bad and the leader didn't intervene?

Regardless, Braxton was the real deal, and I’m lucky he was there for kids like me. And when I hear people like that guy from the video talk about how they love Francisco Franco and how they think their problems would be solved by some strongman dictator weeding out all of the “bad people,” I wonder if they’re missing that original model. Or maybe they just haven’t learned how hard it is for a good leader to rise up once we’ve left the playgrounds and start in on other games. Then again, maybe I should give them more credit. They might know exactly what they’re doing.

-Paul M. French, Editor

Photo by shurikschukin.