Political Leadership: Empaths (Joe Biden & Ted Heath) 3/5

Chopin's 'Prelude, Op 28, No.15' swirls around an opening scene in the 'Crown'. The piece is played by Prime Minister Ted Heath, who was in turn swirled around by miners' strikes across his premiership.

Heath is seen as removed from the action. He is distant, aloof. Yet these strikes would lead to rolling blackouts and a cold, long winter. 

The British people would suffer and no-one was telling them why. Heath took the blame, losing a general election soon after.

A thoughtful leader knows they are responsible for not just the economic, but also the emotional wellbeing of their people. 

In times of crisis, this wellbeing can fracture; the leader must restore it. They have to articulate the population's feelings, soothe their grievances, and forge a path out of the depths.

This is the 'empath-leader'.

Empath

To be an Empath

When 60 million people live together, things can get antsy. Problems frequently arise. Often these are small issues, solvable by police or local government.

However, some tensions emerge that have to be managed by a national leader. Economic downturns. Terrorist attacks. Natural disasters. 

These are complicated issues that arouse deep emotion, and responding to them requires high levels of power and authority.

These crises don't just impact lives, jobs, and infrastructure, but can also cause anger, sorrow, and confusion. If the political leader cannot respond to and soothe these feelings, who can? 

The empath is the leader who is capable of reflecting, articulating, and shaping the national mood in such times. They can appreciate the feelings of those caught up by crisis, and put them into words, often relating them to closely-held values (think 'freedom', or  'tolerance').

Empaths, unsurprisingly, tend to be empathetic. They understand suffering, and they have compassion for their people; maybe, like President Joe Biden, they've experienced personal tragedy already, or have seen suffering around them growing up. 

Biden being sworn into Congress
next to the hospital bed of his son, who was
injured in the car crash that killed his wife

They draw on those experiences, implicitly and explicitly, to respond to the needs of the people at present.

To be clear, being an empath doesn't mean being a storyteller. The two share some similarities, especially a need to understand the values and emotions of the people they represent. 

However, scale separates the two. Empaths don't need big worldviews to engage with isolated, complicated crises, while storytellers often struggle to square their simplistic narratives with often diverse, sensitive problems. 

Empaths can also act with as much effect as speaking; something alien to storytellers, who can hardly act out a narrative.

And the best empath in global politics today has little in the way of a big story and much in the way of action. He knows what grief is, and is determined to heal a battered country. That's all an empath needs.

Joe Biden

Key Book - Joe Biden: American Dreamer (Evan Osnos)

Much more than Presidents Trump, Obama, and W. Bush, 'sleepy Joe' loves people. 

He freely dishes out selfies, cracks jokes and argues with the public, and thrives on general 'human connection'. 

While Trump could manipulate his base like a daydream, and Obama could whip his supporters into a hopeful frenzy, Biden seems to grasp the life of the individual better than either. 

And he has more compassion for that individual than either too. This is a crucial part of why he's such a strong empath.

Biden has shown three key elements of empath-leadership so far:

Firstly, in openly renouncing Trump. Biden rarely directly attacked Trump, but when he did, it carried weight. His genuinely irritated 'Will you shut up man?' in the first Presidential debate last autumn summarised the exhausted frustration of millions four years of White House noise.

When Biden argued later that campaign that 'anyone who is responsible for [220,000] deaths should not remain as President', a majority of Americans agreed and voted accordingly. 

If the crisis in question is simply the entire Trump presidency, Biden has responded by successfully interpreting, articulating, and delivering on the emotions of the American people. 

His victory brings us onto his second strength as empath: that, since becoming President, Biden has quietly returned politics to normalcy. Before the election, as one Obama-era official put it 'this country just needs to chill the f**k out and have a boring President'. 

Biden understands that. He does remarkable things like: his job, and speaks little and sparingly. His poll ratings are pleasingly stable. American news channels remain obsessive, but no longer over the White House. It feels like most Americans are able to switch off from politics again. 

Thirdly, President Biden has shown an ability to connect simply with a range of people across a range of smaller crises. 

The Miami condo collapse, the COVID death toll surpassing 500,000, Asian American shootings in Atlanta; all have been met with steady compassion and a rightful anger to do more and resolve the injustices at the heart of each.

'Silence is complicity. We cannot be complicit' he remarked after the latter, drawing on increasing ideas of not just un-racism, but anti-racism. Such is the requirement on the empath: to comfort, and to develop progress from comfort, not allowing anger to boil over into further crisis. 

'[Asian Americans have] been attacked, blamed,
scapegoated and harassed.'

Joe Biden is the model of the empath-leader. However, it's worth emphasising the empath's strengths by contrasting them with a contrasting leader.

Ted Heath

Key Book - The Prime Ministers (Steve Richards)

Ted Heath governed Britain from 1970-1974, and has faded away in history as just another mid-20th century PM. He was a clever man, casually mastering deep policy, and with vast reserves of confidence. 

He was also as opposite to an empath politician as it's possible to imagine.

Heath, essentially, possessed none of the qualities needed to be an empath. 

Firstly, while he may have been compassionate in a general sense he had no love or civility for individuals; stories of his rudeness abounded throughout Westminster. 

He simply 'lacked empathy' for others, and the supposed struggles of the mineworkers unmoved him.

Secondly, Heath didn't really 'get' people. He assumed Britain would understand his complicated policy proposals and make the effort to engage with them.

He never understood the need for political storytelling (his election victory in 1970 was quite an upset, considering) or that people elect politicians so they don't have to think about such things.

These two traits combined to create an anti-empath leader at one of the (literally) darkest periods in mid-twentieth century Britain. In early 1974, the miners demanded higher wages from the government. Heath said no. 

The miners went on strike, and the following coal shortage meant the government had to restrict electricity usage.

This wasn't even the first time homes had been lit by candles under Heath. Just months previously, he had announced a state of emergency after miners stopped working overtime. 

And in 1970, dockers' and power station workers' had gone on strike with obvious consequences.

Can't see the value in this

 

This was a crisis premiership. And a crisis that quite obviously impacted most of the UK. Ideally, Heath needed to explain why the situation had occurred, and why he felt it was worth it. 

He had to share in the frustration of Britain as to why they were buying dozens of candles every few months, and to build momentum around a way out of the crisis. 

Of course, he did none of that. Instead, he doubled down on framing the mineworkers as in the wrong, and the government as in the right. 

He emphasised the pain of the strikes on TV without articulating why the pain was necessary: 'in terms of comfort, this shall be a harder Christmas than we have known since the war'. 

Heath was never good on TV

Heath failed to recognise that the population was tired and confused, and needed someone to make sense of their confusion. 

This peaked with his launching an election at the end of the Three-Day Week, asking the electorate 'Who Governs Britain?' (i.e. chose between me or the mineworkers). 

They replied 'not you' and voted Labour in.

Heath hadn't pulled a nation together just when it needed him to most acutely. The strikes and the chaos would rumble on for five more years, unable to cohere around an empath Prime Minister.

--

A community without a leader able to respond to its intangible needs is a fragile and pained thing. It can be easily divided, and is slow to recover from crisis to crisis. 

People need to feel emotionally secure, and to feel confidently and clearly led. That is a responsibility all political leaders must recognise. Joe Biden sets the standard. Ted Heath is a warning.

Theo

Uncited Resources:

https://brianwise.net/the-crown-season-3-soundtrack-beethoven-chopin/ (Heath)

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/ (Biden)

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-harris-visit-georgia-shifts-focus-after-atlanta-shootings-n1261491 (Biden)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56159756 (Biden)