“This is a time to be brave”: Former governor Deval Patrick offers leadership lessons for a time of uncertainty

Q: In your experience from your time as governor of Massachusetts, are the ways in which the federal government is interacting with state governments typical, or is Trump pursuing a different path than his predecessors?

Patrick: It’s not just states and local governments. It’s private industry as well as business and it is coming from an administration that says that it is cutting regulation. It’s some of the most extraordinary interventions into private choices and private decisions I think we’ve seen.  

This administration also wants to defer to states on education and yet demand they do it their way. From a historical standpoint, that has been a tension in this country from the beginning, figuring out how to find that balance. But that’s not what this is. This is interventionist.  

One of the ways I think that our leaders can lead for us right now and show that courage is to call that out, just as Governor Mills (D-Maine) did [in pushing back against Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from women’s sports], and resist it using the tools that we have, including the courts.  
 

Q: What do you say to your students or anyone who wants to serve in public administration now?  

Patrick: We need good people, and I will say that the folks who voted for the president, who voted for Vice President Harris, or the 90 million people who could have voted and didn’t vote at all, they’re not wrong when they say the system is broken: it is broken. It has in some ways been broken on purpose. When you think about legislative gerrymandering and dark money, much of that influences policymaking and politics. But it is up to us to fix it. It’s not going to be the election of this or that president or this or that legislative leader.  

It’s going to be all of us committing to this idea that government has a role to play in helping us help ourselves. Democracy is how we make those choices. That’s how we do it. Not leaving it to experts, not leaving it to billionaires, not leaving it to elites. All of us coming together and insisting that the system of policymaking and the system of politics actually belongs to us.  

I also think we need more civic engagement, and I don’t think it necessarily has to be political engagement, but service. I really do think community service is vital. It reminds us of who we are. There are ways in which each of us need other people. I think it’s important to be reminded that there are lots and lots of unmet needs, and some of those needs need to be met through a sense of community through which we all participate.  

I think it is a time for leadership that is values-based and values-driven. This is a time to be brave. 

—

Photograph by AP Photo/Andrew Harnik.