Humans Don’t Just Need Leadership — They Crave It

And when they don’t get it, they’ll take Spencer Pratt over Karen Bass every time

There’s a concept the military uses that perfectly describes what’s broken in America right now: management without leadership.

Managers optimize existing systems. They hold meetings, form committees, issue statements, and explain — at great length — why what just happened wasn’t their fault. Leaders do something different. Leaders show up. Leaders make you feel like someone in the room actually gives a damn about whether you live or die.

America is drowning in managers. It is starving for leaders.

That’s why Trump won in 2016. That’s why he won again in 2024. And that — believe it or not — is why Spencer Pratt, former reality TV villain and professional celebrity husband, is within striking distance of becoming the next Mayor of Los Angeles.

The Palisades Test

When the fires came to Pacific Palisades in January 2025, over 16,000 structures burned. Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana. The fire hydrants ran dry. The Department of Water and Power had cut its budget. Fewer than a dozen homes have been fully rebuilt more than a year later.

This is management without leadership in its purest form. Every box got checked. Every protocol got followed. And the city burned anyway — and nobody responsible lost their job, their pension, or their sleep.

Spencer Pratt lost his house.

He posted the destruction on Instagram. He showed up to the “They Let Us Burn” rally on the one-year anniversary and announced he was running for mayor. His campaign slogan might as well be: I felt this. They didn’t.

That’s not a political strategy. That’s a human being responding to a human catastrophe. And voters — who are also human beings — can feel the difference between someone performing concern and someone who actually has skin in the game.

The Pattern Is Older Than Democracy

This isn’t new. Humans are wired for this.

For most of human history, the leader of the group was the person who stepped forward when something went wrong. Not the most credentialed. Not the most experienced. The one who stepped forward. The one willing to take the spear.

Modern institutional life has systematically selected against those people. Bureaucracies reward caution, consensus, and the ability to avoid blame. The result is a leadership class that is extraordinarily skilled at one thing: surviving inside the system. Not fixing it. Not leading people through a crisis. Just surviving.

When the gap between that class and reality gets wide enough, something snaps.

It snapped in 2016 when a Queens real estate developer with a reality TV show beat the entire Republican establishment and then beat Hillary Clinton. The credentialed managers of both parties had delivered two failed wars, the 2008 financial collapse, and twenty years of stagnant wages for working people. Voters didn’t want a better manager. They wanted to detonate the existing arrangement.

The media called it a joke. Then they called it a fluke. Now Trump is back in the White House for the second time and Joe Rogan is saying he’d vote for Spencer Pratt if he lived in LA.

The Vibrational Coalition

What Trump and Pratt share isn’t ideology. It’s frequency.

There’s a certain kind of voter who isn’t looking for a ten-point plan. They’re looking for evidence that the person asking for their vote has felt what they’ve felt. Frustration. Contempt for the people who run things. The bone-deep suspicion that the game is rigged and everyone in charge knows it and nobody is going to say it out loud.

Trump said it out loud. Pratt is saying it out loud.

That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire electoral coalition. It isn’t right-wing. It isn’t left-wing. It’s anti-management. It’s human beings responding to their oldest hardwired instinct: follow the one who’s willing to actually lead.

The Tragedy of Managed Decline

Here’s the part that should keep you up at night. Management without leadership doesn’t just fail in a crisis. It produces the crises. When nobody is accountable, systems rot. When nobody leads, institutions hollow out. When the people at the top are optimized for self-preservation rather than results, everything downstream of them degrades — slowly, then all at once.

LA’s homeless crisis didn’t happen overnight. The hydrants ran dry because a thousand small management decisions, made by people who would never personally suffer the consequences, prioritized budget spreadsheets over infrastructure. Karen Bass didn’t create the system. She just ran it — competently, cautiously, and catastrophically.

That’s management without leadership. And it’s not just an LA problem. It’s a national condition.

What Comes Next

Spencer Pratt may or may not win. The primary is June 2nd and LA politics is complicated. But the fact that he’s viable — that Time Magazine has to report that a former reality TV villain is within striking distance — tells you everything you need to know about how deep the leadership vacuum has gotten.

The hunger doesn’t go away when the election is over. It just looks for the next vessel. The only long-term solution — the only one that’s ever worked — is real leaders stepping into real roles and actually leading. Not managing. Not consulting. Not forming committees and issuing statements.

Showing up. Taking the spear. Giving a damn.

America is waiting. So is LA.

And until the real leaders show up, don’t be surprised when the people turn to whoever does.