When Leaders Should Resign

A necessary corrective to a very sick public culture and recovery of a lost virtue.

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Matt Taibbi thinks Eric Swalwell’s resignation is a due process problem. He wrote a piece this week arguing that forcing politicians out of office over allegations — before a jury has weighed in — amounts to “public stoning.” The framing is familiar. It is also wrong. Not because due process doesn’t matter. It does. But because Taibbi is answering a question nobody asked, in order to avoid the question that was actually posed.

The question is not: should Eric Swalwell be punished before he is convicted?

The question is: what does a person owe to the people whose trust they hold?

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There is a concept in public life that has almost entirely disappeared, and its disappearance explains more about the current crisis than most of the things we spend our time arguing about. The concept is this: the seat does not belong to you.

If you hold public office, the authority you exercise belongs to the people who granted it. If you sit in the C-suite, the fiduciary duty you carry belongs to the shareholders, the employees, the customers whose lives are entangled with the institution you lead. If you command a military unit, the loyalty you receive is owed to the mission and the people who serve under you. In every case, the position exists to serve interests that are not your own. You are a steward. You were entrusted with something. The moment your presence in the seat becomes a distraction from the purpose of the seat, you have an obligation to leave it.

This is not punishment. It is the basic condition of the job.

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The Romans had a word for this. They actually had a man for it. Cincinnatus was a farmer who was granted dictatorial power to defend the republic, won the war in sixteen days, and went home. He did not stay to enjoy the authority. He did not argue that the people owed him the position because he had earned it. He understood that the power had been granted for a purpose, and when the purpose was fulfilled, the power was no longer his. Washington modeled his own departure on Cincinnatus — and the voluntary relinquishment of power at the end of his second term was, more than any battle, the act that made the American republic possible. It told every future president: the office is not yours. You hold it in trust. You give it back.

Even Richard Nixon understood this. The man was a crook, a paranoiac, and a liar. He debased the office in ways that seemed unimaginable at the time. And when the walls closed in, he resigned. Not because he was noble. Because even Nixon — Nixon — understood that the presidency was bigger than the president. That a leader who turns the office into a stage for his own survival has already forfeited the authority the office confers.

That was the floor. We are now below it.

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Taibbi’s error, and it is an error shared by an entire cottage industry of writers who built their brands as counter-warriors to the #MeToo movement, is a category mistake. They treat resignation as though it exists on the same continuum as criminal conviction — as though leaving office is a penalty that requires the same evidentiary standard as a prison sentence. It does not. These are different institutions answering different questions. The court asks: did this person commit a crime, and can it be proven beyond a reasonable doubt? The office asks: can this person continue to serve the interests they were entrusted to protect?

A politician embroiled in public scandal is not effectively representing the people who elected them. A CEO at the center of a months-long media firestorm is not effectively leading the company. A university president who has become the story is not effectively running the university. This is true whether the allegations are proven, unproven, or even false. The distraction is the point. The inability to fulfill the purpose of the seat is the point. The seat was never about you.

If you are falsely accused, and the accusation becomes an unmanageable public spectacle, this is of course unfair to you. Genuinely, humanly unfair. And you have remedies for that unfairness. You have defamation suits. You have civil courts. You have a legal system designed to adjudicate exactly this kind of injury. What you do not have is the right to hold the seat hostage while you fight your personal battle, consuming the attention and resources and institutional credibility that belong to the people the seat was built to serve.

That is what lawsuits are for. That is what courts are for. And a leader who cannot distinguish between their personal interest in vindication and their institutional obligation to the people they serve is no leader at all.

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The Taibbi school treats this as an argument about individual rights versus mob justice. It is not. It is an argument about what leadership means. And what leadership means — what it has always meant, from Cincinnatus to Washington to every functional democracy that has ever existed — is that the person in the seat accepts a set of obligations that supersede their own interests. The willingness to leave is not a concession to the mob. It is the foundational act of republican self-governance. It is what distinguishes a steward from a king.

The refusal to leave — the insistence that the seat is yours, that your accusers must be defeated before you will consider vacating, that the institution must absorb the cost of your personal drama indefinitely — is the feudal claim dressed in the language of civil liberties. It says: I possess this office. It is mine. You cannot take it from me without proving, to my satisfaction, that I have forfeited it. That is not due process. That is lordship.

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The #MeToo backlash industry has made a lucrative franchise out of collapsing these categories. The argument always takes the same form: an allegation is made, a resignation follows, and a commentator declares that the absence of a criminal trial means justice was not served. But the commentator has smuggled in an assumption that does all the work — the assumption that the only legitimate consequence for a person in power is a consequence imposed by a court. Everything else is a mob. Everything else is hysteria. Everything else is a “public stoning.”

This is flatly ahistorical. For most of the history of democratic governance, leaders resigned when their continued presence in office became untenable — not because a court ordered them to, but because they understood that the office demanded it. The norm of resignation was not an artifact of mob rule. It was an artifact of a shared understanding that public trust imposes obligations on the people who hold it. The collapse of that norm is not a victory for due process. It is the disappearance of an entire category of civic obligation, replaced by a possessive theory of office that owes more to feudalism than to liberalism.

Taibbi, to his credit, is at least consistent. He genuinely believes the individual’s right to hold power should not be abrogated without formal legal proceedings. But consistency is not the same as correctness. And the world his framework produces — a world in which no leader ever resigns, in which every scandal becomes a siege, in which the institution absorbs unlimited damage while the officeholder fights for personal survival — is not a world with more justice in it. It is a world in which the concept of public trust has been fully privatized, and the seat belongs to whoever can hold it longest.

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A leader who is falsely accused and resigns has been treated unjustly. I want to be clear about that. The injustice is real. But the injustice is to the person — and the person has legal remedies available to them as a person. The seat is not a legal remedy. The seat is not a shield. The seat is not yours. It belongs to the people you were asked to serve, and when you can no longer serve them — for whatever reason, just or unjust — the mature act is to give it back.

People used to understand this. Leaders used to resign not because they were forced to, but because they recognized that the cost of staying exceeded the cost of leaving — not to themselves, but to everyone else. That recognition is what maturity in leadership looks like. It is what distinguishes service from possession. It is the difference between holding an office and owning one.

A leader who cannot see this distinction is no leader at all.

It’s not about you.

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