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Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson managed misfits and monster egos. Could he handle our current crisis?

What would Phil Jackson do? I find myself wondering this several times a day. Particularly while watching press briefings and impromptu question-and-answer sessions in the Downing Street rose garden, adjacent to the pergola of power.

The lofty former basketball coach is one of many magnetising figures that make up The Last Dance, the ESPN documentary that revisits the ascension of the Chicago Bulls between 1991-98 and a near indomitable run that brought them six NBA titles.

Having watched all 10 episodes, I can confidently say I am not one iota clearer about the Triangle Offense, the difference between a point guard and a small forward, nor can I tell a Rocket from a Piston. But if Phil told me to jump, I would ask “how high?” 

Even allowing for an era in which the sports personality could really let their freak flag fly, Jackson, now 74, still stands apart. Six foot eight inches in his socks, his shoulders are so square they make the Herman Munster proportions of Balenciaga look a bit halfhearted. In his youth he smoked dope and dropped a bit of acid. At the Bulls he advocated yoga, mixed pep talks with the Native American wisdom of the Lakota, and was famous for a Zen-like calm. 

How might the coach have dealt with bad behaviour were his team not a group of preternaturally gifted athletes but a bunch of politicians — and their aides? After all, negotiating the maverick “genius” of a government adviser would surely be relatively straightforward when you spent seasons managing the majestic ego of Michael Jordan, a man of near superhuman talent who was only mildly joking when he told the rookie Reggie Miller he was the “black Jesus”.

Or Dennis Rodman, the neon-haired renegade who decided to skip finals practice to fly to Detroit to join Hulk Hogan for an evening of televised wrestling in which he hit a rival wrestler with a chair. Rodman’s outing incurred a $10k fine for missing a league-mandated session and the wrath of some of his most ardent fans. But on the subject of Rodman’s sojourn, Phil The Shoulders was sanguine. “It’s just attention, being able to concentrate in the moment,” he told reporters, in 1998. “If it’s important, [Rodman’s] always there.”

I imagine Jackson’s looming authority pronouncing on Dominic Cummings, largely because I have nothing better to do, and because lockdown loves a daydream.

Last month, Boris Johnson’s closest ally breached his own co-authored “stay at home” instructions to drive across the country, walk around a bluebell wood and spend 15 minutes beside a castle. Notwithstanding the indignation surrounding his interpretation of the guidelines, he might have been forgiven had he not obfuscated at all requests to explain where he had been. Would Jackson have fired his most trusted comrade? Or would he have applied some hippie-shaman-logic and simply shrugged it off?

Following his absconsion, Rodman returned for the crucial play-off in Chicago, where, according to the Washington Post he “grabbed all the big rebounds and made all the important free throws”, to secure his team a win. 

Cummings, who was apparently so vital to the government that he risked a 52-mile road trip with poor eyesight in order to get back on the job, re-entered professional life to claim the highest coronavirus death toll in Europe. He might have been more useful had he sniffed a few more bluebells in those woods.

Unlike the curiously cavalier attitude of Cummings and his cohort, The Last Dance reminds us that leadership means nothing if you don’t command respect. Great coaches, like politicians, are made greater by the diversity of talents in the team. Michael Jordan was monstrously unpleasant to his teammates, but he respected Jackson. He wouldn’t play for anybody else (until he did). Rodman was a law unto himself — until he got on to the court. Jackson’s subsequent career may not have been so rosy, but for that period of the nineties, he and his team could barely do wrong. 

Maybe that’s why audiences, exhausted by so many examples of bungled leadership, incompetence and elitism, have embraced this documentary. The Last Dance is a eulogy to the spirit of teamwork and the celebration of talents that lie within. It’s a reminder that real leadership doesn’t require slavish loyalty, nor insist on gibbering rote. It allows for mavericks, mess and massive egos. It celebrates diversity and different points of view. But most of all, it’s totally transparent. You couldn’t fake Jordan’s breathtaking, otherworldly ball skills. And you can’t always slogan your way to a win.

Subsidies will soon end. Americans will then feel the economic pain—and revolt.

The political press is preoccupied with the electoral implications of the virus crisis, and pundits insist the 2020 election will be about the Trump daily soap opera. But an emerging cultural and economic time bomb is about to explode. There has never been a wider gap between average Americans’ perception of their own economic situation and the reality of it. America could soon have its most combustible political environment in recent history.

Something that should alarm everyone: Neither the stock market nor the political preferences of those who have been hit hardest by this Covid-induced economic crisis have fundamentally changed since the crisis began. The American economy has shed more than 30 million jobs in the past eight weeks, and poll numbers haven’t moved an inch. According to Gallup, President Trump’s approval rating was 49% on Feb. 16, with 48% disapproving. Three months and the largest job loss in American history later, those numbers are exactly the same: 49% to 48%.

How is that possible? Is the political climate so partisan that the loss of your livelihood can’t change your political perspective? To some extent that could be true. But most of America is living in an illusion that masks the inevitable pain of this pandemic.

To the credit of the president and Congress, the Cares Act was passed before many Americans missed paychecks. The administration distributed the cash quickly enough that Americans had access to expanded unemployment compensation and a direct payment before their financial situation became dire. For the 40% of people making under $40,000 who have lost their jobs since March, according to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, the Cares Act ensured that their financial situation isn’t worse than it was in February. In some cases, it’s better, thanks to the $600-a-week unemployment bonus.

Much of economically vulnerable America has been insulated from economic reality. A recent Washington Post poll shows that 77% of those who lost their jobs believe they will be heading back to the same jobs following the health crisis. Pew Research reports that 68% of Americans who lost their jobs are concerned about reopening the economy too early, rather than too late.

In short, if your family hasn’t lost a loved one to Covid-19, your bank account probably looks basically the same, and you believe your job is awaiting your return, the past 10 weeks have been an extended inconvenience. Your political views are still informed by the same economic inputs that formed them in February.

That won’t hold for long. The direct payments won’t go on forever. The jobs may not come back soon. Businesses aren’t guaranteed to reopen, and the political bubble formed by this alternate reality could portend large political realignments.

The people who have lost their jobs but come to grips with a radically changed economy haven’t been silent. These are the people lining up at state capitols across the country demanding the economy reopen. So far this group has been marginalized and dismissed as kooks or reckless deniers of a deadly pandemic. But millions more may join them before the year’s end.

In many ways, this group resembles the tea party of 2009-10. That political movement started on the right but included a much larger disaffected voting bloc. The tea party voted in to Congress a class of disrupters who were more interested in breaking what they saw as a corrupt system than toeing the party line. This isn’t the same situation, but millions of Americans who aren’t ideological may drift into this sentiment as economic anxiety becomes acute. Particularly when Americans begin to feel like the trillions of federal tax dollars are being spent on someone else.

The coalition of service-industry workers who are affected by this economic downturn is larger than anything the country has experienced since the Great Depression. It would be naive to assume that the resulting political movement won’t be similar in scale.

Contributing to the illusion that America’s economy hasn’t fundamentally changed is that most urban and suburban upper-class jobs remain insulated from this employment crisis. The new-economy employee has been working from home, where his biggest complaint may be an inability to conduct a Zoom call without a dog barking or child interrupting. America’s deep geographic, social and political divides will be pulled even further apart by this economic crisis.

Historically, American elections after a crisis have been decided on the question of who can more competently lead the country to better days. Yet unlike previous challenges, the true nature of America’s economic crisis hasn’t set in on the American people. When it does, the familiar political fault lines fused with millions unemployed could make 2020 the most explosive ideological election in modern history.

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