Because she doesn’t ever give up on the people she loves, Leslie Knope, the small-town bureaucrat from “Parks and Recreation,” performed by series producer Amy Poehler, is now, for me, the Platonic ideal of leadership, both civic and ecclesiastical. I just finished watching all seven seasons. If you are a fan, too, you may nevertheless worry that Just Say Knope is an invitation to overachieving, codependency, and too much getting up in other people’s business. That may well be. But it beats Trumpism — the doctrine of cruelty and selfishness that U.S. culture and politics now reward. Leslie is its opposite, and the opposite of Trump is something approaching absolute good.
Civic leaders, like all leaders, are teachers and models. Leslie’s office is filled with political biographies and pictures of heroes like Madeleine Albright and Eleanor Roosevelt. With its gold paint and portraits of men whose legacies he does not understand, a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence whose significance he could not explain to a reporter, Trump’s Oval Office is done up in the style of what I assume resembles the men’s room on the high-roller floor of a Trump casino on the verge of bankruptcy. Leslie goes to her office every day nursing the conceit that she can make the world a little better. Trump goes in to make himself feel better by attacking, hurting, or degrading someone.
It will take successors many years to wash his filth away. It will be a gargantuan task. One for the likes of Leslie Knope. Summoned to clean up Trump’s mess, she would blanch but then gather her troops. She’d be the first to get down on her knees and scrub. She put it this way: “There’s nothing we can’t do if we work hard, never sleep, and shirk all other responsibilities in our lives.”
Leslie wasn’t perfect. She of course wanted to get ahead. Once imagining herself the first woman president, she ended up as a two-term Indiana governor, enabling her to stay close to her beloved Pawnee. But she wanted power so she could serve people — build parks, encourage a spirit of community, expand the national park system, and show that government really could help people. It’s an irony worth mentioning that her biggest hero was Joe Biden. His second cameo in the series, which wrapped in February 2015, takes place in a fictional 2025. He looks fit and in command. Alas, it was probably filmed in 2014 — the year before the antipresident rode down his gold plated escalator and lured Biden out of mourning and retirement.
Above all, she wanted to take care of the people she loved. This makes her my current favorite fictional character — not just because she’s an impossible ideal, but because she reminds me of people I know. We can all be like Leslie if we want to be. We can all love our neighbors as ourselves and put others’ needs ahead of our own. We can stick with people if they still need us, even if they let us down. Every one of us can do it, all the time. We just have to want to and then do it. It does help to have decent role models, in our families, at school, church, and work, and sometimes even on TV.
Of course, if we rise to the challenge of the golden rule, our efforts are not always reciprocated. That’s sometimes why we don’t try. In an episode from the final season, Leslie, now a federal official, is sitting on a bench along the Mall in Washington with April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza), who, we know, wants to get out from under Leslie’s wing after eight years as a creepy, death-obsessed, apathetic misanthropic intern-employee with a heart of gold. April is basically Knope 2-point-GenZ. Leslie has utterly misread her and presents one of her famous binders containing a ten-year plan for them to take on the world together. Learning she’s wrong, Leslie’s hurt at first. The shadow side of a people pleaser often shows when they’re spurned.
But the next day, they meet again, and Leslie presents a binder containing a plan for April’s vocational independence. When April asked her where she got another binder so quickly, Leslie said, “I have a binder vendor on standby in Washington.” That doesn’t mean Leslie didn’t fully intend to stay in April’s life. She wants everyone in her life — even Ron the grumpy, marrow-loyal, Scotch-loving libertarian, Tom the failed entrepreneur, and especially Ann, her best friend from the moment they met.
When we’re helping people discern whether they’re called to be bishops, deacons, or priests, we sometimes say, “I would like them as my pastor.” I would say that about any person manifesting Knopean values and temperament. These days in the church, we aptly worry about infantilizing the flock by calling priests “father” and “mother.” But we all still need people who gather family, friends, and neighbors and stay true no matter what. Ideally, we want to be members of social collectives where everyone behaves that way as much as possible, in mutuality and balance. But we will always depend on some people more than others, those who are willing to sacrifice a little more and edge a little closer to the foot of the Cross. Again, I love Leslie because I’ve known people like her — and I’d like to be like her someday. Besides all that, there’s the sheer fun of a well written, good-hearted story like “Parks and Recreation,” even if one discovers it ten years late. Fictional people like Leslie Knope help make real life worth living.