It’s Veterans Day today, which might encourage us to think about leadership. Veterans know more about leadership than most of us — how valuable it is and how dangerous it can be. The word has been trumpeted around as if it were a universally accepted virtue, like wisdom or honesty. But leadership is just a neutral quality, like energy. It is not good or bad in itself. Leadership can take you to the top of the mountain or push you over a cliff. There’s nothing more depressing than hearing intelligent people crying out for leadership. Someone will be only too happy to provide it.
If we look at history, we certainly find great leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Winston Churchill. But if we consider political leadership down the ages, it seems obvious that, on the whole, the suffering citizens of the world would have been better off without it. Think of some of the most famous political leaders of the past two thousand years: Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Powerful leaders may be exciting to read about in retrospect, but their legacy tends to be an enormous body count and one or several destroyed societies.
Historically, strong leadership has usually been a problem rather than a solution; the problem is not the leadership Itself but the followership. Leaders may rant and rave all they like but they are perfectly harmless so long as nobody pays attention. Strong leadership depends on weak citizenship. The leader’s job is to convince the rest of us that he or she knows best. This is absolutely never the case, as history has so vividly demonstrated. The role of the followers is to do what we are told and not to think too hard about it or take any responsibility for it.
It’s so easy and tempting to follow the leader. Reasoned arguments and democratic debate are slow and difficult. Leadership is swift and simple, and very often violent because that’s the easy way to get people’s attention. The social media have put leadership on steroids. This began with Hitler’s revolutionary use of radio in the 1930s, and now a leader can speak to millions of people directly. Ambitious leaders can construct a kind of parallel universe of lies and conspiracies to justify their power – it has happened over and over again in history. Social media also allow mobs to be conjured very quickly out of thin air, a phantom army always ready to obey the leader’s whim. If that’s not dangerous, I don’t know what it is.
There have always been lies in politics, and there have always been mobs, including the one that started the French Revolution. What these kinds of events have always had in common is what George Washington called “the spirit of faction,” the apparently irresistible urge to use division and tribalism to gain power.
Perhaps we simply need a break – a political season without ideological rhetoric or silly media games, with a government devoted to administration, statesmanship abroad, and problem-solving at home. This would give politicians time to think and something to think about. Meanwhile, the rest of us would have four years without leadership, which may be exactly the kind of leadership we need.
