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This American election was in the tradition of the American Revolution.

Americans are old hands at rebelling against leaders they think cruel and corrupt. Deaf to their entreaties and blind to their realities. Unwilling or incapable of changing.

From its inception in 1776 the United States of America has had an ideal. It was to be a haven for the weak against the strong, especially for those without power who dare resist those with.

Of course, the American ideal is like other ideals – it remains to be realized, Still, it endures. Which is why a day after the Big Day yesterday many Americans are still celebrating. For they had come to see the president as Goliath who they, David, finally had to slay.

Over 250 years we came to revere American Founders such as Washington and Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison. To see them as great leaders. But once upon a time they were no such thing. Once upon a time they were followers who were expected to obey without questioning the king – the King of Great Britain, George, III.

Which for a while they did. But finally, the Founders and their like-minded compatriots got fed up. Fed up with a leader they had come to consider a tyrant. So, they decided that what the situation required was not obedience but resistance. They decided that instead of being powerless they would become powerful. They would try, many with every fiber of their being, to overthrow the existing system. They would be revolutionists.

The Declaration of Independence reads in part:

When a long train of abuses and usurpations… evinces a design to reduce [one people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their security….  

I do not want to exaggerate the importance of what happened yesterday – though it was an historic rebuke of an incumbent president, and of his party, and of his egregious enablers. What I do want to do is to remind that rebelling and even revolting against people who abuse power is in the most venerated American tradition.    

This is the last of a series of three posts, each titled, “Playing with Fire.” What’s the fire to which I allude? Autocracy. As I wrote in Part II of the series, leaderless groups – such as those recently demonstrating in Europe – never stay leaderless for long. Why? Because if they do, they will fail. They will fall apart – to be replaced by another group that is better organized because it is more hierarchically structured. To repeat… first anarchy, then autocracy. To put it differently, too much democracy, like too much of most things, is counterproductive.

It’s impossible to convey to those who have not experienced it, or maybe closely monitored it, what it’s like to live in an autocracy, especially if that autocracy is extreme. So autocratic that it’s a dictatorship.

China: President Xi Jinping has become more tyrannical each of his years in office. (Since 2012/2013.) His appetite for total control is insatiable. Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Xi’s crackdown on what he deems disloyalty “has pruned the party elite so much that the governing Central Committee” has been reduced “to its lowest attendance at a policy-seeing meeting since the Mao Zedong era.”

Uganda: Uganda is worse – a “reign of terror” grips the country. Specifically, that of General Muhoozi Kainerugaba who brags on social media about his torture chambers. For Ugandans there is no place to hide. “Welcome to our menacing new world,” writes Megan Stack about Uganda. A world where authoritarians “enjoy tolerance from the international community; wield cheaper, quieter, and far more powerful surveillance tools at home; and reach across borders to help one another hang on to power.”*

Russia: Like China’s Xi, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who has been in power since 2000, is far more dictatorial now than he was earlier in his tenure. An indicator is the closure, announced just last week, of Novaya Gazeta. For three decades the newspaper represented resistance to regime repression. For three decades its staff survived physical attacks and death threats, police raids and interrogations, censorships and seizures of its printing press. For standing against persecution and for press freedom, its editor-in-chief, Dmitri Muratov, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (in 2021). Ultimately none of it was enough – the paper succumbed. In announcing that it was finally forced to shut down, Muratov said: “Destroying Novaya Gazeta is part of establishing a dictatorship.”

Far from me to diminish the importance of context. France is not China, nor is Spain Russia, or Albania Uganda. Still observers of the protests in Europe report that for now at least the political center has been gravely weakened – and that leaders on the far right and far left are rapidly gaining ground.

The protests are easy to understand. The demonstrators have lost faith. All I’m saying is buyer beware. Beware of replacing democracy with anything that smacks of autocracy. For unless it is stopped or at least slowed, leadership that is bad invariably gets worse.    

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* https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/opinion/surveillance-autocrats-uganda.html?eafs_enabled=false

Part I of this piece, posted a day ago, ended with this question: “Is there any connection between leadership and followership in Europe and leadership and followership in Latin America?” Coincidently – or not – in the last 24 hours my question was answered. Not by me but by national elections that happened to be held virtually simultaneously, the first in Serbia, the second in Brazil.

The astonishing outcome is that the elections mirrored each other, voters surprising the pollsters and predictors in both Serbia and Brazil. In both countries voters came out in large numbers against populists and for liberals. In Serbia the victory over longtime strongman Aleksandar Vucic – he was both president and prime minister for over a decade – was especially sweet. It came after nearly two years of anti-government demonstrations led by you guessed it, students. Again, a consistent, persistent display of relatively young followers furious at relatively old leaders who in their view were screwing up.

Of course, the parallels between what happened in Serbia and Brazil go only so far. The outcome of the election in Brazil was the reelection of the incumbent president, Lula da Silva. In Serbia in contrast the old order was overturned with a new one yet to be ushered in. Still, in both cases voters roundly rejected autocracy – opting instead for democracy.  

Which returns us to France and other countries in Europe such as Greece and Spain, where students first and foremost have taken to the streets to object to the status quo. In these cases, demonstrations are not against right-wing governments or long-term strongmen. Rather protesters are objecting to ostensibly democratic leaders and democratic systems – political systems, economic systems – that they believe are failing them. Failing to assure them that they will have what their elders have had. A future that is reasonably safe and secure.

Repeatedly we hear that the protesters are leaderless. That the demonstrations are more spontaneous than organized, more the result of social media contagion than of anything smacking of central planning. Which sounds well and good. Wonderfully democratic rather than dangerously autocratic.

But if history teaches us anything it is that nature abhors a vacuum. Leaderless groups and organizations never ever stay leaderless for long for the simple reason that if they do, they will fail. Fall apart. So, counterintuitively perhaps, my advice to those hellbent on challenging the status quo is first to decide on leaders and then to publicly identify them. Otherwise? First anarchy, then autocracy.      

 

In addition to the protests that turned violent last week in France, were demonstrations in Italy and Albania, in Spain and Portugal, in Belgium and Greece. The protesters were all ages but mostly they were young. Young people who were not merely angry, they were, they are, furious.

Protesters are followers who feel screwed by their leaders – leaders they think screwed up.  

Europe’s problems – and to a lesser extent America’s – are as profound as pervasive. They are political and fiscal, moral and spiritual. They are at the individual level, such as low wages and high rents, and they are at the national level, such as poor public services and ballooning national debt. And they are existential – especially the impact on young lives of climate change and artificial intelligence.

Because old leaders are enraging young followers, large numbers of the latter are refusing to follow the former. Rather than complying they are resisting.

Groups and organizations cannot, however, function when mayhem is sustained. Too much mayhem and the collective cracks up. Which leaves the authorities in France, for example, with no choice but to crack down.

To be clear, crackdowns like these are not just for the benefit of the group – in this case the state. They are also for the benefit of the individual. A modicum of law and order is as required for you and me to survive as it is for the group of which we are a part. It’s why “submission is the human condition.”*

Consider the example of El Salvador’s incumbent president (since 2019), Nayib Bukele. He transformed what was once one of the world’s deadliest countries into what now is one of the world’s safest. How did he do it? With an iron fist. By declaring a state of emergency that gave his government virtually unlimited power. This included free rein to round up tens of thousands of mostly young men who, in rapidly held mass trials, were sentenced to long, hard years in prison.

Have Bukele’s hardball tactics backfired? Is he reviled for the extreme severity, even cruelty, with which he runs his government? Not hardly.  At home, because his people are so relieved to be living in a largely safe, stable country as opposed to one that was dangerously unsafe and unstable, his approval ratings are sky high. And abroad, across large swaths of Latin America including in, for example, Columbia and Ecuador, Bukele is widely admired. Seen as a strongman who is not to be repudiated but emulated.

Is there any connection between leadership and followership in Europe and leadership and followership in Latin America? I’ll answer the question in Part II of this post.

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*For more on “submission is the human condition,” see Chapter 2 of my book, Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t.     

In my last post (10/20) I referenced my own just published book, Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. I also  mentioned two other recently published pieces, one a book, the other an article. Here – because they are all on the same theme – I list the last two again, this time along with an earlier book of mine.

• My book, published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press, is titled: The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America.
• The recent book is by Jacob Weisberg and is titled, Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.  
• And the recent article is the brilliantly argued and eloquently written piece by Frank Rich which appeared in New York magazine (October 5-18). It’s titled, “The Collaborators.”

The two books and the article are in some ways different. I, for example, focus on enablement during President Trump’s first term; Weisberg and Rich write about enablement during his second. More importantly, though, the three pieces have much in common.

First, they are not about the leader who in all three cases is Trump, but about his followers. They focus laser-like on those who decided, consciously, deliberately, to follow the president, no matter where he led.

Second, as their titles make clear, in each of the three cases Trump’s followers were deemed by the authors to be “bad.” Bad in this case is my word; it is not Weisberg’s or Rich’s.* But all three of us clearly made a value judgement, the same value judgment. We concluded that President Trump was in important ways bad and that those who cravenly followed his lead, especially elites – political elites, corporate elites, financial elites, legal elites, and educational elites among others – were, therefore, also bad.

Third, we made clear that whatever President Trump has or has not done that was bad would never have been possible without the essential participation, cooperation, of his followers. Followers who were willing to do his bidding – whatever he explicitly told them to do or implicitly wanted them to do.

I defined enablers as “followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in behaviors that are destructive.” Weisberg describes followers who are cowards as failing “to act courageously, in ways that reveal both their moral weakness and the fragility of the institutions they represented.” And Rich unleashes his furies at those who cater to a lame-duck president who is “running amok in a second childhood of ceaseless tantrums and slobbering irrationality.”

Our assessments, then, are clear. Weisberg, Rich, and Kellerman all think Trump a bad president. And we all think that those who have enabled his not one, but two bad presidencies are similarly bad.

Again, I acknowledge that our assessments are judgements, value judgements. I therefore acknowledge that yours might well be different from ours. But on this I trust we can agree. That bad leadership, however defined, does not happen because it cannot happen without bad followership.

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*I define a “bad” leader as one who is demonstrably unethical, or manifestly ineffective, or both. For more on this see my book, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).  

Did you know that today was Followers Day? You didn’t?! Well, maybe because I’ve just designated it!

You, like most people, probably think a lot about leaders but nearly never about followers. Well, I aim to change that. Not that leaders are unimportant. It’s just that they are not all important. Followers matter. Moreover, because there is no such thing as a leader without at least one follower, the latter matter every bit as much as the former.

Which raises this question: Why did I decide that today of all days is Followers Day? Two reasons. First and much, much the most important because today is the official publication day of my new book, Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t!

The second reason is that there are two other pieces on followers, both recently published, to which I wish to draw your attention. Unlike my book, these two focus only on followers during the time of Trump. But be forewarned: as their titles make clear, they do so from a particular perspective.

The first is an article in New York magazine (October 5-18) which is brilliantly argued and even more brilliantly written. It’s titled “The Collaborators” and is by longtime journalist Frank Rich. The second is a quite good but not very good book by Jacob Weisberg titled Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.

I will be writing more about both Rich’s article and Weisberg’s book in the coming days. For today though I’m done. I’m off to celebrate FOLLOWERS DAY!

Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t is the title of my new book. It will be published tomorrow by the University of Toronto Press.

*

The last paragraph of my last post read:

Submission is the human condition – usually. But it is not always. As my new book makes equally clear, there are reasons why sometimes, not often but sometimes, people resist.  

In recent weeks followers in France – large numbers of them, up to three quarters of a million, over 100,000 thousand in Paris alone – have chosen to do just that. To resist. To resist in ways that have already been extremely costly.

Literally costly – it will be expensive to repair and replace the tangible losses. But even dearer are the intangible losses. At least for now of pride in France and of trust in leading individuals and institutions.

What is so broken in France that massive, sometimes violent demonstrations spread so quickly through the country?  Two reasons were given. The first, mainly by students, was poorly funded school systems. The second, mainly by labor, was government budget cuts in the face of rising living costs.

But the immediate reasons must be seen in a larger context. To start, France itself, which in important ways is in trouble. Its national debt is sky high. Its longtime president, Emmanuel Macron, has long since worn out his welcome. (If he ever had one!) Finally, the French people. They have a well-deserved reputation for taking to the streets to protest whatever they decide is a slight.    

Then there is the even larger context, the one within which France itself is situated. The context within which there are anti-establishment, anti-elitist demonstrations in democracies around the world, including recently in the largest, India. For weeks students in India – they are called and they call themselves “cockroaches” – have led loud, large anti-government demonstrations beginning in New Delhi and then spreading to other cities including Mumbai. Each of these various resistances – I include in this category seven British prime ministers in ten years; abysmally low approval ratings of leaders such as Germany’s Friedrich Merz who has been Chancellor for less that eighteen months; and the rise of parties toward the extremes of right and left. We’ve reached a point where in most of the world’s largest democracies ordinary people are angry at and alienated from the leaders who purportedly represent them.   

What is the still larger context within which furies like these have been unleashed? Massive wealth inequities; fear and loathing of AI; climate change that is palpable but nevertheless unmanageable; and leaders failing at fundamental tasks such as providing their followers with feelings of safety and security.

I wonder though. Are followers in democracies aware their protests are a luxury? A luxury their counterparts in autocracies could never afford?

Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t is the title of my new book. It will be published next week by the University of Toronto Press.

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The title of this post is the same as that of the second chapter of Why We Follow…. So, I’m not surprised that Americans of all stations are standing fecklessly and helplessly by as their president throws Ukraine under a bus.

But let me be as clear as I can. Unless this trend is reversed, American decision-making on the war between Russia and Ukraine will be the single greatest stain on and, possibly, the single gravest mistake in American foreign policy history.

Earlier this year less than a third of Americans were very or somewhat confident that Donald Trump could/would make good decisions about by far the deadliest war in Europe since the end of the second world war. Since then, though most Americans continue to support Ukraine, and though in recent weeks especially the country has increasingly been under deadly attack, the United States has drastically scaled back its support. Additionally, the personal and political rift between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, has grown even more tenuous, acrimonious, and dangerous.

Which raises the question of how such a thing can happen. How can the American people – especially but not exclusively the political elite – be reduced to such abject submission on a matter of such critical consequence?

The answers are not hard to understand. But nor are they familiar or immediately obvious. Suffice here to say that 1) they are in my book; 2) they testify to how and why followers are as important a determinant as leaders; and 3) they clarify how leaders who are bad if not even evil get away with murder.

Submission is the human condition – usually. But it is not always. As my new book makes equally clear, there are reasons why sometimes, not often but sometimes, people resist.  

As I wrote in Part I of this post, the idea that leaders should be role models goes back thousands of years. Moreover, it lives still – at least in theory.

Of course, some of the instructions that we used to get are dead and gone. For example, we used to be told that at the age of six George Washington was given a small ax, with which he swung at his father’s cherry tree. When he was asked what happened, George replied, “I cannot tell a lie. I cut it with my hatchet.” But instead of being punished by his father, his father embraced him. He valued George’s honesty more than his cherry tree.

This small story once taught two lessons. First, that virtue is its own reward. Second, that virtue is rewarded. Both apply to leaders as role models. Leaders are virtuous because being virtuous makes them feel good. And leaders are virtuous because it’s likely their followers will follow suit.

Virtue is variably defined. It can mean being honest or kind; it can also mean being diligent or abstinent or all the above. But whatever the nuances and differences, healthy groups and organizations have a common understanding of what virtue is. What good character and behavior look like and consists of.

It’s peculiar then that the chief executive of the United States of America is a man who by every conceivable conception or definition is the antithesis of a role model. The character of the President Donald Trump is bad and he behaves badly – he is not a man of virtue as this word is conventionally and commonly understood.

It is not political but demonstrable to say that Trump is, for instance, each of the following:

• A chronic liar.
• A vengeful adversary.
• A coarse vulgarian.
• A nasty bully.
• A rapacious money-grubber.

He is moreover shameless. Trump does not pretend to be what he is not. Not only does he not aspire to be a role model of any sort, but he also seems to pride himself on being singular, on getting away with what no president ever did or would ever have dared attempt.

All of this says more about us, the American people in the 21^st century, than it ever did about him. Even when we elected Trump president the first time, we knew what we were getting. We knew we were getting a leader who lacked all relevant experience and expertise – and who was instead a showman and charlatan.

Which raises two possibilities. Either the idea of a role model is dead and gone. Or the ideal of a role model has been turned on its head.  

The idea that leaders should be role models – should themselves model the character and behaviors they want their followers to emulate – goes back to ancient times.

Confucious wrote in the Analects that the sage, Master Zeng, said, “I examine myself three times a day. When dealing with others, have I been trustworthy? In intercourse with my friends, have I been faithful? Have I practiced what I was taught?” And when he was asked by a leader what he could do to make his followers “respectful, loyal, and zealous,” Master Zeng replied that he himself should set the example. “Approach them with dignity and they will be respectful. Be a good son and a kind father, and they will be loyal.”

Similarly, in Plutarch’s classic, Lives. The intent of Lives was to instruct. To compare leaders so that others would copy those of good character. As I wrote elsewhere, “Plutarch’s work is timeless primarily because he trains his lens on personality rather than on politics, on private dispositions as opposed to public deeds, and on the importance of character in addition to capacity.* For instance, unlike Brutus, Dion was “a commander without fault improving to the utmost those counsels which he himself gave.” Dion was a role model. He was what he wanted others to be. And he did what he told others to do.

Now it’s the American military that most clearly and consistently articulates the idea that leaders should be, that they must be, role models. At the United States Military Academy, for example, cadets are advised or maybe forewarned: “From the moment that you arrive as a plebe to when you graduate as a commissioned officer everything you do here is designed to develop your character and leadership.” Character first, who you are; leadership second, how you behave.

Well over a century after West Point was founded (1802), the so-called father of modern management, Peter Drucker, saw fit to point out, approvingly, that the academy’s “core competence was its ability to turn out leaders who deserved trust.” Though Drucker himself was a realist, not an idealist, he nevertheless believed that good leaders earned the trust of their followers. How exactly? By being themselves of good character and setting high ethical standards.

In their popular book, The Leadership Challenge – the 7^th edition was published in 2023 – James Kouzes and Barry Posner reiterate yet again the importance of leaders as role models. In a section they title “Model the Way,” they emphasize that leaders should be who they want their followers to emulate. This makes it essential that leaders know themselves – that they are aware of what they stand for and what their priorities are. Once this work is done, they can lead others, presumably relatively wisely and well.

The idea that good leaders should be good role models is timeless. It goes back thousands of years – and still it’s alive and well. At least in theory.

*Barbara Kellerman, ed., Leadership: Essential Selections (McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 32.