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Representative Mike Johnson is evidence that the cynical maxim, “nice guys finish last,” might apply some of the time. But not all of the time. Sometimes nice guys finish first. As happened last week when the largely unknown Republican Congressman from Louisiana became, against all odds, Speaker of the House.

How did this happen – or more to the point, why did this happen? Johnson is now second in line for the presidency. But until he was elected Speaker, unanimously, by every one of the 220 House Republicans, he was not only obscure, but without any significant leadership experience. Moreover he’d been in Congress for only six years, fewer than any other Speaker in recent history.

Johnson is a Christian Conservative whose views on every aspect of American politics and culture are relentlessly hard right.

• He has sought to defend gun rights – and to expand them.
• He has called abortion a “holocaust” and voted for a national abortion ban.
• He has referred to homosexuality as “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle.”
• He has argued that “teachers, professors, administrators and left-wing media” were trying to force gender transitions among young people.
• He has called climate science into question and voted against all clean energy legislation.
• He has maintained that Congress has a “moral and constitutional duty” to balance the budget.
• He has been a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump and was prominent among Republicans who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

What enabled Johnson to snag every single Republican vote for Speaker – including those of the few Republican moderates – is not immediately clear. The reasons given most often were embarrassment and exhaustion. Republicans were mortified that the leadership circus had gone on as long as it did. (After previous Speaker Kevin McCarthy was tossed out early this month, also rejected were three others, including House Majority Whip Tom Emmer whose quest for the brass ring lasted all of four hours.) And Republicans were drained and demoralized by their repeated failures to agree on who should lead them – sick and tired of the mess of their own making.

Still, why Johnson? Why not someone else, one of his more seasoned colleagues? The answer seems to be – last week we repeatedly heard it – that Johnson’s a “nice guy.” Unlike, for example, another Republican Congressman, Jim Jordan, who had also been up for the Speakership but who is notoriously bellicose and belligerent, Johnson is apparently unfailingly affable. He is “truly humble” and “mild mannered.” He is inoffensive, low-key and well-liked. Or, maybe better, he is not disliked. He is not disliked by Trump – and he is not disliked by effectively any of his colleagues who seemed to calculate that Johnson was a leader they could, at least, stomach.

Johnson’s likability is not to be taken lightly. In one of my earliest books, The Political Presidency: Practice of Leadership (still available on Amazon), I wrote that in the American political system, which is fundamentally anti-authority, the ability to be ingratiating is an important, a very important, political skill.

Here’s how I defined it: Ingratiation is a behavior designed to influence another person concerning the attractiveness of one’s personal qualities. Ingratiation tactics include: 1) preempting problems; 2) giving advance notice; 3) rendering favors or providing services; 4) agreeing; 5) flattering; and 6) behaving in such a way as to increase the likelihood of being judged appealing and, or, decent and, or, simply, nice.     

By every measure, in recent decades Americans have become ruder and coarser, more divisive and argumentative. There is something to be said then for a leader who is a gentleman – a gentle man as opposed to a street fighter, a gentle man even as opposed to one with sharp elbows.

Speaker Johnson is of course wholly untried and untested. Who knows if his moderate manner will extend to his politics? All we know now is that more than anything else it is his niceness that explains his sudden, remarkable rise to the top of the leadership pole.

While America’s President Joe Biden was in Tel Aviv doing his level best to tamp down the crisis in the Middle East, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin were playing kissy face in Beijing. Xi took the occasion to emphasize his “deep friendship” with his Russian counterpart. Putin meantime basked in the glow of his “old” and “dear” friend, Xi.

The juxtaposition of these two scenes is symbolic – and it is substantive. Though Russia and China have interests in the Middle East, and though even China has recently dabbled in Middle East diplomacy (it brokered a detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia), during the current crisis Xi and Putin both have steered clear. Let Biden risk his reputation and dirty his hands in the blood and guts of the fighting between Israel and Hamas – no reason, so far, for the two tyrants to do the same.

The divide between the sides could not be sharper or starker if it were choreographed. On the one side, the leaders of the two nations most obviously associated with authoritarianism if not totalitarianism. On the other side, the leader of the state most historically representative of liberal democracy.  

Of course, if it were just these three players striding on the global stage it would be one thing. But it is not. Since Putin’s war on Ukraine, other countries around the world have been more pressed to take sides, precisely because the axis between China and Russia has been growing tighter and their interests more clearly aligned. All this when the American system of government has been looking decidedly ragged. It’s no fault of Biden’s that for weeks the House has lacked a speaker. Nor is it any fault of Biden’s that for years a corrupt crook has controlled the Republican Party. Still, it’s the president who leads our democracy – now weakened if not threatened by dysfunction.

The fact that Xi is the undisputed leader of China and Putin of Russia has implications abroad and at home. Abroad their appetite for risk has increased over the years not decreased. Just this week Chinese vessels confronted or even blocked Philippine boats in the disputed waters of the South China Sea. And just this week the foreign minister of Russia shook hands with the president of Iran – while Russian forces claimed successful artillery and air strikes near the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. Old China hand Matt Pottinger cautions that “even with a weak economy, Xi is feeling emboldened.” Meantime, the president of Finland, Sauli Niinisto, warns about the dangers of Russian escalation in Europe. “The risk,” he recently went so far as to remark, “that nuclear weapons could be used is tremendous.”

The situation at home – at home in China and in Russia – mirrors that abroad. Both Xi and Putin now rule with an iron fist. Dissent is met with swift, brutal punishment. Virtually complete compliance with the state and, in China with the Chinese Communist Party, is demanded and accorded. The few exceptions prove the rule – most famously Alexsei Navalny, for many years the most prominent and painful thorn in Putin’s side. The levels and durations of Navalny’s imprisonments and punishments continue constantly to escalate – to the point where his lawyers themselves are in danger of being incarcerated. Navalny will nearly certainly die alone and away, sealed off from other souls he might contaminate with his dissidence.     

For those of us fond of freedom it’s not a pretty picture. But here we are. In a world in which the good guys are hamstringing themselves while the bad guys are taking advantage.

Never have the demands on President Joe Biden been as great as they are now. This applies to him as a domestic leader, and to him as a foreign policy leader. Trouble is that his key constituents, the American people, are deeply dissatisfied with his leadership.

At home we believe he falls short on inflation, immigration, and addiction; on crime and punishment; on national security and the national deficit. Last week President Biden’s approval ratings stood at a miserably low 37%. Worse yet for the incumbent and his supporters – especially given the next presidential election is now just a year away – polls suggest that if it came to a contest today between him and his immediate predecessor, the latter would beat the former.

Abroad is worse. Biden got what he never bargained for. Not one war to which the United States had somehow to respond, but two. Biden was so eager to escape the burdens of international conflict that he got out of Afghanistan post haste – to his enduring political detriment. Now, with the war in Ukraine likely to continue for at least another year, and additionally a major crisis in the Middle East that every hour threatens to get worse, America’s chief executive has almost more than he can handle. As deeply informed observer, Walter Russell Mead, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The Middle East firestorm is merely one hot spot in a world spinning out of control.”

Whatever people hold against him, nearly no one who is not determinedly partisan argues that President Biden is either an idiot or corrupt. That he is either inexperienced or inexpert. That he is either crazy or extreme. While among Americans are fissures on both foreign and domestic policy, neither the man nor his message incites great anger or even antagonisms.

What, then, is the problem? Why is he receiving so little public support and why is such support as he does have so unenthusiastic? Two answers come to mind.

The first is my own, by now familiar point, which is to say that in the third decade of the 21^st century followers generally diss their leaders. They tend no matter what not to like them. And they tend no matter what harshly to judge them and even to tear them down.  

The second is Biden’s age. It’s also a familiar argument but one that does not quite get to the point – perhaps because people are reluctant to say precisely what they mean. It’s not per se that the president is 80 years old. Lots of Americans are 80 years old and they present well, hale and hearty, fully able to take on what life throws at them. Biden though is not among them. It’s not that he’s 80 years of age. It’s how he’s 80 years of age.

How does Joe Biden look? He looks old, old. Frail, feeble, and fragile; pale and gray; wispy and thin; tottering around, in small steps taken haltingly on what seem spindly, wobbly legs. His eyes are small slits in a curiously unlined but nevertheless wizened face.

How does Joe Biden sound? He sounds old, old. His voice is ancient – scrawny and raspy; croaky and scratchy; weak and wan. It seems to emanate not from deep down, in ringing – dare I say masculine? – tones. But rather from up top, from near the top of his throat, in sounds that are not exactly high-pitched, but lack the cadence of power and persuasion, of a leader in anything resembling full command.

How does Joe Biden speak? He speaks old, old. Never an orator, the passing years have not been kind to his capacity to communicate, to convince us that he’s a smart, strong leader who knows exactly what he’s doing when. Biden nearly never speaks extemporaneously. He does not trust himself, nor, apparently, do his aides presume he can do so without risking an awful gaffe. So, the president reads. He reads from a script in his thin, reedy voice that inevitably underplays if not even undermines his message.

However smart and sane whatever President Biden says or does, he cannot at this point in his life be fully appreciated nor even fully heard. Effective leaders must somehow, in some way, look and sound leader-like. Alas, for those among us who generally support him, no leader on the planet would benefit from presenting like the incumbent American president.   

In 2015 I came out with a book of the above title.* The point of the book was that while leadership in America has always been difficult to exercise, it was becoming more difficult than ever before.

Historically, leading in America has been hard because, on account of our history and ideology, we Americans are fundamentallly anti-authority.  Contemporaneously, leading is even harder because of changes in the context that mitigate against leaders leading and followers following. These more recent changes include those in culture and technology. Precisely because the context has changed, so have leaders and, more to the point, followers. Followers are far less willing now quietly to go along – to follow – than they used to be.

Don’t believe me? Ask Claudine Gay, the recently inaugurated president of Harvard University whose series of missteps in response to the attacks on Israel by Hamas brought on her head widespread wrath. One of her most eminent predecessors, Lawrence Summers, went public with his anger saying that Gay’s statement(s) on the situation had failed “to meet the needs of the moment” and lacked “moral clarity.”

Others, such as mega-Harvard funders Leslie and Abigail Wexner, went so far as to write a letter to the Harvard Board of Overseers saying that they were “stunned and sickened at the dismal failure of Harvard’s leadership to take a clear and unequivocal stand against the barbaric murders of innocent Israeli civilians by terrorists.” Moreover, in their letter the Wexners announced that their foundation was “formally ending its financial and programmatic relationship with Harvard and the Harvard Kennedy School.” Harvard is an immensely wealth institution. But even for Harvard, losing the Wexners as funders is a bad blow.

President Gay is by no means the only university president who ran into trouble on this issue. The leaders of Indiana University, Northwestern University, and Stanford University, among others, had similar situations play out – though none so publicly and perhaps painfully as at Harvard.

These presidents, then, are simply signs of the times. Signs of a time in which leadership in America is hard and getting harder. Signs of a time in which constituents and constituencies come out of the woodwork demanding to have a say. Signs of a time in which followers refuse to follow – including students who have taken to protesting frequently and furiously. Signs of a time in which the costs of being a leader are more and the benefits less.

No wonder the average tenure of a college president has dropped to five years. Not long ago it was ten.

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*Stanford University Press.

Leadership from Bad to Worse is the title of my forthcoming book. The subtitle is, What Happens When Bad Festers. *

As it pertains then to the crisis in the Middle East, I quote from David Grossman’s recent piece in the Financial Times, “Israel Is in a Nightmare.”

“What’s happening now is the concrete price Israel is paying for having been seduced for years by a corrupt leadership which drove it downhill from bad to worse; which eroded its institutions of law and justice, its military, its education system; which was willing to place it in existential danger in order to keep its prime minister out of prison.“

Grossman, one of Israel’s most distinguished men of letters, does not let Hamas off the hook. He writes plainly that the “horror” was “effected by Hamas.” But in this piece his rage, and his grief, are directly primarily at his own people who allowed the slide, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “corrupt leadership,” to continue unimpeded and interrupted. Catastrophe, tragedy, were the inevitable result.

It’s what happens: When leadership and followership are bad, unless they are stopped they get worse.

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*The book will be published by Oxford University Press on March 1, 2024. Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers can be preordered now on Amazon and other outlets.

The phrase “crisis of leadership” is commonplace. Not so much its obvious obverse, “crisis of followership.”

Is such a thing even possible? Can it be that followers trigger a crisis – or themselves constitute a crisis – not leaders?

It is, it can. Americans have ample evidence right now. In the U.S. House of Representatives in which members of the majority Republican Party have been unable to agree on who should be their leader. On who should be Speaker of the House of Representatives.

On one level the situation in which House Republicans find themselves is just a few days old. It was only on October 5 that the former Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, was ousted by a handful of his right-wing Republican colleagues (who did the deed by joining with House Democrats). But on another level, it goes back to when McCarthy was first elected Speaker – which he succeeded in doing only by granting his ostensible followers the power absurdly easily to push him from his perch.

Finally, is yet another level which goes back even further, to when Ohio Republican John Boehner, who became Speaker in 2011, found that members of the Tea Party – again, Republican right-wingers – made it impossible for him to do what he presumably was elected to do, to lead. Though Boehner tried every which way to accommodate his right flank, to minimize differences between mainstream Republicans such as himself and Tea Partiers, they made his life impossible. They refused to follow – which is precisely why, four years after he became Speaker, Boehner resigned. A lifelong politician, he quit politics completely and indefinately.        

It took just eight House Republicans (who joined with Democrats) to depose Speaker McCarthy. Eight Republicans out of a total of two-hundred and twenty-one. Among them was Floridian Matt Gaetz, a right-wing flame-thrower for whom the noun “follower,” and the verb “follow,” seem not to exist. People like him loathe following, they despise going along to get along, they equate it with weakness. Instead of doing what they perceive as caving they are ready and willing to Burn Down the House.

Americans are taught that leaders are all-important and that followers are unimportant. Nothing, but nothing, could be further from the truth. Leadership is a relationship. A leader without followers is powerless to act, to get anything accomplished. Moreover, followers who refuse as a matter of principle to follow will certainly gum up the works. Preclude even the work that must get done – say, approving appropriation bills to avoid a government shutdown – from getting done. To be clear, there are times when followers can and should resist people in power. But in the American system of government, when resistance becomes recalcitrance, and recalcitrance hardens into refusal, the system breaks down.

As further evidence consider the case of Alabama Republican, Senator Tommy Tuberville, who for months has single handedly blocked key military confirmations, promotions, and appointments. The reason he has given for his outrageous intervention is his objection to the Pentagon’s policy on abortions. But the net effect of his refusal to go along with the overwhelming majority has been badly to hinder what should be a source of great American pride, the American military.

Tuberville is most certainly not a leader – not one of his colleagues has followed his lead. Rather he, like Gaetz, is a wretched example of an elected official who fails totally to understand the importance of following in the interest of the greater, the common, good.

That leaders who lust can be lethal is a truism that applies, alas, to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His lust for power has turned toxic.*    

Once upon a time Netanyahu was among the most gifted politicians in his country’s history. Smart, good looking and articulate; highly educated and well-traveled; expert and experienced not only in politics but in business.

For his excellence he was well rewarded. He served as Israel’s prime minister from 1996 to 1999. A decade later he became prime minister again, this time for twelve years, from 2009 to 2021. Moreover, during this entire stretch, when he was not prime minister, he held other prominent government posts, including Minister of Finance and leader of the opposition.

Things began to turn seriously south for Netanyahu in 2019, when he was formally indicted on charges including bribery and fraud. In June 2021 he was ousted from his post as prime minister by a coalition government.

It’s been said that Netanyahu remained in electoral politics after the charges were filed primarily to avoid the punishments and degradations of being found guilty. Who knows? Impossible to get inside anyone’s head. Whatever his ostensible reason for remaining in the game, he refused to leave the table. While his trial was ongoing, he continued to serve as leader of the opposition and, after yet another round of elections, in December 2022 he again became prime minister.     

This first year of Netanyahu’s most recent term has turned out the most disastrous in Israeli history. For many months the country has been under assault from within – its calamitous divisiveness the result of massive protesting against the judicial “reforms” put forth by Netanyahu and his notoriously right-wing, some argue facistic, cabinet. And now the country has suffered another assault, this time from without. An unprecedented attack by Hamas spotlighting an unprecedent failure of Israel’s vaunted intelligence apparatus.   

Netanyahu’s lust for power has led to unmitigated tragedy. Nor is this story over. The ultimate consequences of his so far endless tenure remain to be revealed.

I want to be clear here. The cycle of violence in the Middle East is the fault not only of Israeli leadership, but of Palestinian leadership, that is, the lack thereof; and of leadership at the top in every other country in the region and in many other countries around the world. But history will never let Benjamin Netanyahu off the hook. His insistence on remaining in power no matter the price to be paid will forever blacken his name.

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Todd Pittinsky and I define a leader who lusts as having “a psychological drive that produces intense wanting, even desperately needing, to obtain an object, or to secure a circumstance. When the object has been obtained, or the circumstance secured, there is relief, but only briefly, temporarily.” In Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. (Cambridge University Pressi, 2020, p. 2.)

Sometimes demanding more money is just about money. But sometimes demanding more money is additionally about power – about getting more money and more power.

Similarly, sometimes demanding more power is just about power. But sometimes demanding more power is additionally about money – about getting more power and more money.

Though money and power usually are inseparable, the symbiotic relationship between them tends to remain unspoken. Unspoken because it’s much more acceptable to ask for more money than to ask for more power.

Wanting more money is easy to understand, and sympathize with, especially if income is blatantly unequal. More money can and usually does translate into living a better lifestyle – and it mollifies feelings of grievance.

Striking autoworkers have taken to the picket lines for several reasons. High on the list is that the CEOs of Detroit’s big three automakers are earning about 300 times more than the median autoworker. Not only is this gap in earnings egregious, but it’s also wider than most large companies nationwide. Not incidentally, the media industry, also beset in recent months by strikes, is similarly unfair. In 2021 Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav earned 2,972 what his median employee made – $246 million.   

But if the benefits of having more money are immediately obvious, what are the benefits of having more power? What does more power get you? It might of course get you more money, in which case the virtue of having more power is clear. But what if having more power is about nothing else than having more power?

Does the question apply to, for example, Matt Gaetz, the Republican member of Congress who, with special venom, is trying to unseat the Republican Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy? If there’s money in this for Gaetz, it’s not immediately apparent. What is immediately apparent is that for Gaetz this is about power. Even if he fails to overthrow McCarthy, Gaetz has seized the national spotlight, thereby accruing more power than if he had remained merely a backbencher.

As I wrote in The End of Leadership, in democratic societies leaders are becoming weaker and followers stronger. Hence the title, “the end of leadership.” In some ways this shift in power and influence is good, and in others bad. It certainly contributes, mightily, to our democratic dysfunctions – including to the current food fight in Congress. But it also contributes, mightily, to rectifying previously existing imbalances.

Case in point: the movement for player empowerment in college sports. Imagine this a generation ago: the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team petitioning the National Labor Relations Board to unionize! Startling, yes, surprising, no. For these players are only the most recent in a growing line of those taking on the old model. The model in which student-athletes gave their all to their schools – but their schools gave them little or nothing in return. No money and no power.

On the surface, what these players want is money. It was only two years ago that the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) finally agreed to allow its players to profit from their prowess. But beneath the surface this is also about power. Players are sick and tired of not being able to cash in on their contributions. And they are equally sick and tired of not being treated like enormous assets – which clearly, they are.

Motivations matter. It matters whether people are motivated by money, and, or power, and, or something else, such as safety and security. Motivations matter especially to those of us with an interest in who leads and why, and in who follows and why. For what drives us – and how strongly – determines what happens.

Follower power. This tale of two women is about follower power. About how two women with little or even no power took on men with so much power they were nearly unbridled.

The first of the two women was Frances Haugen. She was the whistleblower at Facebook who (in 2021) disclosed her identity on 60 Minutes. Haugen revealed she was the source of internal documents disclosing that Facebook knew some of its algorithms were causing great harm, notably to young people. She further told of a Facebook program designed to curb misinformation and other threats to national security, but that was dissolved after the 2020 presidential election. Haugen said what she saw at Facebook “over and over again was that there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interest, like making more money.”

The second of the two women was Cassidy Hutchinson. She was the whistleblower in the administration of President Donald Trump, who was an aide to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Hutchinson came to the nation’s attention when she complied with a subpoena to testify before the January 6^th committee charged with investigating the attack on the US. Capitol. Previously Hutchinson had been a loyal member of Trump’s team, course-correcting only after the violence that unfolded on January 6^th. To explain her about face, she too invoked feelings of patriotism, specifically her loyalty to American democracy. She told the committee that she regarded the January 6^th attacks on Mike Pence as “unpatriotic” and “un-American.” And she testified that “we were watching the Capitol building getting defaced over a lie.” All this has just been reinforced, and then some, in her new book, tellingly titled, Enough.    

Do Haugen and Hutchinson have anything in common that might explain their extraordinary bravery? Their willingness to risk their well-being to publicly defend the United States of America from its economic and political excesses?

They do.

• Both are women. Both are women in a time when men still continue to hold the most powerful posts in American business and politics.
• Both are young, or relatively so. Haugen was about 35 when she went public with her disappointment and anger. Hutchinson was about 25 when she did the same.
• Both were anything other than members of coastal elites and undergraduates at anything other than elite schools. Haugen graduated from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. Hutchinson from Christopher Newport University.
• Both were starry eyed optimists early in their respective careers. When Haugen joined Facebook, she thought that “Facebook has the potential to bring out the best of us.” When Hutchinson started working in the White House she was, by her own testimony, “transfixed” by Trump and wanted nothing so much as to be his “loyal foot soldier.”
• Both came quickly to the conclusion that whistleblowing could and would be their way of trying to save the nation – and trying to redeem themselves. Haugen and Hutchinson are similarly a throwback to a time when civics and civility mattered far more than they do now. And when American ideals and idealism were threaded through the fabric of our national discourse.

None of this is to say that the weak shall inherit the earth. Rather it is to point out that being apparently weak – lacking obvious sources of power – does not preclude being remarkably strong. When Haugen worked at Facebook, and when Hutchinson worked in the White House, they were, by every measure. followers. They were certainly not, by any measure, leaders. Still, by daring to speak up and speak out they changed the nature of the conversation. And, maybe, the course of history.   

Go into a bookstore, look online, and you’ll see many, many, many books on leadership – online they’re available by the thousands. However, the word “evil” virtually never enters the leadership literature. As if leadership that is evil, as if the conception that leadership can be evil, never crosses our collective mind.

In my book Bad Leadership, I identified seven different types of bad leadership – of which Evil Leadership was one. I defined it this way:

The leader and at least some followers commit atrocities. They use pain as an instrument of power. The harm done to men, women, and children is severe rather than slight. The harm can be physical, psychological, or both.

I cannot say that since Bad Leadership came out our reluctance to explore leadership that is evil – to consider carefully this pox on the human condition – has subsided. We do see evil leadership. We do lament evil leadership. We do condemn evil leadership. And sometimes we even intervene to stop evil leadership. But nearly never do we call it out for what it is – leaders and some of their followers using pain as an instrument of power. And nearly never do we treat or attack it as we should – as a social, or societal, or sociological disease that can be and often is as lethal as some of our physical diseases.

To the general rule that the word “evil” is nearly never a modifier of the word “leadership,” nor nearly never applied to a particular leader, are rare exceptions. One such was a few days ago, in New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s column titled, “I Saw Firsthand How Much Is at Stake in Ukraine.” I was gratified to read that he used the word “evil” because there is no better word in the English language to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch an unprovoked attack on Ukraine – or Putin himself.

I want to be clear. Friedman does not call Putin evil, refer to him as an evil leader or evil man. Rather he writes this: “What Putin is doing in Ukraine is not just reckless, not just a war of choice, not just an invasion in a class of its own for overreach, mendacity, immorality, and incompetence, all wrapped in a farrago of lies. What he is doing is evil.” Later Friedman adds that “what is so evil beyond the death and pain and trauma and destruction…  is that the last thing humanity needed was to divert so much attention… to respond to Putin’s war.” (Italics added.)

There is a distinction between saying that a person is evil – and saying that what a person does is evil. They are not the same. The first is a blanket indictment of a person’s character – an indictment of the whole. The second is an indictment only in part – a judgement rendered of what someone does, not of who someone is.

Leaders cannot be understood except as part of a system – the leadership system.  This system has three parts, each of which is of equal importance – leaders, followers, and contexts. Putin’s war against Ukraine cannot therefore be separated from the man himself. Or from his followers – ranging from close aides and acolytes to tens of millions of ordinary Russians. Or from the contexts within which the war was launched – for example the historical context within which Russia and Ukraine have been entwined not for decades but for centuries.  

Still, the systemic approach does not let the leader – in this case the aggressor, Putin – off the hook. While a word such as “evil” must be used judiciously, very, very sparingly, on occasion it’s apt. We have no trouble calling out flat out past leaders who were evil – leaders such as Hitler and Stalin. We should do no less in the present. If American leaders more directly labeled Putin “evil,” American followers would more unanimously support President Biden’s endgame. Defeating President Putin without question.