Author: Barbara

There has been no recent event on Planet Leadership as seismic as the sudden, startling sacking of Sam Altman.

Altman was more than the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI – the company at the forefront of artificial intelligence development. Altman personified AI. Altman was the ambassador of AI. Worldwide people – including people in positions of great power – depended on Altman to level with them. To tell them the truth about where in the big picture AI was, and where it was likely, at least in the near term, to go. Altman was King of AI – he embodied the technological development that is as potentially potent as any in our lifetimes.

And now he’s gone. Well, not gone really. Impossible to believe that he won’t resurface. But he was, so far as we know, pushed from his perch from one moment to the next by the board of the company that he appeared absolutely to lead.

What happened is unclear. A post on OpenAI’s website said only that the board “no longer has confidence” in Altman’s leadership because he was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” What is clear is that the internal turmoil will have an external effect. Altman was so singular a captain of his domain that inevitably his domain will be impacted by his shocking departure.  

Leaders in America were damned if they did. And they were damned if they didn’t. If they did speak out about the war in the Middle East – made any statement at all – they were bound to be attacked by some or another of their constituents. And if they didn’t speak out about the war in the Middle East they were bound to be attacked by some or another of their constituents.

Let’s review the context:

• Leadership in America has always been difficult. Our history was, after all, revolutionary. The American Revolution birthed a political culture in which resistance to authority was admired, not despised.
• Leadership in America has always been difficult. Our ideology is, after all, in strong support of followers, not leaders. It gives ammunition to ordinary people for whom ideals such as freedom and democracy buttress their claim to have a say.    
• Leadership in America has always been difficult. And, our constitution and our system of government were, after all, deliberately crafted to preclude any single individual or branch of government from accumulating too much power. Hence … “checks and balances.”
• Leadership in America is even more difficult now than it was before. The rights revolutions of the 19^th, 20^th and even into the 21^st centuries expanded our conceptions of who was entitled, legally as well as morally, to have a say.
• Leadership in America is even more difficult now than it was before. Social media give everyone a voice -many ominous and downright dangerous. Leaders are especially vulnerable to followers consumed by hatred and rage.

Let’s review the situation:

• An unprecedented and unanticipated war in the Middle East, between Israel and Hamas, triggered by a bloody attack.
• A war in an area of the world beset by ancient hatreds.
• A war in which the warring parties evoked impassioned responses not only in the region but around the world.
• A war which in the United States is home to people who strongly support both sides.  
• A war with potentially enormous geopolitical consequences – political, economic, and military.

Let’s review the followers – the American people:

• Most don’t care much, if at all, about the war in the Middle East.
• But some care a lot. Some on the right care a lot and so do some on the left, even some in middle. Moreover, some if not most Jews care, and some if not most Muslims do the same.
•  Of those that do care a lot about the war in the Middle East, there is not necessarily agreement. For example, some American Jews strongly support Israel doing whatever it deems necessary to defend itself. Others condemn Israel for putting in harm’s way many civilians.
• Americans who have done something as opposed to nothing have done different things: written letters to editors; vented on social media; spoken out at meetings or other gatherings; put up signs or posters supporting or denigrating one or another side; attended a march, protest or rally; donated money to their cause; or withheld money from an organization or institution they concluded had violated principles in which they deeply believed.
• Americans are divided on the war on the Middle East. But an overwhelming majority – 84% – are either very or somewhat concerned that the United States will be drawn into what at this writing remains still a confined conflict.

Finally let’s review the leaders. Here a sample:

• The President of the United States. You know you have a problem when your most immediate followers are among your most restive. This week more than 500 government officials representing some 40 government agencies signed a letter protesting the Biden administration’s Middle East policy.  Moreover public support for President Biden’s stance on the war is slipping, even among Democrats.   
• Other elected officials. Longtime, generally mild-mannered Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, was booed at a vigil in Boston when he had the temerity to call for a “de-escalation of the current violence.”
• Appointed officials. None other than the relentlessly hard-working and publicly mild-mannered Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, faced dissent in his ranks. Some of his State Department underlings used the Department’s internal “dissent channel” to protest Blinken’s policy in the Middle East, which they viewed as too strongly pro-Israel.  He in turn felt the better part of valor was to assure his subordinates that, “we’re listening.”
• Presidents of colleges and universities. They’ve been on the frontlines since day one. Harvard’s newly minted president Claudine Gay is evidence. One of her predecessors, Larrry Summers, stated publicly that he was “sickened” by the university’s “silence.” Major Harvard funders Leslie and Abigail Wexner criticized Gay’s “tiptoeing” and “equivocating” on the war and announced they were cutting all ties to the University. Nor were students exempt – Harvard’s campus was sundered by student groups noisily, sometimes aggressively, attacking those who opposed them.
• CEO’s – if they said anything they usually were careful, very careful. Most statements coming out of corporate headquarters were anodyne – such as Microsoft’s, which condemned the “hatred and brutality;” Intel’s which said the company was taking steps to “safeguard and support” their workers; and JPMorgan’s, which called the war a “terrible tragedy.” There were exceptions – but by and large corporate leaders have become gun shy. For good reason. They know now that if they take a stance on anything that’s remotely political or controversial, they – and the companies they lead – will be vulnerable to attack.

Anyone say that leading in that America was hard?* In the past it was hard. In the present it is hard. And in the future it will be harder still.

Unless of course we elect a president who is a fascist – in which case no problem. Fascists don’t even bother to persuade us to do what they want us to do. They just force us to do it.

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*Barbara Kellerman, Hard Times: Leadership in America (Stanford University Press, 2015).

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There are none. Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. But it’s not hyperbole to say that among political leaders in China, women are now completely excluded from the top ranks.

The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and the Communist Party (CCP) that governs it has always been mostly male. From the founding of the PRC in 1949 under the leadership of Mao Zedong, through the upheavals of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, then through the more stable and liberal decades of the 1980s and ‘90s, it was men who largely led China.

But in the last month, under the present president, Xi Jinping, China took another step back.  It eliminated all women from the next tier of power, the now 24-member Politburo.   

China is like the United States in that the higher up you go on any organizational or institutional pyramid the less likely you are to find a woman. But it is unlike the United States in that its patriarchal past and present is much, much more rigid than ours, its traditions much, much more deeply and tightly entrenched. Moreover, its cultural expectations are more demanding, women being disadvantaged at every turn, from early in their lives, straight through parenthood, and their mandatory, earlier-than-their-male counterparts, retirement.

Recently was a tableau that vividly depicted the subservience of Chinese women. The scene was the 13^th National Women’s Congress which took place last month in Beijing. At the close of the meeting, it was not a woman who spoke to the assembled, but a man. Mr. Xi. The president was nothing if not patronizing, telling the female delegates that what they should aspire to is not power, politics, and policy making, but cooking, cleaning, and baby making.

He did not of course put it so bluntly. But the president of China made clear that what China needed from women first and foremost was for them to get married and have a baby. To offset the growing demographic crisis – too many old people, too few young people to support them – he effectively told them it was their patriotic duty to find a husband and get pregnant.

Whatever the largely proforma previous support for women’s equality by China’s leaders, it was no more. It is the traditional values that are now being extolled, above all the benefits of family. This means that women deemed virtuous are expected to forgo their professional ambitions in order to provide a private service – a private service that is a public service.

Xi did not mince words. He told the female leaders in the hall of the Congress that they should “tell good stories about family traditions and guide women to play their unique role in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation.”

My reaction? I support family, I support fertility, and I support domesticity. But when these are prioritized to the point of excluding other satisfactions – such as those found in gaining indepence, securing work, and earning money outside the home – it does not bode well for women with ambition.  

I make many mistakes. But I don’t make the mistake of thinking that leaders have more impact than they do. I don’t make “the leader attribution error.” To the contrary, I repeatedly emphasize the importance of understanding leadership as a system with three equal parts: the leader, the followers, and the contexts.

But, to every rule there are exceptions. Sometimes followers are more important than leaders. Sometimes contexts are more important than either leaders or followers. And sometimes it is leaders who stand out – leaders who are so exceptional that they do explain what happens!  

Such is the case with the president of the United Auto Workers union, Shawn Fain. He’s the real deal. A leader who has an outsized impact on everyone and everything around him.

By consensus, the deal that was reached this week by the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Big Three automakers – General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis – was a “huge” win for the union. And, by consensus, it was also a “big” win for the UAW’s president, Shawn Fain.

Fain won big because of his means – his negotiating strategy was innovative and bold. And he won big because of his ends – his goals were, and are, ambitious and far-reaching.

Fain’s means included:

• Keeping the carmakers consistently off balance. For example, instead of immediately striking big, each of the carmakers in a single stroke, he struck small and sporadically. The Big Three never knew when or where their workers would walk out.    
• Being pointedly pugnacious – drawing sharp distinctions between employers and employees. He took on the issue of exorbitant CEO pay as well as the system more generally. “Billionaires,” he said, “in my opinion don’t have a right to exist.”
• Bringing in experts to compensate for where he was inexpert. For instance, he hired a media-savvy assistant who enabled Fain to provide weekly livestream updates and ensure that coverage of the talks, by old media and new, was ubiquitous. Similarly, he brought in a labor lawyer who was instrumental in the UAW’s biggest strategic departure – holding talks with the big three automakers simultaneously instead of sequentially.   

Fain’s ends included:

• Snagging the best contract for the UAW since at least the 1960s.  
• Securing large pay gains – a 25% pay increase over the next four and a half years – and cost of living increases.
• Guaranteeing the reopening of a 1,350-worker factory in Illinois that Stellantis had shut down earlier this year.
• Reversing concessions the union made during previous downturns, such as lower wage tiers for newer workers.
• Expanding the scope and heft of the labor movement far beyond Detroit.

The last could turn out the most important. We cannot yet know Fain’s enduring impact – including his impact beyond Detroit. What we can know is that his ambitions seemingly have no bounds. Upon securing his record-breaking contract, Fain declared the UAW’s victory “stunning.” And he pointedly invited “unions around the country to align” themselves with his own. “Hey,” Fain said, “strikes work, solidarity works, we’re more unified now than before the strike. I think that’s a powerful argument that unions can take elsewhere.”

Somewhat similarly, experts dismayed by the relentless march of inequity in this country, thought it possible that Fain’s success would have a wider impact. Writing in the New York Times, Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman wrote that “maybe, just maybe, union victories in 2023” – of which the UAW’s was much the most notable – “will prove to be a milestone on the way back to a less unequal nation.”  

In achieving his striking success (pun intended), Fain’s followers mattered. They willingly and even eagerly followed a leader who they believed was good. So did the context matter, the larger context within which Fain operated. The UAW benefited from an America that had a tight labor market, inflationary pressure, and a profitable recent run for the auto companies.

But make no mistake about it. Fain proved himself a remarkable leader. Arguably the most outstanding labor leader in this country in decades – and a worthy successor to his eminent predecessor, Walter Reuther.  Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers in the 1950s and ‘60s, built the union into one of the most powerful and progressive in American history. While Fain has a long way to go before matching Reuter’s record, for now the incumbent can legitimately claim to be the real deal. A leader who matters.  

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.