Author: Barbara

I reject the idea that I’ve been obsessed with Jamie Dimon. On the other hand, it’s obvious that I’ve occasionally focused on Jamie Dimon. As evidence I cite three of my short articles about the man who since 2005 has been chairman and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase. (Links below.) The first goes back to 2008; the second was written in 2012; the third a decade later, in 2022.

Given what happened in the last week, these pieces from my past don’t make me look good. Not only has Dimon not – despite earlier missteps and the extreme length of his tenure – failed or faltered, he has emerged as a hero. JPMorgan Chase’s purchase of the failed First Republic Bank has, for the moment at least, earned the gratitude of the U.S. government, of the banking industry, of markets at home and abroad, and implicitly if not explicitly of the American people who otherwise were threatened with a larger banking crisis.  

The moment of uncertainty has not passed. Who knows what will happen in the coming months? But for the time being Dimon is widely seen as a leader who is outstanding. As one of the great corporate leaders of our time.

A few headlines from recent days:

• Wall Street Journal: “Dimon Wins Again in Bank Deal.”
• New York Times: “JPMorgan, A Savior Once Again.”
• Financial Times: “All Roads Lead to JPMorgan.”

Since the financial crisis of 2008 this is the third time that Dimon has agreed to buy – in a federally backed transaction – an institution in crisis. (The first two were Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual.) In each case have been downsides. But in each case have been, certainly for JPMorgan Chase, significant upsides. Under Dimon’s leadership the bank has soared ahead of each of its competitors. It currently boasts $3.7 trillion in assets and 250,000 employees. In terms of assets, deposits, and market capitalization, it is now the largest bank in the United States by far. Chase has branches in 48 of the 50 states.  

None of this is to say the concerns that I earlier expressed are trivial or irrelevant. Dimon and his bank have made several serious missteps, some with consequences that linger. More importantly, despite Dimon’s presentation of his acquisition of First Republic as a public service, questions have already been raised about how big a behemoth his bank has been allowed to become. As progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren put it, “Jamie Dimon should never have been permitted to take over a failing bank because JPMorgan is already too big to fail.”

Withal, when I complained that Dimon was a leader too long in his post I was wrong. Whatever the general rule about the length of a leader’s tenure, there are exceptions. And, whatever the systemic implications of his most recent bite out of the apple, JPMorgan Chase shows not the slightest sign of being stopped or even slowed. To the contrary. The institution to which, and for which Dimon is responsible has never in its long, storied history been as strong.  

When French President Emmanuel Macron managed to bypass the National Assembly by getting the Constitutional Council to approve a law raising the legal retirement age in France from 62 to 64, he paid a heavy political price. After months of bitter protests and angry strikes in which hundreds of thousands participated, a large majority of French were bitterly opposed not only to the law itself, but to the man who had successfully pushed it through. Macron’s approval rating – never robust – sank this month to only about 20 percent, the lowest it had ever been.

Americans found it absurd the French should have clung so tenaciously, so furiously, to a retirement age that was completely at odds with how long we now live. So did fiscal experts who know for a fact that with our lifespans considerably longer now than they were a few generations back, it’s fiscally irresponsible not to raise the retirement age. No matter. The French felt that what most of us think of as early retirement was a right to which they were entitled.

Impossible to know how history will treat the incumbent French president. It’s conceivable he’ll be rated more highly in the future than he is in the present. What we do know though is this.

First, leading liberal democracies – especially in opposition to strong public opinion – has become exceedingly difficult. It’s the big difference between democracies and autocracies. Specifically, it’s much easier to lead the latter than the former.  It’s why when autocracies are “economically benevolent,” they can achieve economic transformation while weak democracies tend to stagnate.  

Second, Macron is in the second term of his presidency, which means he cannot run again. It seems, then, that he is willing to trade his popularity for his performance – because his popularity is a currency of diminishing value. He doesn’t have to worry as much now as he did earlier in his political career about fending off challenges, or about compromising for purposes that are tactical and practical.

To be clear. The next presidential election is not until 2027, which means that Macron will be president for four more years. So, he is not done trying to get things done. Still, he might have calculated that a major victory on the issue of France’s retirement age will, notwithstanding heavy short-term costs, reap long-term benefits. Whatever his thinking … his doing certainly took guts.

In the early 1960s Betty Friedan wrote the bible of the modern women’s movement, The Feminine Mystique. Her primary purpose was to urge women (especially educated women of a certain class) to realize what she deemed their full potential. How? By getting out of the home – escaping from the suffocating tediousness it implied – and into the workplace.

It would have been difficult for Friedan then to imagine that twenty years later, in her second major book The Second Stage, her argument would be entirely different. By the time it was published Friedan’s concern was not that women were doing too little, but that they were taking on too much.  That instead of freeing women, the “superwomanhood” of the 1980s had led to their double enslavement. Still at home and now, additionally, at work.

Since then, the word “superwoman” has come to be part of our lexicon. It’s usually applied to a Western woman who works exceedingly hard to manage and even excel at two apparently incompatible, tasks. The first is to succeed personally, which means running her home, from cooking and cleaning to childcare and elder care.  The second is to succeed professionally, which means advancing her career and bringing home some, most, or even all the bacon. Of course, some men now take on more of the domestic chores than they did a half century ago. But even in the United States women still do most of the housework and caregiving. And in most other countries the imbalance between what women and men are responsible for, specifically in the home, is much greater.     

The word “superwoman” is sometimes used admiringly, in admiration of a woman who appears to do it all well. And it’s sometimes used disparagingly, in disparagement of a woman who clings to the sadly and badly mistaken idea that it’s possible to do it all well.

The subject regularly comes up in conversations about women and leadership. Can a woman with a child, especially a young child, and especially with more than one child, and especially if she happens to be a single parent, simultaneously be a leader? If yes, what if anything does this say about her as a parent?

Which brings me to the exception that might or might not prove the rule – Ursula von der Leyen. She is one of the most powerful women leaders in the world. She is one of the most powerful leaders in the world – period.  

Von der Leyen has been president of the European Commission since 2019. During her tenure she has taken an essentially weak body consisting of a recalcitrant membership to forge the European Union (EU) into a relatively cohesive and forceful global actor. Notwithstanding the crises first of Covid and then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and notwithstanding her own aloof and patently ambitious executive leadership, von der Leyen has replaced former German Chancellor Angela Merkel as Europe’s most effective single leader.  

To be clear, von der Leyen is not loved by her constituents. Nor is she destined ultimately to succeed in keeping Europe sufficiently united, able to sustain itself as something akin to a single voice. But she has already established the EU as a global actor with which the rest of the world has to reckon. As one member of the European parliament summarized her impact, “People used to ask what Europe’s phone number is. Now we know. She has given Europe a voice and a face.”

Oh, and did I mention that von der Leyen is a physician?

Oh, and did I mention that under Chancellor Merkel von der Leyen was German Defense Minister?

Oh, and did I mention that she and her husband, Heiko von der Leyen, have seven children?

President Vladimir Putin now presides over a country and culture of terror. I write “now” because he was not always intent on strangling every voice in oppositon. Not that he was ever a liberal democrat. But Putin during his early years in power was far less repressive and despotic than he is now – especially since the start of Putin’s War.

Two weeks ago, Russian authorities arrested and imprisoned a prominent American reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Evan Gershkovich. And twenty-four hours ago, a Russian court sentenced a prominent Russian dissident, Vladimir Kara-Murza, to twenty-five years in prison. For telling the truth as he saw it – specifically for criticizing Putin’s war against Ukraine – Kara-Murza was found guilty of treason. Immediately he was sentenced to the harshest punishment for opposing the government that Russia has imposed in decades.     

Like Alexei Navalny – Russia’s most prominent dissident – Kara-Murza has been not just imprisoned but poisoned. And like Navalny, Kara-Murza can be seen in one of several ways, As a fearless follower, or as a holy fool. As a leader who will in time be seen as ahead of his time, or as a misguided martyr who suffered was for nothing.

We cannot know how history will judge. What we can know though is this. That the only power Kara-Murza has is the power of his pen. That the only authority Kara-Murza has is his moral authority. He is, in other words, entirely devoid of either the power or the authority to determine his own fate. To be sure, because of his daring dissent he has important allies, such as the Washington Post, for whom he has been an occasional columnist. But Kara-Murza himself has no agency. For the moment he is the ultimate, consummate follower, completely at the mercy of his leader, President Putin.

Notwithstanding his devastating sentence, Kara-Murza continues to embrace the part he has chosen to play. “Not only do I not repent any of this,” he recently said, “I am proud of it.” And in the immediate wake of his sentencing his mantra remained the same: “My self-esteem has even risen. I realize that I have done everything right as a citizen and politician.”    

In my book, Followership, I identified five different types of followers, one of which was the Diehard. Here is how I defined the type:

Diehards are as their name implies – prepared to die if necessary for their cause, whether an individual, or an idea, or both. Diehards are deeply devoted to their leaders; or, in contrast, they are ready to remove them from their positions of power, authority, and influence by any means necessary. In either case, Diehards are defined by their dedication, including the willingness to risk life and limb. Being a Diehard is all-consuming. It is who you are. It determines what you do.   

Kara-Murza is the quintessential Diehard. If necessary, he will die hard for the cause in which he believes. If necessary, he will die hard trying to depose the man who for one year has controlled his every breath.     

Evil Leadership – 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, or psychological, or both.*

There is no doubt or dispute that, in keeping with the above definition, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is an evil leader. To skirt the threat of being weakened or overthrown because of protests associated with the Arab Spring, since 2011 he has come down so hard on the Syrian people that these are the results.    

• A long-running civil war, between pro-democratic insurgents on the one side and Assad and his loyalists on the other.
• Approximately a half million Syrians dead.
• Approximately half of Syria’s total population (about 21.3 million) displaced from their homes.
• Approximately 5.5 million Syrian refugees and asylum seekers.
• Approximately 90% of Syrians living below the poverty line.
• Destruction or impairent of Syria’s infrastructure, including roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals.
• Approximately 15 million people in need of emergency aid. (A number that was exacerbated by the recent earthquakes.)

Human Rights Watch summarized the situation:

“While the Syrian government, with its allies’ support, has regained significant territory using tactics that violate the laws of war, areas under its control also are rife with abuse. Security services arbitrarily arrest and torture hundreds, and millions are going hungry due to the government’s diversion of aid and failure to equitably address the crippling economic crisis.”

In a better world the man who presided over this already thirteen-year-long catastrophe – President Assad – would long ago have been toppled from within. Or, failing that, he would have long ago, and he would indefinately remain, an international pariah. Exiled permanently from the community of nations. But no such luck on either count.

After all the murder and mayhem, Assad and his strong-willed wife, Asma al-Assad, continue to reside in the presidential palace in Damascus. (It was built by his father, Hafez al-Assad, who immediately preceded the incumbent, and was himself president of Syria for nearly 30 years.) After all the murder and mayhem Russia remains an enduring and reliable ally, a partner in crime. (“In Syria,” David McCloskey wrote, “Russia created a foundational myth, twisting the war’s history to serve its own ends, and to justify its brutal military campaingn.”) And, after all the murder and mayhem, Assad’s neighbors in the Middle East are preparing to welcome him again into their midst. While for a time Assad and his enablers were shunned in the region, it appears that time is past.

The shift back to business as usual began slowly, in 2018, when the United Arab Emirates reestablished diplomatic ties with Syria. Now, as the geopolitics of the Middle East have been reordered – for example in a deal brokered by China’s President Xi Jinping, Saudi Arabia and Iran have reestablished diplomatic ties – the region is increasingly open to Syrian inclusion.

To be clear, there is no agreement yet on how to proceed. A meeting of Arab foreign ministers held just yesterday in Dubai revealed that different leaders of different countries hold different views. But this handwriting is on this wall. As the Saudi foreign minister remarked in February, there is growing regional consensus that isolating Syria is not working. Which is another way of saying that Bashar al-Assad will soon be rewarded by being reintegrated.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for not enough people to do not enough good.

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*This definition is in Barbara Kellerman, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

Remarkable, right? That one man should have achieved so much. Become world famous for how much money he made. And for how much money he gave away. And for his name now a symbol – a symbol of anti-Semitism. For about five decades George Soros has been making a fortune. For about three decades, George Soros has been giving away a fortune. And for about one decade, both in Europe and in the United States, the name George Soros, as in, for example, “Soros-backed,” has become synonymous with Jew-baiting.   

Soros is an American and a Jew who was born in Hungary. For frequently and lavishly contributing over the years to liberal causes in East and Central Europe he has aroused the unrelenting ire of nationalist and populist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. And for frequently and lavishly contributing over the years to liberal causes in the United States he has aroused the unrelenting ire of nationalist and populist former president Donald Trump. Even in the last year Orban has accused Soros of being a permanent political puppet master who has “ruined the lives of tens of millions” with currency speculation. And even in the last month Trump has accused Soros of “hand-picking” and “funding” the career of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who had the temerity to indict Trump.   

Soros is not only one of the richest men in the world, he is also one of the most ambitious. As Todd Pittinsky and I wrote in our book, Leaders Who Lust, it never sufficed for Soros to make a mountain of money. His ambition was far greater and much more far-reaching. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Soros’s goal has been nothing short of changing societies at their core. In Europe from authoritarianism to liberalism in countries such as Hungary and Poland. And in the United States from politics and policies that are more right-wing to those that are more left wing. In these quests Soros has never let up. Nor as is the nature of leaders who lust – leaders whose drive is unstoppable, whose thirst is unquenchable – will he ever.

Which raises the unsettling question of how George Soros went from being a leader in finance and philanthropy to being a symbol of anti-Semitism – more of a symbol of anti-Semitism than any other single individual anywhere in the world. To answer with precision how this happened is impossible. Rising tides of hate are elusive, impossible to explain in a single stroke. This is not, however, to suggest they are not real. In 2022 was a significant increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes in the United States, for example in New York City, where attacks on Jews were up 41 percent compared with a year earlier.

Attacks on George Soros for ostensibly pulling the strings behind the scenes have become blurred with attacks on Jews for being, well, Jews. Whatever the connection between the two, if any, it has become connection by implication and association.

Anti-Semitism is ancient – it is called the “longest hatred.” Soros, in contrast, epitomizes a current phenomenon, especially in the United States where certainly post-Holocaust, since the end of the Second World War, blatant evidence of hatred of Jews had diminished to near the vanishing point. But those days are over. Soros’s name now comes up regularly, used in the United States by right-wing figures, especially prominent Republicans (for example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis) and hosts on Fox News, to connote loathing of his commitments to liberal candidates and causes and also, certainly in some cases, by extension or implication an unspecified antipathy to Jews more generally. 

To be clear, not everyone who mentions the name Soros is anti-Semitic. Nor does everyone who hears it even know that Soros is Jewish. But enough do – the very frequency with which the name is uttered distinguishes “Soros” from every other American political funder, left, right, or center. Jonathan Greenblatt, C.E.O, of the Ant-Defamation League, a Jewish Civil Rights group, put it this way: “When a person or a political party repeatedly and relentlessly makes wild claims such as that there is a ‘cabal of globalists backed by Soros that is destroying our country,’ that is invoking a classical anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, and it should be condemned.”    

On the one hand it is, of course, reasonable and acceptable to criticize Soros for his partisan donations to liberal, even progressive causes and the Democratic party. Soros is, in fact, by far the largest single donor to the party and its candidates. But on the other hand, this is not, as Charles C. W. Cooke has argued in the National Review, about “shutting down the debate.” Instead this is about the regular invoking of the name “Soros” which has led, fairly or unfairly, to suspicions of Jews more generally. The connection is between Jews who are perceived to be “globalists” and “cosmopolitans” and Soros who is perceived to be a “globalist” and “cosmopolitan.” And it is between Jews who are perceived to be liberal and left-leaning and Soros who is perceived to be liberal and left-leaning. But these connections are tenuous to the point of being specious. The connection that counts – that is unsettling and even upsetting – is between past anti-Semitic tropes and present anti-Soros tropes.

Soros has come – as a nonagenarian, no less – to epitomize everything purportedly crafty and conspiratorial about Jews now not only historically but contemporaneously. Just as Jew-hatred has historically stemmed from Jews being seen as if not all-powerful then at least as too powerful, so Soros-hatred stems from his being seen as if not all-powerful then at least as too powerful. Again, Soros is using his pile of money to support those, and that in which he believes. But numberless Republicans are doing the same and they are not being singled out or called out – identified, repeatedly, by name. Which is precisely why, especially given the sensitivities on anti-Semitism, you would think, or maybe not, that Republicans would cease and desist from blowing their by now familiar dog whistle.       

George Soros is no saint. But he survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary in Hungary to become one of the most brilliant, successful, and yes, generous men of the late 20^th and early 21^st century. If someone had told him when he was young that he was destined to be first at the cutting edge of finance, second at the cutting edge of philanthropy, and third at the cutting edge of a resurgence of European and American anti-Semitism, he might well have believed the first two. But he would never, could never, have believed the last.

Yoav Gallant is a former commander of the Israeli navy, a much-decorated war hero, a member of Israel’s parliament and, since last year, Defense Minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Until the end of March Gallant fell into line. He said nothing publicly that was pertinent to what had been happening in Israel for weeks and then months – which was hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets to protest the government’s plan to overhaul the Israeli judiciary. But then Gallant stopped doing what his superior, Netanyahu, wanted him to do, which was only to go about his business.

But on March 25^th Gallant refused any longer to obey authority, to follow where it was that Netanyahu led. Instead, the defense minister gave a speech in which he publicly called for the prime minister to change course, or at least to delay the process. “The security of the state of Israel is my life’s mission,” said Gallant. “Clothed in the IDF’s [Israeli Defense Forces] uniform, I have risked my life dozens of times for the State of Israel, and at this time, for the sake of our country, I am willing to take any risk and pay any price.” He said that he had been speaking to military officers and to the rank and file about the government’s plan to reduce the power of the courts. He went on to say that he had heard their voices and was “worried.” “Unprecedented feelings of anger, pain and disappointment have risen from all over,” he continued, going on finally to withhold his support for how Netanyahu was proceeding. Concluded Gallant, “I will not lend my hand to this.”

Netanyahu was enraged. He was enraged at Gallant for speaking his truth to the prime minister’s power, for being, as he saw it, insubordinate. What did Netanyahu do? Within approximately 24 hours he fired Gallant. What was the result? Mayhem. What had been massive protests morphosed in an instant into demonstrations so enormous and disruptive they threatened to bring Israel to a total halt. To the point where its economic and political stability, and its military security, were at risk.

Gallant had backed Netanyahu into a corner. About 48 hours after the defense minister spoke out the prime minister felt forced to call for a pause. He announced he would delay the proposed judicial reforms – which had proved so inflammatory as nearly to paralyze the state everyone professed to love.  

Curiously, or maybe not, for now Gallant remains in his job. Perhaps he’ll help Netanyahu save face by apologizing for what he did or, more likely, how he did it. But whatever the short term outcome, when the history of this period is written Gallant’s speaking out will be seen as a pivotal moment. The subordinate forced his superior to stop in his tracks.

On Tuesday April 4, at 2:15 pm former president Donald Trump is scheduled to be arraigned in a New York City courtroom on charges of one or more crimes. In a perfect world this would happen quietly, in reasonable accordance with a reasonable law. However, in this imperfect world, the event will generate hysteria “unlike the world has ever seen.” The media, all media, will be apoplectic. The American people will be ginned up, riled up by political passions right, left, and center. And the world will be, despite numberless bigger fish to fry, riveted by the spectacle. Trump is the consummate showman, and this will be his biggest show yet.

This post focuses on one man, one leader, Trump. It does not focus on his followers, his enablers who are, of course, integral to the story, especially prominent Republicans who in recent days have crept like lemmings again to defend him. I focus here on Trump because it’s worth being reminded at this critical juncture of how aberrational he is. How mentally unstable; how deviant and delusional; how paranoid and narcissistic. He is not normal, he is abnormal. Still,he has realized his wildest and yes, fondest dream: being stage center, the center of global attention.       

This post is short and simple. It’s no more than – but no less than – a reminder of Trump’s extreme paranoia and deep-seated narcissism. Just before the circus starts it’s appropriate remind ourselves yet again of how psychologically unstable and unfit for public life is our former president.

Points on Political Paranoia

The principal components of political paranoia are:

• Suspicion – Trump tirelessly engages in a relentless search for the enemies that he assumes without question are out there somewhere. (Which by now of course they are. Even paranoids have enemies!)
• Centrality – Trump’s world is one in which everything has meaning only as it pertains to him.
• Grandiosity – Trump believes that he alone knows the whole truth and nothing but. And he has no tolerance, none, for dissent or disagreement.
• Hostility – Like all paranoids, Trump is angry and aggressive; bellicose and belligerent; inordinately defensive and perennially poised to attack.
• Fear – Of all Trump’s many fears, his worst is loss of autonomy. For him even to conceive of giving in is intolerable, as is the idea of being less than the dominant agent.   
• Delusion – Trump clings to his habitual lies, deceits, and false beliefs, even when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
• Conspiracy – Trump’s thinking is extreme thinking, conspiratorial thinking. He sees the world as essentially a struggle between evil on the one hand, and good on the other.
• Certainty – The absolute certainty with which Trump radiates his many hatreds is compelling to his followers This includes but is not limited to those who otherwise have lost their moorings.

Points on Pathological Narcissism

          The principal components of pathological narcissism are:

• Lack of empathy – Trump is, literally, unable to consider the needs, wants, wishes, and feelings of others.
• Entitlement – Trump is convinced of his own centrality which is why he always assumes he owes nothing and is owed everything.
• Exploitation – Trump badly needs other people around him for the primary purpose of making him feel special. He does not, because he cannot, return the favor.
• Impaired judgement and volatile decision making – Trump exhibits both. Both are symptoms of pathological narcissism and both are especially dangerous in political leaders because of their potentially enormous impact on others.  
• Mary Trump on Trump’s narcissism – “His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough. This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism. Donald is not simply weak. His ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered at every moment because he knows that deep down he is nothing of what he claims to be.” (Mary Trump is Trump’s only niece. She is a clinical psychologist.)*

“I alone can fix it,” Trump famously said at the 2016 Republican National Convention. More accurate would have been, “I alone can break it.”

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  *This post has drawn on three books: 1) Robert Robins and Jerrold Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitcs of Hatred; 2) Bandy Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President; and 3) Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.  

Former President Donald Trump’s enablers are a recurring nightmare. Just when we begin to forget them, they reappear as if deliberately to taunt us and haunt us.

My book, The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America, was about followers, specifically Trump’s. Those at a greater remove, including his base. And those up close and personal who were the president’s enablers, who on a regular basis facilitated and sometimes even exacerbated his bad behavior. They consisted of rather a large cast of characters, including some well-known names such as Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president; Lindsey Graham, long term Republican senator and short-term Trump toady; Jared Kushner, Trump’s serf and son-in-law; and Mark Meadows, Trump chief of staff and fixer in chief.

They also included members of the media, most regularly and visibly at Fox News. And, since I was writing about the year that was the worst of the pandemic, they also included some who worked at the C.D.C., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is this twofer, some of whom were well intentioned but all of whom were enablers, who reappeared this week to remind us of how complicit in Trump’s wrongdoing were so many who could so easily have done otherwise.

We now know that at Fox were two different scenarios, one private, one public. Because Dominion Voting Systems is suing Fox for defamation, information came out that made clear that some of the network’s biggest stars and highest paid executives did not for one moment believe Trump’s claim that he had won the 2020 presidential election. Did they however go public with what they knew to be true? They did not. Instead, they pandered to the president as they pandered to his crowd, their viewers who they did not want at all costs to alienate.  

This week it also came out that some C.D.C. scientists were in despair as the agency squelched their Covid-related alerts and research.  “All of us knew tens of thousands were going to die, and we were helpless to stop it,” testified one. Said another, “I’m [still] angry about this every day.” As the New York Times reported it, these scientists were not alone. Many at the agency reported their sense of frustration and powerlessness had led them to seek therapy or to turn to medication to “cope with their frustration and disillusionment.”

Because we do not teach or even discuss how to follow wisely and well, we foster a culture of silence in situations such as these, in situations in which a bad leader has a stranglehold. If groupthink prevailed at Fox, at the C.D.C. was the widespread sense that no one had the power or maybe even the right to speak up and speak out.

By failing to educate our young people that there are times when they ought to take a stand, and when they ought to speak truth to power, we are failing ourselves.   

What if a leader is democratically elected? What do they owe those who elected them? What if what leaders believe to be right and good and true is different from what their followers believe to be right and good and true?

It’s one of the oldest questions to bedevil democratic theory. Specifically, to what extent should leaders who are democrats follow their followers? Hold their fingers to the wind and see which way it blows. Or, conversely, consider themselves not one of the people but of the people, their representative, selected to lead in what they decide is in their constituents’ best interests.

Nowhere is the democrat’s dilemma, the democratic leader’s dilemma, more vividly exemplified just now than in France. For better and worse, French President Emmanuel Macron has thrown caution to the winds to pursue what he thinks best for the country – the peoples’ preferences be damned!

This is my third post on Macron. The first was on May 7, 2017, shortly after he was first elected. I wrote then that he was a “boy wonder.” At not yet 40 the newly minted French president was an excellent pianist, exceptionally clever in economics and finance, highly literate, a self-made man of considerable wealth and, presciently, “as bold as he is brilliant.”           

My second post on Macron was on April 28, 2022. It was occasioned both by the election in which Macron had just won a second term (the first French president to be reelected in 20 years), and by the war in Ukraine which Macron was trying diligently if ultimately unsuccessfully to mediate. I wrote then that while Macron was in many ways a visionary who had an impressive list of political accomplishments already to his credit, he was also seen as an elitist, one who was not only poor at working a room and playing to a crowd but didn’t much care about winning the crowd over. He was a leader who did what he thought right when he thought it right. He did not lead from behind – he led from out front, sometimes far out front. As I wrote in 2022, “For the entirety of his [first] term the French president has been seen as arrogant and remote, and as not much, if at all, interested in the day-to day travails of the lower and working classes.”

At the time I thought it possible that Macron had been chastened by his political rival, Marine Le Pen, who had come closer to defeating him in the election than he anticipated. In this I thought wrong. Not only was the French president not chastened he was emboldened. He was emboldened by his reelection to among other things promote a pension reform plan that an overwhelming majority of the French people hated. Despised. Detested … and protested in numbers so enormous they resulted in the largest demonstrations in France in decades.

Macron’s pension bill would, or now more likely will, push the legal age of retirement from 62 to 64. “What’s the big deal?” say Americans, who have long been used to working well into their sixties and even into their seventies. Given we’re living much longer in the present than we did in the past, it only makes good fiscal sense to push back the age at which we pull back.  Not so say the French, who for social, political, and cultural reasons see themselves as being different from other Western countries, and to whom their now relatively young retirement age is a right to be protected not a privilege to be amended not to speak of abandoned.

Though Macron has just (barely) survived two votes of no confidence, France is slated again to come to a halt on Thursday when people in massive numbers will take to the streets to protest the man they rather recently reelected president. For his part, Macron is doing what he thinks is right – advocating for modernizing, pushing for reform that is fiscally responsible and demographically sensible. But for their part, the French are doing what they think is right, taking on head on a leader who refuses to hear what his followers have to say.

The democrat’s dilemma. The democratic leader’s dilemma – which President Emmanuel Macron appears to have resolved, if only to his own satisfaction.