Author: Barbara

Watching Republican Senator John Cornyn is why my whipsaw. The man has gone from being a leader, to being a follower, to being neither. Cornyn is an example of what can happen to a man who loses his moral compass and recovers it again only after getting lost.

Cornyn has been a senator from Texas for over 20 years. For most of this time he was widely regarded as an establishment Republican, staunchly conservative but able to work across the aisle. But when Donald Trump became president, especially the second time, Cornyn morphed. He went from being a leader to being a follower. Rather a craven follower at that who, to secure Trump’s blessing for his reelection to the Senate, jumped when the president said jump.

Cornyn posted a photo of himself reading Trump’s book, Art of the Deal. He proposed legislation to rename a stretch of the interstate in Trump’s honor. And in a failed effort to please the president he reversed himself on the filibuster.  These are just some examples of what one Senate watcher called his “political gymnastics.” As Cornyn’s former Senate colleague, Jeff Flake put it, “You look at the positions he took to please the president and the groveling and whatever, it was rather painful to watch.” It was painful to watch Cornyn do summersaults – to vault from respected leader to pitiful follower.

Predictably it did Cornyn no good – his sad subservience was for naught. Trump withheld his papal blessing and bestowed it instead on Ken Paxton. Which is why the Texas Republican primary was lost by the widely respected Cornyn and won by the widely disrespected Paxton.  

After Cornyn’s ignominious loss his abject behavior came to a grinding halt. He was no longer a Senate leader – but he was also no longer a Trump follower. He was neither. Last night he secured a win by reaching a deal with the White House in exchange for his vote to advance the president’s nomination for Attorney General. But best way to think of it is as Cornyn’s last hurrah. He will exit the Senate in limbo.

The words “leader” and “leadership” are defined in hundreds of ways.  But by every definition among the most eminent of America’s leaders in science and medicine during the last half century has been Dr. Anthony Fauci. His list of professional achievements is as long as impressive. Suffice to say here that for most of his illustrious career Fauci has been widely regarded as a splendid and deeply dedicated public servant.

Notice I write “public servant.” Fauci did not, in other words, get his M.D. to make the fistfuls of money he would have had he gone into private practice. Rather he chose to serve in the public sector – service that included advising every president since Ronald Reagan. President George W. Bush thought so highly of Fauci that he awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, specifically for his life-saving work on AIDS.

I would not claim that Dr. Fauci walked on water. In fact, in my book on what happened in the U.S. during the worst year of the Covid crisis, I took Fauci to task.* I raised the question of whether he was a Trump enabler, pointing out the good doctor chose to walk a fine line: On the one hand there were times when Fauci was “carefully critical of the president for the way he was handling the health crisis.” And on the other hand, there were times when Fauci tried to protect himself – to “escape being fired” and to avoid “the most lacerating of Trump’s tongue-lashings.” Which necessarily raised the question of whether Fauci did what he could to stave off the covid calamity. My answer finally was no. In the book I concluded that Fauci could have and should have done some things differently – though he was correct to assume that had he been more critical of Trump, Trump would have been likely immediately to dismiss him.

Still, whatever his deficits, Fauci has been a long-time public servant who has been well and widely respected for his contributions and general excellence. He deserves to be treated with respect especially by those who ostensibly are role models – including, again, ostensibly, members of the U.S. Senate. Yesterday though he was accorded neither. Yesterday Fauci was obliged to endure a Senate hearing that was in every way wretched. A fiasco. For several senators had already decided to dismember Dr. Fauci personally and professionally. They took him apart for what he did and did not do and say during the Covid crisis, and for what he did and did not do and say since then.

It was a miserable, despicable spectacle far more injurious to Fauci’s interlocutors than to him. The worst of the Senate lot did not besmirch Dr. Fauci. They besmirched themselves and the upper chamber to which, alas, they belong.

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*Barbara Kellerman, The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America (Cambridge University Press, 2021), see especially pages 251ff.

In September the University of Toronto Press will publish my next book. It’s titled Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. These four are among the questions to which the book provides answers. First, what are our rewards for following? Second, what are our punishments for not following? Third, what are our rewards for not following? Fourth, what are our punishments for following?

What’s happened in India in recent weeks testifies to the subtitle of my first book on followership – How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders* An example: Indians, especially young, middle-class Indians, who by the tens of thousands took to the streets in recent weeks to protest not just the lack of jobs but, as they see it, the government’s woefully underfunded and ineffective system of education.

Recent evidence of follower power in India has been even more striking than in Ukraine (see my previous post). This is for the good and simple reason that unlike Ukraine’s leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is a democrat, India’s leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is an autocrat. Modi is a strongman who for more than a decade has governed India with something akin to an iron fist.   

Which is why recent events in India have come as nothing so much as a surprise or even a shock. Indians themselves have been stunned by the size of the protests and by the daring and perseverance of the protesters. They have been struck by what seemed overnight to morph into a demonstrably powerful political movement with the evocative name of “Cockroach.”** The so-called Cockroach Janta Party deliberately parodied and satirized the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party with what turned out stunning effectiveness.  

Instead of being stymied my Modi’s longstanding grip not just on Indian politics but on the digital narrative, the protesters, the cockroaches, circumvented it. Fueled by their outrage they came up with slogans and signs, videos and memes, jokes, taunts, sneers and jeers – all of which challenged not just the ruling regime but the dignity and, importantly, the heretofore infallibility of the prime minister.

In the last 24 hours Modi caved. Remarkably but not really, he succumbed to those who ostensibly he ruled by offering concessions including the resignation of India’s education minister. The cockroaches’ immediate response was to give Modi some breathing room. They called off their protests. But cockroaches are known for their extreme survival skills – and these are unlikely to prove an exception.     

 To Modi this presents a problem that will not go away anytime soon. For once a chink appears in the leader’s armor, the leader’s armor appears to his followers to be permeable.   

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*The title of the book is Followership (Harvard Business School Press, 2008).

**Some weeks ago India’s Chief Justice made the mistake of comparing some political activists and unemployed youth to “cockroaches.”  

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In September the University of Toronto Press will publish my next book. It’s titled Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. These four are among the questions to which the book provides answers. First, what are our rewards for following? Second, what are our punishments for not following? Third, what are our rewards for not following? Fourth, what are our punishments for following?

What happened in Ukraine in the last week testifies to the subtitle of my first book on followership – How Followers are Creating Change and Changing Leaders.* An example: Ukrainians who by the tens of thousands just took to the streets to protest the president’s firing of his defense minister.  

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has done a masterful job of leading his country since in early 2022 the Russians launched their unprovoked attack. His leadership under extraordinarily difficult circumstances has generally been so outstanding that, unless there’s a dramatic change, history will regard him as one of the great leaders of the first half of the 21^st century.  

But precisely because he is a democrat not an autocrat, Zelinsky is not immune to the power and influence of his followers. To their capacity to create change and to change him or, at least, to change his course of action. Which is exactly what just happened. As a direct result of mass protests – repeated demonstrations against something that Zelensky had done, which was to fire his popular defense minister – he reversed course.

The president’s action provoked a reaction – an extremely strong one. Ukrainians took to the streets not once but repeatedly. Over and over again until the president decided, in less than a week, to backtrack. Zelensky did not exactly reverse his decision, but he did revise and revamp it. The leader was obliged by his followers to change his course of action to the point where the country’s military was transformed. Almost overnight the old guard was effectively replaced. Replaced by a younger generation of military leaders much more familiar with the technologies that in the last year have distinguished Ukraine’s military. That have set it apart from, and above, most other militaries in the world.

Follower power.

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*The title of the book is Followership (Harvard Business School Press, 2008).

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Let’s be clear-eyed. China is a serious, a very serious, competitive threat to the United States in artificial intelligence. While the most powerful AI systems are still being built in America, China is not far behind. Moreover, and of paramount importance, is that while China’s systems might be less impressive, they are also less expensive.

Affordability matters not just at the level of households but at the level of organizations. Therefore, business leaders from around the world will be massively attracted to AI systems that are, maybe not better than America’s, but cheaper. If you don’t think this represents a threat to some of the most prominent of American tech companies – OpenAI and Anthropic, for example – think again.

Once again leadership does – or it should – surface as an issue with which Americans must contend. As indicated in my previous post, up to now the development of American AI has been Wild West-like. A leaderless enterprise in which political leaders cannot lead and in which business leaders, specifically tech leaders, will not lead. The result is chaos – far more competition than cooperation when cooperation between and among tech companies, and between and among interested parties including government and business, is largely lacking.   

President Xi Jinping has, predictably, had a strong hand in the development of China’s tech industry.  First, state control is integral to the communist playbook. Second, after more than a decade as president, Xi’s appetite for dominating everything and everyone has only grown greater.  Ironically, then, it is he, not America’s president, who is calling for international cooperation in just this realm. Last week Xi delivered a speech in which he specifically called for “a symphony of international cooperation” on AI development.

Even more to the point is that while American AI models are proprietary, their secrets fiercely protected by the companies that develop them, at least some of China most competitive AI models are the opposite. They are open source – they are freely shared and distributed. Which is to say that they can be used by anyone at any time anywhere in the world.

How this does not threaten what has been up to now American dominance in AI technologies escapes me. What does not though escape me is the urgent need for collaborative leadership in a domain in which up to now it has been lacking. In fact, America’s tech leaders are so obsessed with beating each other that beating China is secondary.  

My previous post suggests a way forward. I am open to other suggestions.

This week the Nobel laureate, pioneering innovator, and chief executive officer of Google Deep Mind, Demis Hassabis, issued a rare public statement. He called for the creation of a U.S. led standards body to test “frontier AI models.” Clearly Hassabis is worried about the risks posed by rapidly advancing technologies. Just as clearly, given he is worried, so should we be.

Hassabis’s recommendation differed from other related ones. For example, he did not suggest an international regulatory body. Knowing the enormous practical and political difficulties involved in getting any sort of global cooperation, Hassabis proposed an initiative that was entirely American. Better to start such an effort in one country, he clearly concluded, than not to start one at all.  

Along similar lines, knowing the politics, policies, and bureaucracies involved, Hassabis sought to avoid direct government (public sector) oversight. Instead, he proposed a self-regulatory body that would be funded by the tech industry (private sector), which would also oversee it. As one expert on the subject, Sebastian Mallaby, summarized, “Hassabis’s main point is that the self-regulatory route stands the best chance of generating a well-funded, technically proficient safety team without the world having to wait years for it.”   

Implicit in Hassabis’s proposal were two overriding concerns: first, again, the risks posed by the new technologies. Second, the rank inability of government leaders – in the U.S. especially presidents and members of Congress – to tackle the problem on their own. Political leaders are incapable of addressing the issue both because of their generally profound differences and their generally profound ignorance of the technologies. Which is to say that if we leave it to our political leaders to lead us to a safe tech space it will not happen because it cannot happen.

The risks posed by the new technologies fall into two broad categories. One is from external sources, such as, to Americans, threats of competitiveness and control coming from China. And the other is from internal sources such threats to our social fabric posed by, for example, people replaced by robots or their digital equivalent leading to widespread unemployment.  

To address the enormous problems posed by the advancing technologies there is no shortage of proposed solutions. A recent opinion piece in the New York Times suggested a “populist A.I. agenda that treats the technology as a public project.” It further recommended that we “treat some A.I. profits as a shared resource and distribute them directly to citizens.”*  

Great. But… how do we get from here to there? The piece is full of good ideas, but it contains not a word about how they might be implemented. It’s one thing to have a good idea in theory; it’s something else altogether to put it into practice.

Which brings me back to where I started. To Hassabis’s suggestion that business leaders take the lead on this. That they do not wait for political leaders to guide us through a thicket about which most remain ignorant. That instead they, the experts, step to the front and point the way.

At some point in the regulatory process public officials would and should get involved. But we have got to start somewhere. Preferably where people know whereof they speak.

*https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/opinion/ai-populism-china-open-source.html

Two days ago, President Donald Trump delivered a primetime speech during which he focused on the integrity of American elections. Though he reiterated his usual longstanding grievances, many pundits concluded that Trump’s talk was less about the past and more about the future. The president’s speech was broadly seen as an attempt to prepare the American people for the upcoming November election. To prepare them for an election that he might claim was rigged and that would, therefore, justify federal intervention on constitutionally designated state terrain.

Congressional Democrats reacted strongly to Trump’s speech. Connecticut Representative Jim Himes said that the president’s claim to have evidence of widespread voter fraud was a “baldfaced, 180 degree obviously provable lie.” Georgia’s Senator Jon Ossoff accused Trump of “clearly signaling his intent to attack the elections and to undermine voters’ rights.”

The point of this post is not to prognosticate. I have no idea what Trump will and will not do if voters rebuke him in November. What I will, however, suggest is that to make meaning out of what’s happening between now and the end of the year you keep your eye less on the leader and more on his followers – especially on his loyalists. What will they do if the president’s behavior is increasingly outside the mainstream; increasingly beyond traditional norms; increasingly flaunting the letter of the law; and increasingly personally and politically erratic?

Here is a list of those to watch most closely.

• Congressional Republicans.
• Elected Republicans at the state and local levels.
• Members of the executive branch.
• Major Republican donors.
• Major Republican media.
• Key leaders in the private sector.
• Key celebrities and influencers.
• The MAGA middle.

It is not the leader who will determine the fate of the nation. It is his followers.

When someone dies people tend to be kind. As with Senator Lindsey Graham who passed over the weekend.  In the last 48 hours politicians and pundits have bent over backwards to say good things about Graham – even if they found his late life pivot to President Donald Trump personally and politically reprehensible.

I see him as a man who was two things at the same time. For many years he was known for being among a small group of highly effective senate leaders. And for the last decade he was known for being among a small group of singularly servile presidential followers. Graham metamorphosed into a consummate groveler.

Graham is a minor character in my forthcoming book, Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t.* In the book I explore what motivated such a man – a man with his establishment history and independent ideology – to become a Trump lap dog.  

But in a book that I wrote several years ago titled, The Enablers: How Trump’s Team Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America, Graham is a major character.**  A quintessential example of an enabler, which I defined as follows. Enablers are followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in, behaviors that are destructive. Given that those being enabled are leaders, what they do has an impact on others, sometimes many or even millions of others. What we have then, alongside bad leaders, are bad followers.  

For those of us who consider Trump a bad leader, Graham was all along, during the president’s first term and into his second, a bad follower. Moreover, Graham seemed sometimes in a class by himself. Which is to say that he was exceptionally, excessively, fawning. I should add though that it paid off. Graham was desperate to become a Trump crony and a Trump crony he quickly became. By 2019 Graham could describe himself, accurately, as a member of Trump’s “smaller orbit.”

Many if not most of us contain multitudes – a rule to which Graham was no exception. In one thing he was, however, exceptional. In his willingness abjectly to follow a leader who, earlier in his life, he did not just quietly dismiss but loudly disdain.

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*University of Toronto Press, 2026.

** Cambridge University Press, 2021.

In my book Leadership from Bad to Worse I wrote that “bad leadership and its conjoined twin, bad followership, are as ubiquitous as pernicious.” I further observed that “once bad has burrowed in, it digs deep and then deeper,” making it increasingly difficult to extract or excise. *

Of course, questions about what exactly constitutes “bad” leadership and who exactly is a “bad” leader are always up for debate. Your “good” leader might well be my “bad” one.

Nevertheless, in the political realm it’s easy enough to make our values clear. My values are liberal and democratic. I believe in fair elections and in fundamental civil, political, and legal rights. For me, then, a good political leader must be a liberal democrat.

Is being a liberal democrat sufficient? No – it is necessary but not sufficient.  Leaders who are liberal democrats can be, for instance, callous or corrupt, inefficient and ineffective. Still, liberal democracy is the base line on which every good political leader must, in my view, stand.

Which brings me to two feedback loops. In both cases leaders have gone from being plain vanilla autocrats to being autocratic in the extreme. These two men have moved, inexorably, from being bad early in their tenures to being in time far worse.

The first example is China’s President Xi Jinping. This excerpt is from an article titled, “Xi Steamrolls Dissent with Old Playbook” that a few days ago was in the Wall Street Journal. 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is [now] employing the sort of autocratic tactics once wielded by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to stamp out opposition and stack the leadership with acolytes as he prepares to extend his reign. In a throwback to the most powerful Communist leaders of the 20^th century, Xi has purged dozens of senior officials… overseen the growth of a cult of personality and demanded absolute loyalty. His goal: Dictate China’s destiny for years to come.

The second example is, no surprise, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Since he came to power in 2000, Putin has become steadily more repressive and oppressive. Moreover, since Russia attacked Ukraine, in 2022, Putin has become even more controlling. Concerned in recent months that the increasingly high costs of the war, in both men and materials, will make the Russian people restive, Putin has cracked down. These lines are from an article titled “Russia Further Restricts Telegram, Escalating Internet Clampdown” that a few months ago was in the New York Times. I should add that the crackdown continues; even in recent weeks were more restrictions on internet access. 

Russia tightened its step-by-step throttling of the ubiquitous communication app Telegram, escalating a crackdown on what remains of the free Russian internet amid {Putin’s] war against Ukraine…. The moves are broadly seen as an attempt to extend Kremlin control over what Russians are able to see, do and say online.  

History testifies that bad leaders always get worse. More precisely, they always get worse unless they are stopped. For never ever do bad leaders stop getting worse on their own!

To see where this can and sometimes does lead, I suggest you see the film “Two Prosecutors.” Most of it takes place in a Soviet prison during the worst of Stalin’s purges. It is, as a critic for The New Yorker wrote, a “superbly chilling historical drama.” It is, as I write, a lesson of itself.

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*Barbara Kellerman, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers (Oxford University Press, 2024).

The ideological origins of the American Revolution were resolutely anti-authority. They were, equally resolutely, anti-leadership or, more precisely, anti-any leadership that previously was legitimate.

The ideological origins of the American Revolution were – no other word for it – revolutionary. They called for the total overthrow, by violence, if necessary, of the old order.  The leader of the old order, the British king, was to be tossed on the ash heap of American history. Whereas the leader of the new order, the president of the United States, was to be something altogether different. A leader who was accountable to his followers.

Unlike the leader of the old order who was an autocrat, the leader of the new order would be a democrat. Unlike the leader of the old order who inherited the right to rule, the leader of the new order would be granted the right to rule. Granted the right to rule by those over whom he ruled. And, unlike the leader of the old order who was leader for life, the leader of the new order would be obliged after a time to surrender his power to another who peaceably would replace him.

The American Revolution was like all revolutions – the action was driven not by those at the top of the established order but by those in the middle and at the bottom. It was driven not by leaders but by followers. By followers some of who, in turn, became leaders.

Of course, the original leaders were the intellectual leaders: the political philosophers who led the Enlightenment. Leading lights such as John Locke, Montesquieu, and Mary Wollstonecraft, all of whom planted the seed. Planted the idea that ordinary people, followers, had rights. Rights that included electing the leaders they wanted and rejecting the leaders they did not.

Which explains why during the decade that led up to the American Revolution it was defiance of people in power that “poured from the colonial presses and was hurled from half the pulpits of the land.” It was the right, the need, the absolute obligation to disobey legally constituted authority that had become “the universal cry.” In other words, the American Revolution was also like all revolutions in that the “doctrine according to godliness” was turned on its head. No longer was obedience to authority valued, the coin of this new realm was resistance to authority.*

The rebels were not given to empty cries and murmurs. Their resistance and defiance and their suspicion of people in power were not merely in theory. They were in practice. Hence Americans’ innate antagonism to authority was to be etched in the equivalent of stone. It’s why the United States of America has a government deliberately designed to check power and to balance it. And it’s why the United States of America has a government deliberately designed to distribute power among the three different branches – executive, legislative, and judicial. And among the three different levels – federal, state, and local.

But there is an irony in all this. For the 21^st century threat to American democracy has come not from where the Founders imagined. Not from leaders who wanted more power. Instead, it has come from leaders who want less. It has come from leaders, specifically elected officials, who have so wholly surrendered their power and authority that they can longer be called leaders. Rather they are followers – followers of the most craven sort. Followers who dare not breathe even a word or lift even a finger against their leader – lest he punish them.

One could argue that President Donald Trump makes King George III look like child’s play. And one could argue that current Congressional Republicans are the abject subjects that the king could only have dreamed of. But the danger that America250 faces – the danger of autocracy smothering democracy – does not come from a single individual or even a collection of individuals. Rather it is a failure of imagination. Neither the Philosophers nor the Founders conceived of a world in which the greatest political threat came not from those who wanted more power but from those who wanted less. For there can be no practical purpose to checks and balances, or to separation of powers, unless people do what they are supposed to do. This includes exercising power when it is called for – and resisting power when resistance is right. Cowering in a corner will not cut it.     

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*The quote is in Barbara Kellerman, The Political Presidency: Practice of Leadership (Oxford University Press, 1984). It is from Bernard Bailyn’s classic, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.