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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? Today’s post is about, you guessed it, followers. More precisely, it’s about who followers, ordinary people, can trust.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, “Who Do You Trust?” was the title of a popular television game show. For five years it was emceed by Johnny Carson who went on, of course, to become the GOAT of late-night television hosts. But then his role was to get contestants to decide if they trusted themselves correctly to answer a question – or thought it better to trust someone else. Who did they think was more likely to get the right answer?

Though the show is from another era, the question it asks is more urgent than ever. It is key not just to how we function as individuals but as a collective. Who do we trust? Who do we trust personally, professionally, politically – and technologically?  

In the old days, when “Who Do You Trust?” aired, Americans were generally a trustworthy people. Specifically, into the mid-1960s we trusted people in positions of authority. But our trust specifically in government, in our political leaders, began to wane first after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. And second, after the military and political mendaciousness that was associated with the war in Vietnam. Since then, the trend has never reversed. And since then, mistrust has spread.  

In his 2017 book The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols argued that mistrust had become endemic.* Moreover, its demise implied not just a rejection of existing knowledge, but of science, of objective reality generally. It was emblematic of an age, Nichols wrote, in which “all citizens [all followers] believe themselves to be experts on everything.”**

The years of covid – which were characterized as much by ignorance as fear and loathing – further accelerated and exacerbated the existing trend. Many Americans were more ready to believe what the president of the United States said than medical and scientific experts. It didn’t help that President Donald Trump appeared convinced of his every word while the experts seemed to be fumbling in the dark – which often, for good reason, they were. To this day Trump continues to sell himself as a medical expert. Just this week he issued an executive order on measles vaccines for children that, to quote the Wall Street Journal, “isn’t based on rigorous science, or really any science at all.”

Which brings us – as all roads seem now to do – to AI. As the pace of its development accelerates, experts and laypeople alike are becoming perceptibly uneasy. Uneasy not just about the rapidity and extremity of the changes taking place – five years or less before AI is smarter than we are? – but about who exactly is in charge. Who in matters of artificial intelligence is leading and who following? It’s fine to argue that “humans cannot be passengers” in the AI car.*** And it’s fine to charge that companies are making critical AI decisions without any kind of social or political mandate. But how exactly are followers, we, supposed to weigh in? How exactly do we “acquire more agency over our human future”?

Who do we trust? Do we trust us?

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*The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press).

** Nichols’s argument was presaged by my own. In The End of Leadership (HarperCollins, 2012).I point out that because of changing cultures and technologies leaders (experts, authority figures) in Western democracies were getting weaker while followers (ordinary people) were getting stronger.

*** John Thornhill in the Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/33094bff-546e-4ac2-a949-af2e9daaa3f0?syn-25a6b1a6=1

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? Today’s post is about, you guessed it, followers. Or, more precisely, rules for followers.

For daring not to follow where President Donald Trump led, he accused Alaska’s Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of being a “traitor.”* Three other Republican senators chose a different path. Though they had made plain, in public, their reservations, they nevertheless caved, they folded. They voted to confirm.

But before you accuse them of being spineless, craven, abject lapdogs, remember the long history of followers who seek to avoid the punishments of their leaders no matter how decadent or depraved, no matter their depredations.

Here then are ten rules for followers who fear the fury of their leader. They are culled from 26 pointers provided by Stendhal in his great 19^th century novel, The Charter House of Parma.**  

• Always track gossip. Be alert to calumnies against you.
• Recognize that your allies might not be able to help you. Have backup plans.
• Anticipate attacks against you from rivals for the leader’s favor. Thwart them and strike back.
• Avoid becoming popular so that your leader never feels threatened.
• Be prepared to defend yourself effectively – but respectfully.
• Do not expect the law to protect you.
• Never criticize your leader, it will arouse suspicion.
• Cultivate allies among your leader’s family and friends.
• Make your leader see you as indispensable – but not threatening.
• If your influence wanes, invent a conspiracy against your leader and punish its members to impress him.

Some things never change. Like followers so frightened they follow bad leaders.

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*Senator Murkowski had the temerity to vote against confirming Todd Blanche as U.S. Attorney General.  

**This post is based on this article. Click on the link for additional tips on “surviving autocracy.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/books/review/stendhal-charterhouse-of-parma-machiavelli-the-prince-autocracy.html

It’s one of my running themes.* Leaders can’t hold onto their jobs – and, or they don’t want to hold on to their jobs. Whichever way you slice it, leaders continue to turn over at a remarkable rate.

The post of British prime minister is an extreme case in point. The recent incumbent, Andy Burnham, is the 7^th person to occupy the position in just ten years. In the U.S., out of 535 members of Congress 80 will not return to their seats next term, the highest number in over a decade.

Moreover, lest you think the exodus of those at the top is limited to the public sector, think again. Last year, 234 chief executives of publicly listed companies vacated their offices globally, “up 16 percent year on year.” It’s another record. Similarly, the tenure of leaders in higher education, which each year is shorter. An analysis of historically black colleges and universities published this month found they had “the highest rates of presidential turnover ever, averaging a new president approximately every four years.”

The reasons why the shelf life of leaders is shrinking, and then shrinking still more, are of course multiple and variegated. But for those of you interested in analyzing why what’s happening is happening, I suggest you start by looking at the leadership system. Which means looking not just at the leader but at the followers and at the contexts within which the leader and their followers are situated.  

Autocracies do not generally have leader churn. It’s democracies in which the trend is so striking – and so telling.  

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*See, for example, these two previous posts.

Turnover at the Top

Leader Churn

The leaders of Russia and Ukraine, and of the United States and Iran and of every other country in the Middle East, and of the dozens of African countries currently engaged in armed conflict, are all men. Not a woman among them, nor among most of their fighting forces. Why?

In the early days of the most recent incarnation of the women’s movement – in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s – the question of whether women lead differently from men often came up. The conclusion generally was yes: women tend to be somewhat less aggressive and more collaborative, including in the workplace. This was in keeping with what we know about nearly all great apes – of which humans are one – which similarly have males more prone to fight, especially physically, than females.

The issue of women and power is less fraught now than it was when the women’s movement was in its heyday – or maybe it just surfaces less. Why would this be? Have the questions been satisfactorily answered? Of course not. Have women reached equity with men? Of course not. But there are reasons why the issue of women and power has been pushed to the back burner. Three of the most important:

First, the number of democracies has decreased, and the number of autocracies has increased. This matters because as Hillary Clinton pointed out in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, a “crucial element at the heart of the authoritarian wave” is the persecution of at least the diminishment of women.* This has implications not just for women on the lower rungs of the ladder but for those higher up. Even in recent years, “female leaders and activists have faced intimidation, treason charges, prison, and exile.”

Second, while in the private sector has been progress – there are more women chief executive officers and board members now than fifty years ago – progress has been so slow that the issue of gender and power has come over time to feel less not more pressing. This year only 11 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women – which is, if you can believe it, the highest number ever. Norway is reputed to have the highest number of female CEOs anywhere in the world, but even this number is under 14 percent. It’s hard to remain indefinitely excited about a problem that is chronic.

Third, is the lack of a sufficient sample size. In every sector the number of women leaders has been so low that it’s difficult if not impossible to reach reliable conclusions. Do I have to hear yet again that in 1982 Margaret Thatcher took military action when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands? Do I have to point out yet again that the United States and China, France, Russia and Nigeria have never had a female leader? Do I have to mention that neither Meta nor Nvidia, neither Amazon nor Alphabet, have ever had a female leader?  

What’s remarkable is not, then, that we don’t have all the answers. What’s remarkable is that we still have so little information because women with power remain still so rare – which is perhaps why war. Wars.  

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*“Women’s Rights are Democratic Rights” in Foreign Affairs, March/April 2026.  

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