Category: Digital Article

This is the third in a series of posts that explore followers in a pandemic – this pandemic. During the coronavirus crisis leaders have been regularly, even relentlessly examined, explored, deciphered, and dissected. The American obsession with the American president, Donald Trump, has been especially virulent, as if he alone is solely responsible for everything bad that has happened, and for that matter everything good. In other words, as is typical, followers, in this case Trump’s followers, have been ignored. More precisely, they have been ignored not in individual instances – but as a group. They have been ignored as a group that was deeply involved in bringing us to this point – and now in our frantic effort to cure what ails us. Each of these posts is, then, intended as a corrective. A corrective to the misleading, mistaken idea that our fixation on Trump is warranted – as if he were not just the leading actor but the only actor. In brief, if there is blame, blame must be shared.  

III – The Media

Social media are today’s tabloids. They tend toward the extremes at both ends of the political spectrum, generally attracting those who agree with the messages they send, generally distancing those who do not. But even in this time of tweets and trolls, old media, specifically cable television networks, play a significant role as influencers. Here too we incline to consume media that confirm – that confirm our preexisting biases. Liberals, then, gravitate toward cable networks such as MSNBC and CNN, that relentlessly diminish and demean President Donald Trump; whereas conservatives gravitate toward Fox News, a network dedicated to nothing so much as extolling Trump’s various virtues.

Fox News is, of course, the legacy of legendary media mogul, Roger Ailes. (Ailes has also come to be known for fostering at Fox News a culture of sexual harassment, which, though, is beside the point of this post.) Under Ailes’s leadership, Fox News became two things simultaneously: first, a remarkable story of unmitigated media success; second, a reliable extension of the Republican Party. Fox News became so successful a hybrid of politics and entertainment that it did not simply have viewers, it had fans. It had fans so relentlessly rabid and tirelessly dedicated that the network became a money-making juggernaut. At the same time, Ailes’s ties to the Republican Party, as well as those of Rupert Murdoch, Ailes’s empire-building boss, became stronger while proving enduring. Stronger and enduring to the point where, during the administration of Donald Trump, Fox News became, in effect, an extension of the White House.

Ailes’s ties to powerful Republican politicians went all the way back to his association with Richard Nixon. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s Ailes was a Republican Party stalwart, reliably available, eager even, to serve as media consultant and political guru so long as he deemed the association in his best interest as well as in the interest of his baby, Fox News. The connection continued to shortly before Ailes’s death. To the time of Trump, in other words, who Ailes helped to win the White House, while Trump in time on drew on Fox News to enable him to dominate the American media landscape as no other politician since Franklin Roosevelt.                

During Trump’s presidency, the success of Fox News has continued unabated. In 2019 it generated some $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21^st Century Fox, and it remains the most watched of all cable news networks. Simultaneous to this success, has been the relationship between Fox News and Trump’s White House, which in the last three and a half years solidified into symbiosis. Fox features a fervid pro-Trump lineup in primetime, including anchors Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity. This has meant that when times were, are, tough – such as during the current virus crisis – Trump has been able to rely on his media cronies to continue to be his toadies. For example, when the president was proselytizing, relentlessly, for hydroxychloroquine as a possible or even probable remedy for COVID-19, Ingraham served as his Fox foil. She declared the drug a “game changer.” She booked guests willing to describe it as a “miracle turnaround.” And she charged that anyone who questioned the efficacy of the drug was in “total denial.” Ingraham backed off only after Trump himself did, when the evidence and the experts began increasingly to imply that enthusiasm was not in order, but that caution was.        

The links between Fox and the White House are not only professional, they are personal. They range from Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News, who went for a time to the White House to serve as director of communications and deputy chief of staff. To Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox co-host who has been for some time the steady girlfriend of Donald Trump, Jr. To Fox anchor Hannity, a close friend of Trump, who former Fox star, Bill O’Reilly, recently called “the most powerful guy in the country” because Trump seems to do what Hannity effectively tells him to do.

Given the enormous reach of Fox News, the network has been a fabulous foil for Trump, a follower as force multiplier that has enabled him throughout his brief political career to exercise power and influence far beyond what he could possibly have achieved without the network in tow. There is, though, an irony here. For while Trump appears the leader and Fox the follower, Fox will defer to the president only so long as it’s in the network’s best interest. Should the president stumble – specifically, should the pandemic push him to lose his footing – Fox News will scurry in front rather than stay out back.

This is the second in a series of posts that explore followers in a pandemic – this pandemic. During the coronavirus crisis leaders have been regularly, even relentlessly examined, explored, deciphered, and dissected. The American obsession with the American president, Donald Trump, has been especially virulent, as if he alone is solely responsible for everything bad that has happened, and for that matter everything good. In other words, as is typical, followers, in this case Trump’s followers, have been ignored. More precisely, they have been ignored not in individual instances – but as a group. They have been ignored as a group that was deeply involved in bringing us to this point – and now in our frantic effort to cure what ails us. Each of these posts is, then, intended as a corrective. A corrective to the misleading, mistaken idea that our fixation on Trump is warranted – as if he were not just the leading actor but the only actor. In brief, if there is blame, blame must be shared.  

II – The Party

From the beginning, when Donald Trump first declared himself a presidential candidate, has been a staunch band of Never-Trumpers. It originally comprised and still does a seriously determined, if ultimately deeply ineffectual, small group of Republicans who all along refused to recognize Trump as their leader.

This group – which has had a series of names from Meeting of the Concerned to The Lincoln Project – has never been particularly productive. It has not at any point in the process had much of an impact – not during the campaign when Trump’s inexperience and lack of expertise, not to speak of his dubious and salacious behavior, were amply in evidence. And not during his time in the Oval Office when he was able to escape from under a mountain of evidence that testified to his personal, political, and financial corruption, and that included sworn witnesses at only the third presidential impeachment and trial in American history.   

The obvious question is why. Why, given the failed presidency of Donald Trump, and given the president’s own screamingly glaring deficiencies, did the Never-Trumpers fail to get any traction? It will not suffice to look at whatever their inadequacies. In fact, they consisted in the main of highly accomplished men and women with extensive political experience. So, we need to look elsewhere, at the large majority of Republicans who all along opposed the Never-Trumpers – at those who supported Trump early on and have continued to do so no matter his flagrantly flawed personal character and woefully inadequate political performance.

In my previous post I addressed the wellspring of Trump’s power – his base. That large majority of Republicans voters who for years have deeply believed that Trump could do no wrong – or, even if he did, it weighed less than what he did that was right. This brings us to Party professionals, specifically to Republican members of the U. S. Senate who have similarly stood staunchly by the president, no matter his “screamingly glaring deficiencies.” More than any other group of Americans – including wealthy Republicans who continue even now to pour money into Trump’s coffers – it has been Republican Senators who have been Trump’s enablers. Who have made it possible for Trump to remain in office even when it seemed the deck was stacked heavily against him.

To be clear, not every Republican Senator has fallen into line. But those who did dare to deviate from the norm – which was to follow the president in lockstep – have paid for their resistance by being sent into exile. An example was Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, a traditional Republican conservative, who early on believed Trump was poisoning the party. Flake’s private disillusionment and public disaffection earned him no end of abuse from Republican right wingers, who in no time flat caused Flake’s numbers to collapse. It’s why he decided (in 2018) not to seek reelection. So while his declaration of independence from Trump – who he finally described as “reckless, outrageous, and undignified” – no doubt salved his conscience, and no doubt earned him the silent admiration of a few fellow Republicans, it also ensured that for the duration of Trump’s reign, Flake would be far, far from the corridors of power.

If Flake was an exemplar of a Republican Party dissident, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been the exemplar of a Republican Party faithful. For his own self-interested reasons, McConnell has protected Trump at virtually every turn, up to and including prohibiting witnesses at his impeachment trial, therefore effectively guaranteeing the president could and would remain in office. In a recent article in the New Yorker, Jane Mayer quotes well known Never-Trumper, Bill Kristol: “Under McConnell’s leadership, the Senate, far from providing a check on the executive branch, has acted as an accelerant. Demagogues like Trump, if they can get elected, can’t really govern unless they have people like McConnell.” Kristol goes on to add that Trump’s base would have stuck by him in any case. “But the elites might have rebelled if not for McConnell. He could have fundamentally disrupted Trump’s control, but instead [he] has kept the trains running.”        

Whatever we might think of McConnell, he has been, up to the current crisis anyway, extremely effective as Majority Leader. He has set much if not most of the Republican Senate agenda. He has passed many if not most Republican Senate bills. He has obliged Republican Senators nearly invariably to toe the line. And he has been able successfully to manage up – to manage the president despite their differences always in style and sometimes in substance.

McConnell has been, then, an exceptionally powerful leader – while being at the same time an exceptionally abject follower. Not for nothing is the title of Mayer’s piece, “Enabler-in-Chief.” The Senate Majority Leader has presented the president with Republican heads served on a silver platter.

A final note on the critical connection between this post, on the Republican Party, and the previous post, on the Republican base. As Mayer reports, in 2017 McConnell took a brief break from his feckless fealty to the president. After the white-supremacist riot in Charlottesville, and after Trump claimed there were “fine people on both sides,” McConnell issued a statement condemning the “KKK and neo-Nazi groups.” For his indirect criticism of the president, the Majority Leader was punished. He was punished by Trump’s base who in droves withheld their approval from McConnell until he reversed course – until he began again to back Trump with unswerving dedication. Said one local operative, McConnell’s support of Trump during the fight to seat Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, “rescued him with conservatives, who said that finally he was acting like a Republican and supporting our President.”

This is the first in a series of posts that explore followers in a pandemic – this pandemic. During the coronavirus crisis leaders have been regularly, even relentlessly examined, explored, deciphered, and dissected. The American obsession with the American president, Donald Trump, is especially virulent, as if he alone has been solely responsible for everything bad that has happened, and for that matter everything good. In other words, as is typical, followers, in this case Trump’s followers, have been ignored. More precisely, they have been ignored not in individual instances – but as a group. They have been ignored as a group that was deeply involved in bringing us to this point – and now in our frantic effort to cure what ails us. Each of these posts is, then, intended as a corrective. A corrective to the erroneous idea that our fixation on Trump is warrented – as if he were not just the leading actor in the virus drama but the only actor. In brief, if there is blame, blame must be shared.  

I – The Base

“I could stand in the middle of 5^th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” So said Donald Trump in Iowa in January 2016, when he was campaigning for president. He was not suggesting he was intending to kill. He was boasting there was nothing he could do that would deter or derail his most fervent and fervid followers. They would, he predicted, remain fervent and fervid – loyal to him personally and politically, loyal to him above all. To a remarkable degree Trump was proved right. Despite gaping flaws in his character, and despite gaping flaws in his personality, and despite gaping flaws in his performance, what Americans came to call Trump’s “base” has continued to stand with him.  

Estimates of the size of his base vary, in part because its size has varied over time. For example, in the immediate wake of his 2019 State of the Union speech, President Trump’s approval rating among Republicans was a sky high 97 percent, whereas in the immediate wake of the coronavirus crisis his approval rating among Republicans was only 87 percent. What? “Only 87 percent”?! As recently as early April 87 percent of Republicans still thought the president was doing a good job?! Yes. Moreover even by late April evidence was that the country’s deeply entrenched partisan divide was still precluding the president from losing more than a few percentage points on his overall rating.

Let me be clear: numbers like these can deceive or, at least, mislead. For example, most polls do not distinguish between weak approval ratings and strong ones. Case in point was last fall, when polls indicated that whereas 74 percent of Democratic registered voters strongly disapproved of President Trump, only 50 percent of Republic registered voters strongly approved of him.  Still, even his detractors agree that his base – his core group of diehard followers – is approximately one third of American voters. Moreover, at least until the current crises – the public health crisis and the financial crisis – the president’s approval ratings have stayed remarkably stable. Whereas in every other recent administration, the president’s numbers were irregular, so far at least Trump’s numbers have been regular. His approval ratings were never as high as Richard Nixon’s, or George W. Bush’s, or Barack Obama’s – but they have, again, so far at least never sunk so low. As Don P. McAdams noted last winter in the Atlantic, “Unlike all other presidents [Trump] has never exceeded a 47 percent approval rating. But he has rarely dipped much below 37 percent. He has a sizable core of support that refuses to shrink.” This after all the damning evidence unearthed by the investigation of Robert Mueller, by the impeachment proceeding, and by the repeated indications of everything from financial corruption to sexual misconduct.               

The stability and durability of Trump’s base has never been fully understood. McAdams provided a psychoanalytical explanation: he speculated that Trump enables his admirers to “feel a rush of excitement and allure.” They enjoy, he writes, being in the presence, really or virtually, of such a “beautiful figure – or a powerful, creative, dynamic, charismatic, or intriguing figure.” Tim Alberta, in contrast, provided a political explanation: To consider Trump’s “unwavering support” within the Republican party is to recognize “the essential ingredients of American life: instinctual outrage and involuntary contempt, geographical clustering and clannish identification, moral relativism and self-victimization.” (Alberta’s book on Trump and the Republican party is titled, American Carnage.) For further insights I suggest the best literature on charismatic leadership: far from implying a casual connection it describes the powerful bond between the charismatic leader and his (charismatic leaders usually are men) enthralled followers.

Whatever the source of the base’s unswerving support is, obviously, less important than its effect. Its effect has been to give Donald Trump a rock-solid foundation on which to stand first during his campaign, and then after he became president. Its effect has been to enable him to do whatever he has done – and is continuing to do even now. It is impossible to understand the leadership of the American president without understanding the followership of the Americans who make up his base.      

I have written frequently and extensively on leadership and lactation. On the impact on women and leadership first of being pregnant, and then of breast feeding. I have argued that this impact is on the one hand considerable and, on the other hand, virtually entirely ignored by both the leadership literature and the leadership industry.

What is ignored in the endless conversations about why so few women are in positions of leadership, especially leadership at the top, is not the issue of childcare. In fact, the topic of work/life balance for women especially has been addressed ad nauseum. Rather what has been relegated is the physiological, psychological, and sociobiological impact on women who are pregnant and who subsequently, immediately after delivery, proceed to breast feed.

Again, women are primates. Further, primates who are pregnant are affected by being pregnant, and primates who are mothers take their mothering seriously. In fact, primates who are mothers take their mothering far more seriously than primates who are fathers take their fathering. Given this – given this radical, natural difference between women and men, specifically between mothers and fathers – what is to be done so far as leadership is concerned? The question is not unimportant. After all, 86% of American women in their early forties are mothers. And, after all, less than 7% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women.  

Up to now, staying home more, rather than going to work and remaining at work, all day long, five days a week, has not been much of an option. Though in the last quarter century companies have made major strides in providing alternatives to full time work, including part-time and flex-time, women and, not incidentally, men as well, have been reluctant to work from home for fear of being branded. Being branded if not as a slacker then as less than totally dedicated, less than tirelessly driven. In other words, virtually from the moment of conception all the way through to at least early childhood, women who have been ambitious to lead have found it difficult to reconcile the level of their ambition with the changes in their bodies and psyches, and with their need, their want, after a baby is born to nurse and to nurture.

And now there is this – a pandemic. The coronavirus crisis which has every expert in every field predicting where we will be one year, two years, and five years from now. These predictions are all over the place – with a single exception. With notable regularity we are being told that the nature of work will change – permanently. More specifically, that in the future working from home will be far more prevalent, far more acceptable, and even desirable than it was in the past. In the Financial Times Simon Kuper speculates, “Homeworking will be easier after the pandemic. If white-collar employees end up working from home just half the week, the fall in commuting would slash their emissions, pollution and rush-hour traffic while boosting national happiness.” In the New York Times Timothy Egan suggests, “Millions of people may settle into another workplace following the world war on the coronavirus – their homes. Up to half the jobs in the United Sates could be done, at least partly, from home, by one estimate. Currently, fewer than 4 percent of jobs allow this. The benefits of telecommuting – in terms of personal time, on the environment, on the psyche and on production, could be enormous.” And, in the New York Times Claire Cain Miller makes a similar point, “For white-collar, salaried workers, coronavirus is, in a way, offering a natural experiment, by forcing companies to let people work from home, create their own schedules and spend more time with their family. It could convince companies that constant face time is unnecessary.”          

Women with ambition often decide it best for professional purposes to conceal their being pregnant. Women with ambition often decide it best for professional purposes to obscure their need, their want, to tend more to their infants. Women with ambition often decide it best for professional purposes to work full tilt outside the home even when they have small children. Fact is that in each of these cases women with ambition will be far better positioned if working from home becomes mainstream.

In May 2019 I posted an article on the leadership of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. I situated her in three different contexts: in Germany, in Europe, and in a world in which women leaders were still strikingly scarce. (A link to the previous post is provided below.) To these three contexts must now be added a fourth: the coronavirus crisis. More precisely, the coronavirus crisis consists of two crises that are linked, though they are also separate and distinct. The first is a public health crisis unlike any the West has experienced in some one hundred years. The second is a financial crisis that some experts warn could be the most damaging since the Great Depression.     

Several months into the first of these crises – which is of course responsible for the second – Germany is ranked among the best in the world in its response. According to several indicators, most dramatically death rates, Germany has performed at a high level. It has contained and mitigated Covid-19 to the point where the entire country is beginning to lift the restrictions the virus has imposed. To be clear, no German, least of all the Chancellor, is resting on their laurels or claiming the crisis is over. Rather, in keeping with her leadership style more generally, Merkel is providing a measured plan, a careful countrywide blueprint for reviving economic activity while continuing to fight the virus.

The reasons why Germany – along with other countries such as Taiwan, Israel, Singapore, and Iceland – has ranked high in its response to the crisis are of course multiple. Above all, Germany has an unusually robust public health care system which features, among its various virtues, enormous capacity. Germany has more spare beds in its intensive care units than Italy has altogether. In fact, Germany has so much excess capacity it is treating people with the virus from Italy, Spain, and France. Germany further has in place, and has had virtually from the start, the essentials for controlling contagion: widespread testing and tracing, in that order.

Merkel has been Chancellor since 2005. So, she must get considerable credit for Germany’s high level of readiness for a public health care crisis. She could not of course possibly have foreseen the coronavirus in its specifics. But she and her team obviously foretold that Germany might face a health care challenge of some sort, for which they concluded the country should be properly prepared.

This particular crisis also fed into this particular Chancellor’s particular strengths. This is, after all, above all a health care challenge. A challenge that only health care experts – scientists – will be able ultimately to meet. Merkel, then, met her moment. For in her original incarnation she was a scientist, a physicist, which has made her in an all-important way the perfect person to lead the German people through the thicket of Covid-19. Moreover, her famously laconic leadership style perfectly suits the temper of the time. Since the start of the crisis Merkel has been calm and considered, communicating regularly, reliably, and reasonably with her constituents.

Predictable then that in the wake of the pandemic Chancellor Angela Merkel’s approval ratings have been extremely high. Fully 72 % of Germans recently surveyed said they were satisfied with the government’s handling of the virus crisis. This while at the same moment that President Donald Trump’s numbers dropped – significantly. In a new poll reported by Trump favorite, Fox News, his approval rating is rather a meager 43% while his disapproval number is 54%, up 9 points since March.  

Politics can be a volatile profession, even in Germany, which during virtually the entire post World War II period has stood out for its political stability. There is, then, no guarantee that Merkel will remain in office to the end of her term, in 2021. But given the context of the crisis, it seems increasingly unlikely the German people will opt to change chancellors in other than the regular order.       

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The Leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel

The lead headline in yesterday’s New York Times read, “Despite Timely Alerts, Trump Was Slow to Act.” It was similar to a headline in today’s Washington Post, “Signs Missed and Steps Slowed in Trump’s Pandemic Response.”

As the headlines suggested, both articles focused on the president’s sluggish response to what became the virus crisis. Similarly, both articles included the names of other players who worried early on that Trump’s response could prove dangerously inadequate. These others included top White House advisors, experts deep in cabinet departments, and members of various intelligence agencies.  

Whatever their ranks, or their titles, or their levels of expertise, everyone of these other players were subordinates who saw Trump as their superior. Not, presumably, their intellectual superior, better equipped than they to address their escalating concerns. But as their organizational superior – their leader, the chief executive, who was positioned higher than they in the government hierarchy.

It was this hierarchy that stopped these advisors, these experts, and these officials, from speaking up and speaking out in ways they could be heard. Heard not by the president, who remained for too long deaf to their incantations. But by the body politic who was kept out of the loop, who was kept ignorant of what was happening in the ominous present and, more importantly, of what was threatening to happen in the immediate future. Instead, for all practical purposes those in the know kept those of us who were not in the dark. Those in the know remained, effectively, mute – more Bystander Followers than Activist Followers at a time when it was activism not passivism that was desperately needed.

I will have more to say about Followers’ responses to the pandemic in future articles. Meantime it’s up to you to see the global pandemic not only through the lens of leaders, but equally through the lens of followers. Only then can you tell the pandemic in full.

On the issue of learning to lead I recently wrote a book, Professionalizing Leadership (Oxford University Press, 2018). The book made essentially two arguments: first, that how we teach how to lead is woefully deficient; and second, that there is a better way, specifically that students of leadership should, like students of medicine and law, be professionally educated, trained, and developed.

Since the book was published things happened – some particularly pertinent. One was a still further decline in M.B.A applications, especially to traditional two-year programs. The other was the corona virus crisis that laid bare the deficiencies in how we prepare people to lead, notably but not only when times are tough.       

About the decline in traditional M.B.A applications there is little to be said that is new, other than that the trend has not only accelerated but is unlikely now ever to be reversed. Signs of a shift are all around, and they abound. In January of this year the Financial Times reported that, “Business school deans warn of a crisis threatening the future of the two-year generalist degree. It comes after four straight years of declining applications at most US institutions.” In April of this year the Wall Street Journal quoted a business school dean who observed that, “When you get to the point where Harvard has declining applicants, you know the two-year M.B.A. is in trouble.”   

To address the issue business school deans – especially deans of schools that are other than top tier – have taken several different paths. Some schools have shortened their programs of study, that is, they have shifted from two-year M.B.A. programs to one-year programs. In fact, the number of one-year accredited M.B.A. programs surged fully 250 per cent since 2012. Other schools have started to specialize. Johns Hopkins Carey Business School is a good example. Starting next fall, the University’s traditional two-year M.B. A. program will build on Hopkins’s already existing strong medical, nursing, and public health schools by concentrating on health. (This decision seems now to have been as prescient as fortuitous, given it was made before the pandemic.) And still other schools adapted to the marketplace by offering part-time programs, flex-time programs, and, of course, online programs.         

About the corona virus crisis there is similarly little to be said that is new, in this case not because it’s been said for years but rather because it’s been said countless, numberless, untold numbers of times in the last couple of months. Our leaders – I’ll confine my comments to leaders in the U.S., though they are hardly the only ones culpable – have not been up to the job. The most obvious example is our political leadership class because they are the most visible. But the same can also be said about leaders in business, and for that matter about leaders in science and medicine who, if they did foresee a crisis of this sort, were clearly ineffective in communicating their sense of alarm. Additionally, leaders not only failed miserably to prepare for this crisis, they failed miserably to manage it. As I write, it seems to be agreed that opening the economy safely and successfully without widespread testing is impossible. It seems similarly to be agreed that our capacity to do such widespread testing is, at least at this moment, nonexistent.

I ask you – is this any way to run a railroad?  

At a minimum the obvious shift in what business schools are doing and in how they are doing it should give us pause. After all, for generations it is business schools especially (though not exclusively) that have professed to teach leadership and management. And, at a minimum, the obvious crisis in public health should give us similar pause. It’s clear that leaders across the board – not just the president of the United States! – have failed in their primary purpose. To keep Americans safe from harm – not just physical harm but financial harm.

There are of course exceptions to these general rules. Leaders with traditional M.B.A.s in hand who have excelled. Leaders who foresaw the possibility if not probability of a pandemic. And leaders who since the pandemic have managed it admirably. I am thinking, for example, of Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve, who is being given high marks for his unprecedented response to this unprecedented situation.  

Still, none of us is likely to look back at this moment without cringing at the thought of most of those most directly in charge. Leaders in government and yes, in business and in other sectors as well who failed to pass the test of their time. They, though, failed us because we failed them. We failed adequately to educate them, to train them, and to develop them – to prepare them properly for what could, and did, lie ahead.  

Overwhelmingly the world’s leaders are still men. There are, of course, more women leaders, both relatively and in absolute numbers, than there used to be. But the gender gap between women and men in positions of leadership – especially at the top – remains huge.

Given that we are led still mostly by men, and given that we are still smack in the middle of a global pandemic, the question arises: Would where we are be any different if there were more women than men leaders, or, at least, significantly more women in positions of leadership than there are now? In other words, would the worst of the current crisis have been averted or earlier abated had we had more women leaders?

Impossible to say, of course. What we can though say for certain is that the leaders of what used to be thought of as the world’s two leading democracies not only are men, they are men of a certain kind. Throughout their lives both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson have displayed patterns of behavior arguably best described as macho. Both are men who have been aggressively proud of their putative masculinity – to the point where not only their professional and political lives, but also their personal ones, have been characterized by signs, symptoms, and symbols of their insatiable need constantly, relentlessly, to prove that they are he-men, macho-men.

The virus crisis did nothing to inhibit this impulse. Just a few days ago Trump declared that though wearing a mask in public was now recommended by the experts, he did not intend to abide by the general rule – which was, apparently, seen as a sign of weakness. “I don’t want to wear one [a mask] myself,” he said. “I am feeling good. I just don’t want to be doing… I don’t know. Somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk… I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know, it somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”   

So far, the American president remains apparently healthy. His British counterpart has been less fortunate. Like Trump, Johnson chose to eschew what he seems to have perceived as the namby-pamby recommendations of the experts – in his case the frequent and familiar caution not to shake hands.  Well after the warnings were issued, Johnson still chose to boast, “I am shaking hands…. I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few corona patients. I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands.” About three weeks later the Prime Minister tested positive for the virus – and now he lies in a London hospital, consigned to intensive care.    

It is impossible to draw a straight line between cause and effect in a situation as complex as the corona virus crisis. It is not however unreasonable to speculate that too many macho men in too many posts of political leadership are unhealthy for the body politic.     

Erik Erikson was a developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst who in the 1960s and ‘70s played a prominent role in America’s intellectual discourse. He was best known first for his theory of human development, from childhood through old age, and second for writing two groundbreaking biographies, one of Martin Luther, the other of Mahatma Gandhi.

The two biographies were psychoanalytical in their approach – and psychosocial. The former centered on the development of the two individuals; the latter on their development in relation to the contexts within which they lived. Erikson theorized that between Luther and his moment in time, and between Gandhi and his moment in time, was a singularly fortuitous fit. In both cases the men met their moments in ways that served them as leaders, and their followers, sublimely well.

Erikson was similarly eloquent on how central to leaders were their ties to their followers. And on how central to followers were their ties to their leaders. “Whatever motivation or conflict followers may have in common as they join a leader, and are joined together by him” has to be studied, Erikson argued, in relation both to their personal lives, their lives as individuals, and to their collective lives, their lives as members of communities.

Though for a half century the leadership industry has focused on leaders virtually exclusively, Erikson was not the only expert who insisted it made no sense to focus on leaders without simultaneously focusing on their followers. Another was Bruce Mazlish, the psychoanalytically trained historian who in 1989 wrote that, “The leader does not exist, fully formed, before the encounter with the group he is to lead…. The leader discovers a self … in the course of interacting with the chosen group.” At the same time were others who expanded the canvas by stressing the importance of context – among the most obvious examples, that of post-World War II Britain. Though for all of Winston Churchill’s greatness as a wartime leader, not long after the last battle was fought he was pushed from his perch. Churchill had not changed – but the context had.

Anyone familiar with my work knows that in these matters I stand on the shoulders of a small number of my predecessors. Some years ago I started never to write anymore, speak anymore, or teach anymore about “leadership,” but only about what I came to call the “leadership system.” The leadership system is deceptively simple. It has three parts – leaders, followers, and contexts – each of which is equally important and each of which is both dependent on, and independent of, the other two.

The systemic approach comes to mind now, with the emergence of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as America’s leader primus inter pares – America’s leader who has emerged since the corona virus crisis as first among equals. To the surprise of those who watched him over the years, Cuomo has come, almost overnight, to occupy a prominent place among Americans desperate for a leader who seems to them to be bold, bright, and brave enough to navigate the roiling waters of this existential virus crisis.

Let me be clear: Cuomo did not emerge from obscurity. He is scion of a prominent political family. He held a cabinet post in the administration of President Bill Clinton. He served as Attorney General of the State of New York. And he has been governor of the State of New York for nearly a decade. Still, his was not exactly a household name, certainly not at the national level. Additionally, his popularity among the Democratic establishment was, shall we say, minimal as opposed to maximal. Finally, within the great city of New York he was known mainly for two things: his wretched neglect of the all-important city subway system and his wretched relationship with the city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio. In short, while Cuomo was widely regarded as smart, he was neither widely loved nor widely admired. Until now.

Again, Cuomo has not changed. But the situation has – hence have the needs of his followers. Americans, New Yorkers at the epicenter, are caught, trapped, locked in a pandemic. A pandemic that was not only unanticipated but unimagined. A pandemic that has triggered high anxiety and even abject fear. A pandemic that is a breach into which Cuomo has stepped.

This is a man who has met his moment. This is a man who however he was seen before the crisis, during the crisis is being seen completely differently. He holds daily press briefings that are hailed as master classes in public communication. He posts facts and figures that are praised as master classes in truth-telling. He radiates uncertainty and confidence simultaneously; he alternates being angry and frustrated with being calm and composed. He has, as noted in the Financial Times, “transformed himself into an unlikely father of the nation as it faces one of its gravest modern moments.”

In consequence of the excellence of his performance, Cuomo’s followers have morphed from clear-eyed constituents into starry-eyed fans. They share text messages swooning over his latest appearances. They compare him to the best of group therapists, a person in a position of authority who can sooth their savage breasts. And they fantasize about his future – preferably in the White House, having as seamlessly as bloodlessly deposed the Democratic heir apparent, Joe Biden. No surprise that this week a Siena College poll of New Yorkers found a thumping 87% of respondents approved of the governor’s performance during this current crisis.

Cuomo continues to deny that he has any interest whatsoever in running for the presidency. But his legions of followers can dream, can’t they? Meantime they testify vividly to the veracity of what social scientists call “the fundamental attribution error.” What exactly is this error? “People’s inflated belief in the importance of personality traits and dispositions, together with their failure to recognize the importance of situational factors in affecting behavior.”

Sources of Quotes:

Erik Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence.

Bruce Mazlish, The Leader and the Led.

Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology.

Though the heightened attention to leadership is a late twentieth and early twenty-first century phenomenon, in the mid twentieth century were some ground-breaking studies on leadership, particularly in small groups.  One was an article first published in 1959, by John R. P. French, Jr. and Bertram Raven, titled, “The Bases of Social Power.”

The field of leadership has always been plagued by problems of semantics, the article by French and Raven being no exception. Though they take great pains to define their terms, to our ears their definitions sound quaint if not arcane. While initially they focus on two wellsprings of leadership, power and influence, as the title of their piece suggests they settle on “power” as their primary explicator for how some people (leaders) get another people (followers) to do what they, the former, want and intend.   

Though French and Raven wrote there are “undoubtedly many possible bases of power,” they focused on five they found “especially common and important.” Some of these are related to each other, for example the power to reward and to punish usually resides in the same person. Others of these are entirely unrelated, for example legitimate power and expert power might, or they might not, be lodged in one individual. The five bases of power are:

1. reward power – power derived from the leaders’ ability to reward followers
2. coercive power – power derived from the fear that failure to follow will result in punishment
3. legitimate power – power derived from the legitimization of the leader’s position (we usually follow those whose status is higher than ours)
4. referent power – power derived from the close connection or identification by followers with their leaders
5. expert power – power derived from some people being perceived to know more, much more, than others     

I, in contrast to French and Raven, have concluded that leaders actually have three different wellsprings from which they can draw: power, authority, and influence. They relate to their five bases of power, but they are not the same. In my 2012 book The End of Leadership, I made these distinctions – with A the leader and B the follower: “Power is defined here as A’s capacity to get B to do whatever A wants, whatever B’s preferences, if necessary, by force. Authority is A’s capacity to get B to do whatever A wants, based on A’s position, status, or rank. And influence is as it sounds: A’s capacity to persuade B to go along with what A wants and intends, of B’s own volition.”

Like many if not most academic fine points, the distinctions to which I refer seem mostly to be just that, academic fine points. But every now and then they play out in the real world in ways that are of paramount importance. In The End of Leadership I argue, as does Mois Naim in his subsequent The End of Power, and Tom Nichols in his subsequent The Death of Expertise, that though what French and Raven called “expert power” is not dead, in the last few decades it has been seriously diminished. More specifically, we tend now not particularly to respect those who know more than do we. Similarly, we tend now not especially to be swayed by those who know more than do we. We incline instead to ignore or even disparage the experts, often in favor of our peers, if not downright to defy them.        

None has characterized – epitomized – this proclivity more blatantly than President Donald Trump. Not for him expert power – or influence. To the contrary: he has reveled throughout his time in office in declaring as loudly as recurrently that he knows more than does anyone else, no matter the endeavor or field of expertise.  The current pandemic has been no exception. Until now.

The conflict between what I call executive power and expert influence has played out for weeks on America’s national stage, specifically between two men: the big, brawling, bullying president, Donald Trump, and the small, smart, sensible doctor and director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci. Though Fauci has been well known among those in the know for decades – in the 1980s he played a pivotal in the AIDS crisis – he became virtually a household name only in the last month. As a result of his many media appearances, during which he relentlessly beats the drum for treating the corona virus with the deadly earnestness, Americans have become all-too familiar with his face, his name, and his demonstrable expertise. Repeatedly Fauci has told the American president and the American people what they did not want to hear.

At every turn Trump fought Fauci’s sounding the alarm about COVID 19. Which led some to predict that Fauci would at any moment be fired. And others to fear that the vitriolic right would one day do him real damage. (A post on Twitter and Facebook claiming that Fauci was part of a secret anti-Trump cabal reportedly reached some 1.5 million people.) But, yesterday, finally, the tide turned. Yesterday, finally, Trump backed down. He actually reversed himself – as much as admitting that he was wrong and Fauci was right. That Fauci was right to insist that for weeks ahead Americans must continue to follow the by now familiar guidelines, including not yet going out more than necessary and not yet returning to work.   

For weeks Fauci and other public health officials have argued that Trump should not relax the guidelines too soon – only to be stonewalled by the president, who in spite of their cautions recently said that by Easter he wanted America’s churches to be “packed.” Why then did Trump finally give in? Why then did executive power finally succumb to expert influence?

Here some reasons:

• Present information became overwhelmingly convincing. So much data indicating so many Americans already sick, and so many Americans already dead, that even Trump found it impossible to ignore.
• Future projections became inescapably alarming. So much data predicting that up to 2.2 million Americans could die from the virus if nothing were done to stop it that even Trump found it impossible to ignore.
• The virus hit home on a personal level. Not only was one of Trump’s friends apparently felled by the virus, increasingly familiar names were succumbing to its sometimes deadly affects. (Country music star Joe Diffie, age 61, died yesterday of corona complications.)
•  The virus threatens Donald’s Trump’s political future. Though his poll numbers are rising, and while his ostensible competitor for the White House, a man who as I dimly recall is named Joe Biden, remains largely invisible, Trump understands that his handling of the crisis will be the platform he must run on.*
•  Fear is a powerful motivator. The possible risks of Trump’s continuing to defy the experts were getting to be higher than the possible rewards for nudging the nation to “get back to work.”   
• Fauci was coming to personify the resistance. He was coming to be widely regarded as a hero whose expertise was beyond question, and whose willingness to judiciously but fearlessly take on the president was greatly admired.   
• It dawned on the president that though he had power, there is another coin in the realm, influence. Influence, of which Fauci, because of his scientific expertise, has a copious amount – and which seems in the current context to be of great value. Of greater value probably even than power.

In a recent column in USA Today, David Rubenstein wrote that Dr. Anthony Fauci was “without doubt the … leading authority on infectious diseases,” and that in the “world of infectious diseases” he was “the gold standard.” No matter if this is, literally, true. What is demonstrably true is that though he has no power over Trump, Fauci does have influence. Influence that is derived from his expertise which, to go back to French and Raven, is not only in relation to the president but, additionally, according to an absolute standard of excellence. All of which is to point out that even in an era in which expertise has been declared dead, when the context is crisis expertise can, and sometimes does, spring back to life. All of which is similarly to point out that at this moment in time, where Fauci leads Trump follows.

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*For explanation of remark about Joe Biden, see my previous post, “Where Have You Gone, Joe Biden? Our Nation Turns its Lonely Eyes to You.”