In my last post (10/20) I referenced my own just published book, Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. I also mentioned two other recently published pieces, one a book, the other an article. Here – because they are all on the same theme – I list the last two again, this time along with an earlier book of mine.
- My book, published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press, is titled: The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America.
- The recent book is by Jacob Weisberg and is titled, Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.
- And the recent article is the brilliantly argued and eloquently written piece by Frank Rich which appeared in New York magazine (October 5-18). It’s titled, “The Collaborators.”
The two books and the article are in some ways different. I, for example, focus on enablement during President Trump’s first term; Weisberg and Rich write about enablement during his second. More importantly, though, the three pieces have much in common.
First, they are not about the leader who in all three cases is Trump, but about his followers. They focus laser-like on those who decided, consciously, deliberately, to follow the president, no matter where he led.
Second, as their titles make clear, in each of the three cases Trump’s followers were deemed by the authors to be “bad.” Bad in this case is my word; it is not Weisberg’s or Rich’s.* But all three of us clearly made a value judgement, the same value judgment. We concluded that President Trump was in important ways bad and that those who cravenly followed his lead, especially elites – political elites, corporate elites, financial elites, legal elites, and educational elites among others – were, therefore, also bad.
Third, we made clear that whatever President Trump has or has not done that was bad would never have been possible without the essential participation, cooperation, of his followers. Followers who were willing to do his bidding – whatever he explicitly told them to do or implicitly wanted them to do.
I defined enablers as “followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in behaviors that are destructive.” Weisberg describes followers who are cowards as failing “to act courageously, in ways that reveal both their moral weakness and the fragility of the institutions they represented.” And Rich unleashes his furies at those who cater to a lame-duck president who is “running amok in a second childhood of ceaseless tantrums and slobbering irrationality.”
Our assessments, then, are clear. Weisberg, Rich, and Kellerman all think Trump a bad president. And we all think that those who have enabled his not one, but two bad presidencies are similarly bad.
Again, I acknowledge that our assessments are judgements, value judgements. I therefore acknowledge that yours might well be different from ours. But on this I trust we can agree. That bad leadership, however defined, does not happen because it cannot happen without bad followership.
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*I define a “bad” leader as one who is demonstrably unethical, or manifestly ineffective, or both. For more on this see my book, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).