Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t is the title of my new book. It will be published tomorrow by the University of Toronto Press.
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The last paragraph of my last post read:
Submission is the human condition – usually. But it is not always. As my new book makes equally clear, there are reasons why sometimes, not often but sometimes, people resist.
In recent weeks followers in France – large numbers of them, up to three quarters of a million, over 100,000 thousand in Paris alone – have chosen to do just that. To resist. To resist in ways that have already been extremely costly.
Literally costly – it will be expensive to repair and replace the tangible losses. But even dearer are the intangible losses. At least for now of pride in France and of trust in leading individuals and institutions.
What is so broken in France that massive, sometimes violent demonstrations spread so quickly through the country? Two reasons were given. The first, mainly by students, was poorly funded school systems. The second, mainly by labor, was government budget cuts in the face of rising living costs.
But the immediate reasons must be seen in a larger context. To start, France itself, which in important ways is in trouble. Its national debt is sky high. Its longtime president, Emmanuel Macron, has long since worn out his welcome. (If he ever had one!) Finally, the French people. They have a well-deserved reputation for taking to the streets to protest whatever they decide is a slight.
Then there is the even larger context, the one within which France itself is situated. The context within which there are anti-establishment, anti-elitist demonstrations in democracies around the world, including recently in the largest, India. For weeks students in India – they are called and they call themselves “cockroaches” – have led loud, large anti-government demonstrations beginning in New Delhi and then spreading to other cities including Mumbai. Each of these various resistances – I include in this category seven British prime ministers in ten years; abysmally low approval ratings of leaders such as Germany’s Friedrich Merz who has been Chancellor for less that eighteen months; and the rise of parties toward the extremes of right and left. We’ve reached a point where in most of the world’s largest democracies ordinary people are angry at and alienated from the leaders who purportedly represent them.
What is the still larger context within which furies like these have been unleashed? Massive wealth inequities; fear and loathing of AI; climate change that is palpable but nevertheless unmanageable; and leaders failing at fundamental tasks such as providing their followers with feelings of safety and security.
I wonder though. Are followers in democracies aware their protests are a luxury? A luxury their counterparts in autocracies could never afford?