When I was still teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School, I would sometimes describe to my students – who were all adults – the historical trajectory toward weaker leaders and stronger followers. I addressed the trend in my 2012 book, The End of Leadership, in which I also explained it. Explained how it happened that leaders had become more enfeebled and followers more empowered.
This trajectory was characteristic only of democracies; in autocracies it was the opposite. In autocracies followers were getting weaker and leaders stronger. This was because by the second decade of the 21st century it became clear to autocratic leaders such as Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping that unless they clamped down, controlled their followers more completely than previously, their followers would start to resemble their democratic counterparts. They would become increasingly difficult to control.
Most students came to understand and agree with my argument. But frequently someone in the class would ask, “Where does this all end?” What would happen if the trajectory that I was describing continued? If liberal democracies continued to be characterized by followers who were getting still stronger and leaders who were getting still weaker? To which I would reply that I wasn’t sure. While I was sure that what I was describing was happening, I couldn’t confidently predict where it was going.
Now, some fifteen years after I wrote The End of Leadership, we have some answers. Looking at liberal democracies – especially but not exclusively at the United States, at most countries in Europe, and at some countries in Asia – we do now know where this ends, at least for now.
- When followers get too strong and leaders too weak sometimes it ends in constitutional crisis. As it did a year and a half ago in South Korea when an exasperated president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was unable to control his constituents and so declared martial law. While the decision was quickly reversed, South Korea remains on edge and difficult to govern.
- When followers get too strong and leaders too weak sometimes it ends in voters turning sharply to the right – away from the hallowed principles of democratic rule. While this shift is in evidence in many countries, nowhere is it more striking than in Germany. Why? Because until recently, because of their history, Germans were allergic to right wing politics and politicians. Those days are now gone. The far right, populist, nationalist, conservative party, Alternative for Germany, is the second largest party in Germany.
- When followers get too strong and leaders too weak sometimes it ends in the election of a strongman. As in, obviously, the United States where Americans elected Donald Trump to a second presidential term during which his proclivity to erode democratic norms is fully in evidence. The indicators of Trump’s preference for more autocracy and less democracy include but are not of course limited to his persecution of political opponents; his vilification of marginalized groups; his use of unprecedented power for unprecedented profit; and his bypassing of legislators who, it must be added, give him permission to roll over them.
- When followers get too strong and leaders too weak sometimes it ends in persistent enfeeblement. Of which a sad, stark, example is that once great pillar of democratic governance, Great Britain. The aborted tenures of recent prime ministers speak for themselves. Theresa May and Boris Johnson each managed three years. Johnson’s successor, Liz Truss, squeaked out six weeks. And her successor, Rishi Sunak, was evicted from 10 Downing Street a scant year and a half after he moved in. Which brings us to the present – to the present Prime Minister, Keir Starmer.
To me Starmer is an especially interesting case – perhaps because his vertiginous descent seems to prove my point. As Tom McTague, editor of The New Statesman, described him in the New York Times, Starmer is one of the “most inoffensive politicians imaginable.” If that is, you believe in democratic governance. He is a centrist and a moderate, a Social Democrat who believes in and supports human rights, international law, and public services for his constituents. On his watch has been no calamity or catastrophe – and yet. And yet in less than two years Starmer’s landslide victory has curdled to a point where Brits seem to want nothing so much as to push him out. His approval ratings are historically low. Most of his cabinet has lost faith in his capacity to govern. And more than 100 members of his own Labour Party have publicly called on him to resign.
To answer the question of why for at least the last decade the British have had such terrible trouble governing themselves, McTague tips his hat to context. He points to the pandemic and to inflation, and to economic and geopolitical upheavals, prominently among them Brexit. All of which and more do pertain, as I am the first to claim. (To wit, my regular reference to the leadership system in which 1) leaders, 2) followers, and 3) contexts are all equally important.)
McTague also does what most people do – which is to blames the leaders. Starmer, he writes, is like most of his immediate predecessors, he is “utterly unsuited to the job.” We should, in other words, see Starmer as “just the latest in the long line of duffers.” He has “never known what he wanted to do in the job.” Nor did he arrive in office with any conception of “why things had gone so badly wrong before him.”
What McTague does not, however, do is to point the finger of blame at those who are primarily responsible for Great Britain’s malfunctioning political system. They have not been the leaders. They have been the followers.
Which brings me back to where I started. Starmer, as noted, was elected in a landslide. And he was elected only relatively recently. Still, his approval ratings did not decline starting only in the last few months. They declined starting almost immediately after he was elected – well before he had any sort of chance to prove himself.
British followers, British voters, are so exceedingly fickle they are failing to keep their end of the bargain. Both Sunak and Starmer were in every way normal. Normal men and normal leaders in that they were reasonably competent and reasonably middle of the road in style and substance. Still, the British electorate was inordinately quick to be dissatisfied and so they exercised their muscles. They showed who in the 21st century was getting stronger – followers. And who in the 21st century was getting weaker – leaders. Amazing how fast the furious Brits have repeatedly brought their leaders to their knees.