In my book Leadership from Bad to Worse I wrote that “bad leadership and its conjoined twin, bad followership, are as ubiquitous as pernicious.” I further observed that “once bad has burrowed in, it digs deep and then deeper,” making it increasingly difficult to extract or excise. *
Of course, questions about what exactly constitutes “bad” leadership and who exactly is a “bad” leader are always up for debate. Your “good” leader might well be my “bad” one.
Nevertheless, in the political realm it’s easy enough to make our values clear. My values are liberal and democratic. I believe in fair elections and in fundamental civil, political, and legal rights. For me, then, a good political leader must be a liberal democrat.
Is being a liberal democrat sufficient? No – it is necessary but not sufficient. Leaders who are liberal democrats can be, for instance, callous or corrupt, inefficient and ineffective. Still, liberal democracy is the base line on which every good political leader must, in my view, stand.
Which brings me to two feedback loops. In both cases leaders have gone from being plain vanilla autocrats to being autocratic in the extreme. These two men have moved, inexorably, from being bad early in their tenures to being in time far worse.
The first example is China’s President Xi Jinping. This excerpt is from an article titled, “Xi Steamrolls Dissent with Old Playbook” that a few days ago was in the Wall Street Journal.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is [now] employing the sort of autocratic tactics once wielded by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to stamp out opposition and stack the leadership with acolytes as he prepares to extend his reign. In a throwback to the most powerful Communist leaders of the 20th century, Xi has purged dozens of senior officials… overseen the growth of a cult of personality and demanded absolute loyalty. His goal: Dictate China’s destiny for years to come.
The second example is, no surprise, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Since he came to power in 2000, Putin has become steadily more repressive and oppressive. Moreover, since Russia attacked Ukraine, in 2022, Putin has become even more controlling. Concerned in recent months that the increasingly high costs of the war, in both men and materials, will make the Russian people restive, Putin has cracked down. These lines are from an article titled “Russia Further Restricts Telegram, Escalating Internet Clampdown” that a few months ago was in the New York Times. I should add that the crackdown continues; even in recent weeks were more restrictions on internet access.
Russia tightened its step-by-step throttling of the ubiquitous communication app Telegram, escalating a crackdown on what remains of the free Russian internet amid {Putin’s] war against Ukraine…. The moves are broadly seen as an attempt to extend Kremlin control over what Russians are able to see, do and say online.
History testifies that bad leaders always get worse. More precisely, they always get worse unless they are stopped. For never ever do bad leaders stop getting worse on their own!
To see where this can and sometimes does lead, I suggest you see the film “Two Prosecutors.” Most of it takes place in a Soviet prison during the worst of Stalin’s purges. It is, as a critic for The New Yorker wrote, a “superbly chilling historical drama.” It is, as I write, a lesson of itself.
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*Barbara Kellerman, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers (Oxford University Press, 2024).