Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t is the title of my new book. It will be published next week by the University of Toronto Press.
———————————————————————————
The title of this post is the same as that of the second chapter of Why We Follow…. So, I’m not surprised that Americans of all stations are standing fecklessly and helplessly by as their president throws Ukraine under a bus.
But let me be as clear as I can. Unless this trend is reversed, American decision-making on the war between Russia and Ukraine will be the single greatest stain on and, possibly, the single gravest mistake in American foreign policy history.
Earlier this year less than a third of Americans were very or somewhat confident that Donald Trump could/would make good decisions about by far the deadliest war in Europe since the end of the second world war. Since then, though most Americans continue to support Ukraine, and though in recent weeks especially the country has increasingly been under deadly attack, the United States has drastically scaled back its support. Additionally, the personal and political rift between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, has grown even more tenuous, acrimonious, and dangerous.
Which raises the question of how such a thing can happen. How can the American people – especially but not exclusively the political elite – be reduced to such abject submission on a matter of such critical consequence?
The answers are not hard to understand. But nor are they familiar or immediately obvious. Suffice here to say that 1) they are in my book; 2) they testify to how and why followers are as important a determinant as leaders; and 3) they clarify how leaders who are bad if not even evil get away with murder.
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.