This post is in response to a recent editorial in the New York Times by Richard Pildes.* Pildes’s piece was an analysis of why the Republican Party’s right wing now has so much power – as evidenced by the many rounds of nasty balloting before House Republicans finally settled on Kevin McCarthy as Speaker.
Pildes explained why we are where we are by the “revolutions in communications and technology that have transformed our democracy.” He rightly points out they enabled individual members of Congress to function and even to thrive as free agents. Or, in my language, they enabled House followers (lower ranking members) to free themselves of House leaders (higher ranking members).
But however important are changes in technology to understanding the new dynamic between leaders and followers, there are two other reasons why lowly member of the House now more easily run roughshod over those more highly placed. Both were spotlighted in my book, The End of Leadership, in which I had a chapter titled, “Technological Imperatives – Losing Control.” But I equally had a chapter titled “Cultural Constraints – Leveling the Playing Field.” And I also had one titled “Historical Trajectory – Lessening Power.”
An example of what I observed about the impact of culture was my reference to Monica Lewinsky. “I mention her in this chapter about leadership and culture,” I wrote, “because nothing so strongly signaled the increasing empowerment of followers and the concomitant diminishment of leaders as the sex scandal that dominated American politics during the late 1990s.” My point was that in the old days American presidents did sometimes have sexual relations with women other than their wives – but the American people never knew about it. Now, not only did they know, they strongly believed they were entitled to know. The culture had changed in ways that had narrowed the gap between those with authority and those without.
Similarly, the trajectory of history. “Over the course of human history,” I wrote in The End of Leadership, “power and influence have devolved from the top down.” Certainly since the Enlightenment, power has increasingly been transferred from those at the top to those in the middle and at the bottom, including those previously completely disenfranchised, such as women.
The Republican fringe now has so much power because all fringes now have so much more power than they used to – if they want to. Nor is this diffusion of power limited only to democracies. For at least a decade, authoritarian leaders have understood full well that unless they clamp down, hard, their followers will get the better of them. Are the recent protests in China and Iran unrelated to the mess in Congress? No, they are not. They are all of a piece in which changes in technology, and in culture, and in history impact on how leaders and led relate.