In the last year Americans have tended to attribute what happens not just at home but abroad to a single individual. To President Donald Trump. Love him or loathe him, he is seen as the piston that drives the engine.
Which is natural. It’s natural to make the “leadership attribution error” – which is to credit single individuals, whoever is at the top, with what goes right. And to blame single individuals, whoever is at the top, for what goes wrong.
It’s natural to make inferences about historical causation – and it’s natural to want to keep it simple. To keep it simple by persuading ourselves that there is only one explanation for why what is happening is happening – the leader. The leadership attribution error has the virtue of seeming to keep things simple while simultaneously seeming to order an otherwise disturbingly disordered world. The personification of social causation makes our world easier to understand than it would be if we had to account for several not to speak of countless contextual variables.
But if, as I have argued, leadership is not a person but a system, then all bets are off. Then those of us with an abiding interest in leadership – and especially in why what happens in fact happens – have no choice but to complicate our lives. To see leadership as a system with three parts, each of which is of equal importance. The leader. The followers. And the contexts.
The reason I raise this now is because we, we Americans, are starting to look ahead to the next congressional election in November 2026, and to the next presidential election in November 2028. This makes it the right time, the necessary time for anyone with a vested interest in American politics to stop fixating on Trump and to start widening their lens. To wean themselves from thinking that the American president is all powerful and to remind themselves that what the American people do and do not do in the coming months and years will matter. They will matter a lot. As will the larger national and international contexts within which American presidential politics is situated.
It’s complicated. The world in which we live is complicated, which is why being obsessed with any single individual makes no sense. Even extremely powerful leaders do not act alone. They act in tandem with others – others to whom they are close and others at a greater or even a great remove. Moreover, they, we, do not act in a vacuum. Our efforts are either enhanced by or constrained by the context(s) within which we are situated.
Freud believed that a biographer’s hopes of finding “coherence, motivation and causality were forlorn.” For lives, he thought, even the lives of strongmen, are dictated by “unpredictable instinctual impulse” and by “the caprice and the vicissitudes of circumstance.”* So, it’s important that we avoid the tempting trap of reductionism. The tempting trap of the leader-attribution error. The tempting trap of the blame game. That instead we force ourselves to see the world as it is. A world driven by leaders. And by a large cast of other characters that can include me and you. And by the “caprices and vicissitudes of circumstance.”
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*The quotes in this paragraph are from Stephen Downs, Gustav Mahler (Reaktion Books, 2025). Freud, I might add, spent the last six years of his life (1933-1939) under the black cloud of Hitler.