There often seems to be an assumption that leaders everywhere are the same: that there is no real difference between leaders in different countries or at different times.
It’s true that leaders generally share some attributes: almost all want to lead and want power. But beyond that, no.
Think a little about how leaders changed over time in America. Can you really say that the same port of people run politics or corporations today as when FDR was in charge or during the post-war period? The people then were builders who were expanding the social safety net and increasing the middle class, not the upper. The corporate leadership was dominated by engineers, not by MBAs, and many had started at the bottom and risen to the top.
Or think about the leadership of Europe before and after it was conquered by America and the USSR and split up. These were not men who were automatically subservient to outside powers, without national pride and without ambition.
Think about China under Mao and then China today. The people who ran China under Mao, then during the Deng era, and even in Xi era, while they have some continuity, show significant changes. Over the entire history of the CCP party members are selected, not self-selecting and under Xi’s rule, they’re increasingly chosen based on technocratic accomplishments combined with belief in Party principles. To compare them to the shysters who run America, or the bloodless technocrats of Europe is insane.
In the past we’ve chosen leaders primarily based on military skill and heredity. Leaders of hunter gatherer bands (smaller groups, not all hunter-gatherers have had band formations) were often chosen not for aggressiveness but patience and lack of temper.
Leaders are different in different societies, whether different in space or time. They have different characters, different abilities and different goals. The political elites of 1933-1968 or so in America are very different from those who replaced them and that’s a relatively minor change compared to the replacement of feudal nobles by centralized court aristocrats who were then replaced by elected officials and appointed bureaucrats. Let alone the rise of the bourgeois and capitalists. Men of business think very different from aristocrats competing for court favor, let alone nobles who rule their own domains and armies and who consider even the King simply the greatest among equals. Such nobles are vastly different from Roman imperial bureaucrats or the Senatorial families and elected officials who ran the Roman Republic and were forced to come up thru the Cursus Honorum and actually learn how government works.
Of all the things we do as a society, selecting our leaders and deciding what power to give them is possibly the most important.
It’s something we’ve been very bad at for a long time now.
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Daniel A Lynch
Food for thought: Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest had a “potlatch” tradition where each person gave away things, and the more you gave away, the more you were respected by society. From 1884 to 1951 Canada banned potlatches because they were “contrary to the civilized values of accumulation.” White religious leaders especially opposed potlatches because the practice was in effect the religion of the Natives, and it was impossible to convert Natives to Christianity so long as they practiced the potlatch tradition.
Now contrast the potlatch culture to U.S. culture where social status is based on accumulation, not giving.
Jack McKinley
Emendation needed: change 33–68 to 1933-1968 for the casual non-reader of your posts.
Excellent post, by the way as EVERYTHING revolves around leadership.
Jack McKinley
Self emendation:
Rephrase: …for the non-casual readers of your posts.
HA!
Feral Finster
Far as I can tell, all societies eventually end up in the hands of sociopaths, because sociopaths have an insatiable need for power and will do whatever it takes to get it.
The history of the Catholic Church is most instructive in this regard.
Like & Subscribe
I just said this to my wife the other day — for the one thousandth time in the past decade or more. The world is experiencing an epidemic of poor leadership. Like that song, where have all the cowboys gone, it’s where have all the leaders gone.
Tito, for example despite his foibles and failings, was an excellent leader. As you point out, so was FDR. The leadership JFK showed during the Cuban Missile Crisis was phenomenal when you consider the pressure he was under and the stakes at hand.
The process of becoming a leader has been invariably altered as well and even if a good leader somehow miraculously overcame that process and elevated to a position of power, the processes in place would hamstring this exceptional person from administering great leadership.
We have surpassed Peak Leadership and feckless, spineless mediocrity is the replacement.
GrimJim
A nation’s wealth and prosperity are essentially like that of a wealthy family. As the old saw goes, wealth lasts only for three or four generations:
The first generation builds the wealth.
The second and/or third generations enjoy and spend the wealth.
The third and/or fourth generation piss the remaining wealth away.
So too the “social treasure” of a society, cf. Strauss and Howe:
The first generation of “revolutionaries” build the society after the last Crisis.
The second and third generations enjoy the benefits of the new society as it Grows and Consolidates.
The fourth generation pisses it all away in a Crisis.
We are in that fourth generation.
bruce wilder
We are terrible at building a decent leadership class because we scarcely think about it at all and when we do, I used to think we go wrong because we tend to think naively in terms of “purity” of motive and ideals, when the lumber we have to build with is the crooked timber of humanity. Even worse, in my recent experience of the discourse though, is the self-regarding cynicism that dismisses any historical political achievement as tainted by some original sin. But, right now, in the West generally but especially in the U. S., “the narrative” obscures entirely imho the machinations of politics behind a foreground drama and morality play entirely at odds with whatever is being done in terms of policy. The politicians in Congress have rarely exercised less power and the media have never been less informative regarding where power lodges and what it is up to.
bruce wilder
not enough attention is given to Blair creating a career-path to MP
or, Bill and Hillary Clinton using the Clinton foundation to create a permanent campaign staff and global network for bribery
or the deregulation of finance depriving Congress critters of the ability to maintain their own power by playing opposed interests against one another
in the EU, creating a career path into EU office which does not entail mobilizing any but the most superficial popular support
but, in the U.S. (and likely elsewhere I just don’t know), the most subtle thing may be taking out politicians and pundits by (mostly) non-lethal means — just ending their careers when they get out of line in some way. I don’t think that was so easy to do in the past as it is since television.
connected to this last is the effect of the secret state: the general public is simply never told the truth about anything and is left to wallow in paranoia and cynicism — a Petrie dish sure to grow dark leadership
Mark Level
I appreciate Daniel Lynch’s comment about potlatches, something important in NW Native cultures. I’m sure many here who have learned about Ayn Rand’s “Objectivist” (sic) philosophy that she stated regularly that the Natives were subhuman and should be removed from the face of the Earth. And NOT for the typical reason, that they’re darker skinned (writing in the 40s and 50s after Germany’s holocaust, as someone who grew up a wealthy Jew during the Czarist era, she wasn’t going to go there.) It was because they had no sacred “Market” apart from barter, tribal people lived in very egalitarian societies. I don’t know if she targeted Potlaches, but I’m sure that would have really enraged her. The next wackiest thing in early Libertarian thought was where a male leader developed the idea that since parents “created” their children (fair enough) they should be able to sell them into slavery if they wanted to be “repaid.” So charming!
Generally agree with Finster, as usual. The thing that baffles me is that our Sociopaths are out in the open. Let’s just take one instructive example from last year’s US Presidential election: Which candidate first pledged “Under me, the US will have the most LETHAL military that ever existed in human history” (paraphrased)? It was Kamala, but Trump said the same soon after. It’s like the New Yorker cartoon that Ian included in a recent post, sheep looking at a sign for a wolf, “I Will Eat You”, and one says to another, “I like how he tells it like it is.” (Oh, and promising the world’s “most lethal military” over 20 months into an overt ethnic genocide (2, if we include Sudan, which relatively few know about.)
Had to appreciate Biden’s guy Joe Manchin (who blocked infrastructure with K. Sinema) when he refused to take Medicaid for poor West Virginians, “they’d only spend the extra income on liquor or meth, so we won’t take it.” Some awfully self-hating residents there.
Due Dissidence yesterday covered the case of Arkansas, about 22 minutes into their usual marathon episodes. A dirt-poor, backward state with ruined infrastructure, lousy schools, low-paid jobs, hunger and desperation, spends something like $93 million annually to support Israel, which Zionist “Christian” nut Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders brags about. Link is here– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyDwgIKqezw&list=PL8RPLQX-IDX_czfperwWind2jRn3MU7jb
Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket today, something I never expected positive happened in the comment. Like & Subscribe praised a Slavic leader, Tito, using fact-based logic instead of his usual spittle-flecked rage when it has to do with Russians. Incredible!! Nice to see. (Yes, Tito was Yugoslavian, developed an “alternative” Communism with a kinder face.)
oblique
https://www.mind-war.com/p/how-it-happened-why-america-mirrors
explains where Trump’s hold on his base comes from
Purple Library Guy
Hmmm . . . Sharpening contradictions. Any leadership in a society with classes of any sort has two masters to serve–the elite class/es and the whole society. And, in any society with classes, outside of major upheavals generally the elite class/es gradually gains more and more control, including control over leadership selection (or in the case of royals, leadership formation, as it were, by controlling the cultural environment in which the royal kids grow up). And as they gain more control, they feel more entitled and ignore the needs of the other classes more and more. So they will, more and more, arrange for leaders willing to pander more and more to their interests at the expense of the rest of society.
As this becomes more and more obvious, there is going to be a shift in what kind of person is both acceptable to the elites and willing to occupy the role. We have now reached a point where our top elites are themselves so venal and greedy that nobody who is not an overt crook is acceptable to them. We have reached a point where their interests are so obviously damaging to the rest of the world that nobody who is not incredibly short-sighted is either acceptable to the elites or willing to accept positions that require massively sabotaging society.
There was a time when grey technocrats were acceptable, because the contradictions in their role were fuzzy enough that they could reliably doubletalk themselves into doing what elites needed. I feel like Carney is one of the last of the breed, because I think more and more of our current elites no longer trust them–you never know when any leader who knows a damn thing might decide to not do something elites want, just because they’re smart enough to realize it’s massively harmful to society. The work of leadership has become so clearly not just dirty, but deeply criminal, that only moronic, obviously amoral crooks can be trusted by elites to do it.
Bob
Surely the masses don’t choose their leaders. Choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledee is not a choice.
mago
To what extent do we choose our leadership?
Our institutions and channels are corrupted and corroded by money, blackmail and those who hold control by virtue of their craft and wiles, their ambitions, aspirations and manipulations. Sociopaths as has been noted.
Did the electorate puke up Trump? Maybe somehow, but how did this cosmic pervert get a shot in the first place? Not rhetorical questions.
What about Stalin? He wasn’t elected by critical acclaim. Off with their heads. Send them to the gulag.
Trump fires a statistician who contradicts his rosy bullshit. Unlike Stalin he didn’t exile or kill her. But still.
Now we’ve got military police taking over DC. Nobody voted for that. There are darker forces at work, and the idea that casting a ballot is going to affect a change belongs in Mr Rogers neighborhood.
bruce wilder
I think mostly we, the unwashed hoi polloi, abdicate the responsibility to choose our leaders. We get lots of “help” in our political incompetence. We are discouraged from organizing anything. Propaganda floods our senses. Critical information about what is “really” going on is hidden. But, we also lend a hand to our own debility by failing the most basic critical thinking and factual recall tasks. There is no fixed threshold for withholding our cooperation in any foolishness or depravity.
At this late date, the 90% are completely powerless and the 9% have only illusions of influence. The 0.9% ? I have my doubts but no truck with such altitudes.
I would guess that most people who identify as Democrats remain unaware of how malevolent Obama was (and is), how corrupt and recklessly destructive the Clintons were. I have no use for people who cannot see how reckless and irresponsible it was to install the senile Biden or the airhead. The political class on the so-called “left” saw the discontent that Trump exploited, but instead of doing something or assembling a better team and finding a better candidate, they promoted divisive rhetoric and political lies and hoaxes more egregious than Trump’s narcissistic delusions.
Politically, I feel my best hopes utterly defeated.
“ . . . the people [actually] in charge do have a plan and it’s not stability or prosperity. It’s debt, surveillance, and the slow erosion of control over your own life.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/quartzevelyn/p/shame-on-the-liberals-they-let-this?selection=9b7b3415-3318-427b-8cd9-5cef977ea350&r=20fu63&utm_medium=ios
Jessica
The Pacific Northwest tribes that had potlatches (and in many cases, totem poles) were mostly (all?) slave holding. Hereditary chattel slavery, with slaves roughly the same proportion of society as in the US South before the war.
The tribes farther south (northern California) were abstemious and much more egalitarian.
(from The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow)
The Pacific Northwest is not the only case in which ostentatious generosity among elites is a form of competition among elites in a very non-egalitarian society.
Jan Wiklund
Quite a lot depends on how they are appointed. During the heydays of European parliamentarism leading politicians were appointed by persons who were themselves rather subservient to popular political expressions. People were members of interest organizations like trade unions and famers’ cooperatives, and took this membership seriously. The effect was that political decisions answered to their interests, took these interests seriously.
Today politicians are coopted. Europe is not as bad as the US where politicians are openly bought by corporations, but they are nevertheless a world to themselves, consisting of media people, political consultants and political wannabees. One result of that is tha they have no idea whatever about what popular interests are.
Neither have we ourselves, because we act as individuals, and individual people are self-centered and autistic when not taking part in self-organized political life. Real interests can only be found in cooperation with others. Humans are social beings, which liberal individualism never takes into account.
Another difference is the changed ways of capital. During the Fordist era capital was promoted by investing in producing processes. To do that one had to take the interests of workers and consumers into consideration. Today, capital is promoted by speculation schemes that sometimes is very close to Ponzi schemes. Neither workers nor consumers need to exist. And production has been outsourced to the Chinese.
Politics and business go together. Politics up to the 60s-70s was a compromise between industrial capital and workers. Politics today has no such foundation in reality. Mostly it is sheer moralizing against perceived sinfulness, like the politics during the Ming era in China according to Ray Huang, an ersatz for real politics.
Calvin
If Zorhan Mamdani winds in NYC, it will be interesting to see what he will, or won’t be able to do in a system as utterly corrupted as ours.
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Jessica, thank you soooooooooooo much for that clarification regarding potlatches and, this is a BIG AND, we all learned a new word — abstemious. A new word a day keeps the neurologist away, or so they say whoever they are.
Like & Subscribe
I also have no use for these people but I also have no use for anyone who could possibly vote for Trump believing he is the solution versus an egregious further manifestation of the problem.
Where does that leave me? Well, it means necessarily I have no use for most people to include those who believe dictatorship is the answer to oligarchy hence their embrace of autocracy in their “fight” against oligarchic totalitarianism.
Bill H
We blame it on the leaders, but in almost all cases these bad leaders are elected, and most of them more than once. Voters elect them and reelect them because they are voting based on their own greed (“self interest”). They vote not for the candidate who promises what is best for the nation, but the one who promises what is best for that voter’s personal interest; that voter’s race, or sexual preference, or gender, etc. The vote is based not on, “How will the candidate benefit the nation?” but on “How will the candidate benefit me personally?”
Feral Finster
“Did the electorate puke up Trump? Maybe somehow, but how did this cosmic pervert get a shot in the first place? Not rhetorical questions.”
Simple – Trump represents a reaction to the two Establishment parties that could only offer us a choice of carefully curated corporate imperialist muppets. The only question is whether you prefer folksy folks and Eagle Flag Freedom talk, or whether you prefer your bullshit to come from HR and topped with a rainbow flag.
In a perverse sense, Trump is an entirely rational reaction to this. Once any institution reaches as certain level of corruption, it becomes unreformable, as any substantive reform encroaches on entrenched interests who cannot be readily dislodged using normal processes. At that point, the only alternative is to Burn It All Down.
This is why trumpy chaos delights so many of his supporters.
somecomputerguy
college degree = upper class, not merely elite, upper class. with solidarity and failure protection. that is what college does differently.
somecomputerguy
All our incompetent elites have one thing in common; They all went to American Universities. They were trained that being interested in a discipline, has nothing to do with holding a job in that discipline.
They don’t train to do the thing they are interested in, they take the highest paying job they can get with the training they have.
My understanding is that the greatest civil servants we have ever seen like Francis Perkins and Lina Khan, were published authors in their fields, and then recruited to their jobs, based their interest in actually doing those jobs. Not because they were fellow class members (friends of someone) who were theoretically qualified by their credentials, but showed no previous interest whatsoever.
Particularly pernicious, is the infiltration of the news media, where so-called journalists protect fellow class members from general knowledge of elite incompetence.
It is a hard realization that your expensive education didn’t make you an elite, it just taught you how to pretend to be an elite.
NR
Trump is by far the most corrupt president in history and his supporters don’t care. So “corruption” can’t be the reason they elected him.
Jorge
Meh, some of them go to Brit universities, which are mostly the same.
Any society takes a system of beliefs to keep running, and different societies have a different system. Usually, the elites know it is BS but promote it in public to keep the game going.
At the core of it, from what I can tell, is that our elite societal structure has adopted a rule: they are forced to truly believe the BS. If not, they are sniffed out and expelled from the pack. This practice started with economics, where the very rich recruited only True Believers to be their mouthpieces. Adam Smith really did believe what he wrote (that landlords are parasites) when the British manufacturing nouveau riche hired him to help them break the landlord class.
https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/chapter-xi-of-the-rent-of-land
shagggz
NR: “Trump is by far the most corrupt president in history and his supporters don’t care. So “corruption” can’t be the reason they elected him.” – When the entire establishment is openly corrupt but none dare say so, being the one who says so is paradoxically less corrupt, regardless of how otherwise corrupt said one may be.
NR
That makes no sense at all. Openly taking bribes doesn’t make you less corrupt than everyone else. And Trump is taking bribes on a scale no other president in history ever has. He is, objectively, the most corrupt president in history.
shagggz
L&S: ” I have no use for most people to include those who believe dictatorship is the answer to oligarchy hence their embrace of autocracy in their “fight” against oligarchic totalitarianism.” – May I humbly submit that you could have much use for considering that what you call autocracy/dictatorship is in fact the antidote to oligarchy, aka the Collective West. The antithesis in the dialectical process whereupon the quest of capital for world domination reaches its natural limit.
different clue
@Like & Subscribe,
It is hard to maintain Peak Leadership when real or potential Peak Leaders are assassinated by the Nazi Paperclipper Deep State as soon as they threaten its interests in an existential way.
Kennedy, X, King, Kennedy, Wellstone, etc. etc. etc. When all Peak Leaders are assassinated, or in more modern times bloodlessly deleted ( Edwards, Sanders, etc.), and only mediocrity can consistently avoid being assassinated, mediocrity is what survives.
( Or also genuine pieces of Evil Shit like Clinton, Obama, Trump because they advance the interests of the Overclass and the Nazi Paperclipper Deep State which protects the Overclass’s interests will protect Clinton, Obama, etc. to keep them advancing the Overclass’s interests. If the Overclass really considers Trump terminally bad for business, it will have its Nazi Paperclipper Deep State try to delete Trump. And Trump knows this, so he is taking what steps he can to protect himself from them as well as in-parallel turning America into a Trumpian gold-plated toilet after Trump’s own sewage-soul desires.)
different clue
( In my comment just above, I should not have included Trump with the likes of Clinton, Obama and scum of that ilk. Trump is a unique and different sort of scum).
different clue
@NR,
Here is an example of what hagggz was talking about regarding Trump being lionized for ” telling it like it is” at certain key juncture points. This is a Dave Chapelle monologue delivered on Saturday Night Live, about why so many people ” love Trump”. It is titled: ” Dave Chapelle I know why people love Donald Trump! snl video clip”.
Here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWfQCDaAa6s
different clue
. . . up above, ” hagggz” equals “shagggz” obviously. Mentioned in case it is not quite obvious enough . . .
shagggz
NR: “Openly taking bribes doesn’t make you less corrupt than everyone else.” – It does when everyone else is strenuously pretending the neocon emperor has clothes. Openly taking bribes pales in that situation. “He can’t just walk in,” they said. Well, yes, he can, when the bar is that absurdly low.
NR
Again, this doesn’t make any sense. “Pretending the neocon emperor has clothes” (whatever that even means) has nothing to do with the massive bribes Trump is openly accepting.
Jimmy Carter had to put his peanut farm in a blind trust before becoming president. Trump is openly accepting $400 million luxury jets while in office. If that’s not corruption, the word has no meaning.
shagggz
I’m not denying that openly taking bribes is corruption. But it’s “peanuts” compared to denying the larger, systemic corruption that his faux-dignified insider opponents were perceived to be denying. The openness of his corruption ends up coming across as more honest, because it’s not engaging in this denial.