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When Leadership Failed
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When Leadership Failed
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Journal Article
When Leadership Failed
2003
Overview
Our common sense tells us that leaders & their decisions matter, but our social science theories tell us that constraints determine major societal outcomes. Concerned about this disconnect, Seymour Martin Lipset has suggested that the consolidation of American democracy would have been impossible had George Washington not consciously & judiciously deployed his charisma to mobilize support for the new republic at its most fragile moment. Following Weber, Professor Lipset uses Washington's success to argue that charismatic leaders can play an \"indispensable\" role in consolidating fledgling democracies. In particular, by inspiring trust, Washington helped the US form its identity & institutionalize its competitive electoral system. Professor Lipset codes this as a victory for agency, reminding us that individuals can be important independent variables. He exposes how much we have to gain by exploring the space for leaders & for the strategic, tactical, & moral choices they make -- or fail to make. In this paper, I take the next logical step & examine leaders who fail to consolidate democracy in order to identify which tools they were missing -- & which ones their fascist successors deployed. By applying Lipset's idea to the seamier side of Japanese & Italian political history, I show how the consolidation of fascism was both the product of failed leaders & the success of those who (ironically, like Washington) understood how to recombine shards of the past into a novel, functional, & resilient present. I will suggest further that this sort of bricolage can be as useful as charisma in the battle for power in weakly institutionalized polities. 41 References. Adapted from the source document.
