On Post-Leadership, or Why We'll Lose the War, Again

[alcibiades_mystery]

Americans are obsessed with leadership. It has become an idée fixe in the American psyche, the necessary, sufficient, and primary condition for any form of coordinated social action. Maybe it is the legacy of monotheism, or feudalism, or the militarization of daily life, or even the absurdist management tracts that crowd our airport bookstores. Maybe it is what the philosopher Michel Foucault once called “the fascism inside us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” In every sphere of activity, we single out the Leader – from politics, to business, to sports, to the most minor rituals of life. He’s a leader, we say; she’s a leader, we say. And we mean it with pride. Leadership, it seems, is a good thing.

On the Right, the Leader is adored. On the Left, the Leader is adored. Our President, they say. Or, The Big Dog, we say. The worst critique of Bush from the left is always the Failure of Leadership. Which is to say, Bush fails as a Leader, the very thing we desire. We want our Leader, a real Leader, not that fake Leader. When we decry the inability to capture Osama bin Laden, we work off the same tired fetish: why can’t our Leader defeat their Leader? Hitler, of course, had his Fuhrerprinzip – the Leader Principle – the very foundation of Nazism. But truly, Hitler had nothing on contemporary Americans: he could scarcely have imagined a culture so invested in the Leader Principle, so deeply devoted to the idea of leadership. Hitler’s notion – ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer (one nation, one people, one leader) seems trite and ham-fisted in comparison: rather than focus on the One, we multiply. Leaders, Leaders, everywhere: bowling team Leaders, church group Leaders, software team Leaders, baseball team Leaders, class leaders, business Leaders, reading group Leaders. We have a Leader for everything, amen.

In his monumental study, Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti gives us a different vision. The crowd has been suspected by leader-fetishists since antiquity, but the real suspicion of crowds, and corresponding elevation of leadership, begins in earnest with the great revolutions of the 18th and 19th century, and the crowd theory that developed to quell them, not least LeBon’s study, which inaugurates crowd theory. For this whole line, the crowd is irrational, mad even. Only the Leader can save it from itself. But Canetti reverses all that. It is not the crowd that is mad for Canetti, and leadership that rises to save the crowd from itself. No. It is the leader who is mad: leadership is the pathology. The Leader is the paranoid, and those who crave leadership make up the paranoid crowd, the crowd turned against itself. This is the very fact of America today.

And so we see now Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Leader. And Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is now fallen. Another “benchmark” by the leader-obsessed, like Uday and Qusay – splayed out on television, like Saddam Hussein himself, dragged out from a hole, this Leader without a crowd. The problem, as each of these benchmarks has demonstrated amply, is that our Leader fetish provides us with more illusions than substance. It is the crowd that acts, the network. The Leaders in a network may serve minor functions of attraction or focus, but the crowd acts independently of the Leader for the most part. The Leader, at best, is a sign for the crowd, at least for the simple-minded and the paranoid. And our problem today and throughout this war, perhaps our political problem itself, is our inability to distinguish the sign of Leadership from the real action of a crowd. We will lose the War, again. We lose it everyday, but we’ll lose it more again, because perhaps worse than the IED’s and the snipers and the “indirect fire” is the constant, almost methodical, smashing of our Leader fetish. And we fall for it again and again. A yes, the coverage is different this time, and we may even recognize it when it comes to al-Zarqawi. But will we finally grow up and recognize it when it comes to our own political processes themselves?

[alcibiades_mystery]

1. Kick

Shameless.