King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership

In a sense, the great man gives these potential political happenings a nudge, sometimes a shove, and occasionally a violent shake, but he does not “cause” them in a strictly logical sense. By definition, he cannot cause what does not have the potential for being what it becomes. However, because he is not the direct causal agent for those momentous events attributed to him does not mean that he is not a critical factor in their eventual emergence. Had the great ruler not appeared on the scene at an opportune time, the potential for those momentous events may not have been realized when they were. By being yoked together, the great ruler and his political legacy give each other meaning.

Although democratic leaders were more likely than dictators to fare better with the economy, many dictators likewise had achieved remark able results. For instance, Lee Kuan Yew, who was prime minister of Singapore for thirty-one years, showed well how an authoritarian ruler, relying on dictatorial methods, could stay in power for a long time by tending to the economic welfare of his subjects. Instead of buying into the conventional notion that too much power corrupted rulers, he held the reverse notion, that ordinary people could not be entrusted with power because it corrupted their judgment as voters. Being sheep, people easily could be misled, so therefore a nation had to be ruled from the top down. Governing of a nation was too important to be left to an uninformed and ignorant populace. Because he believed that economics was the major stabilizing force in society, Lee took a number of controversial steps to stimulate the ailing economy.

The main purpose of a government-sponsored personality cult is to get the people to believe that their ruler has extraordinary, even divine-like qualities so that they will follow his lead or be too scared to rebel. There probably is another reason as well. Like ordinary persons, rulers want the public to think well of them. So when they get a chance to influence the attitudes of their people toward them, they naturally want them to believe that they are as wonderful as they imagine themselves to be. After the people begin to repeat what they were programmed to say, the leaders often forget that they were the ones who programmed them to say it in the first place, and then, like writers who write their own blurbs for a book jacket, they become converts to their own hype.

Almost two thousand years elapsed between the writing of The Republic and the next major utopian work, Utopia, by Sir Thomas More. In the long expanse of time between these works, man envisioned his idyllic existence in terms of an afterlife in the Kingdom of Heaven where the rewards for earthly suffering would be forthcoming. Although this dream of a heavenly paradise captured the imagination of people for many centuries, due mainly to the profound influence of St. Augustine’s inspiring but unimaginative work, The City of God, they eventually became dissatisfied with the uncertain promises of an afterlife and began looking for more immediate heavenly gratifications on earth. The impetus for utopias came from this need.

Take the case of Amanullah Khan, ruler of Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929. After he waged a successful holy war against the British, Muslims everywhere hailed him as a hero. Reveling in their adulation, he then took on the task of modernizing and secularizing his country, which was dominated by tribalism, religious orthodoxy, xenophobia, and a 90 percent illiteracy rate. Some of his most ambitious projects were liberating women from purdah and having to wear their veil, a shift from polygamy to monogamy, compulsory elementary education, the elimination of ranks and titles, and the establishment of a fairer tax structure—all those wonderful goals “enlightened” Westerners would admire. But since his people were not enlightened Westerners, he managed in one fell swoop to antagonize almost everybody: tribal leaders, the military, and the religious community. Widespread rebellion throughout his kingdom forced Amanullah, the once revered and almost all-powerful leader, to abdicate his throne and go into permanent exile. Soon afterward, the new ruler ordered Amanullah’s name expunged from the history books and erased from the public memory.

The political condition the leader finds himself in may be responsible for the expression of certain latent tendencies within him that never might have been realized under other circumstances. When a dictator holds absolute power and has a personality cult proclaiming his greatness and his sycophants treat him with deference and his televised speeches are proclaimed to be brilliant by his own press and people do whatever he says, he may begin to show much of the grandiosity and ebullience associated with mania, even if he has masterminded all this hullabaloo himself.

Transitionals, otherwise known as leaders of emerging democracies, ap pear to have some of the characteristics of visionaries and established democrats. They resemble visionaries in their desire to bring into being a new form of government that conforms to their ideals, but, unlike visionaries, their ideals include greater freedoms for their people rather than compliance with a particular ideology. They resemble established democrats in their commitment to freedom and democracy, but, unlike established democrats, they tend to be more paternalistic, perhaps because in many instances they really are the fathers of their country or have stewarded it from a more oppressive government to a more liberal one.

Authoritarian rulers, not surprisingly, have what is known as an “authoritarian personality,” which tends to be characterized by a reverence for tradition and convention, a dislike for introspection, a distrust of others, and a hierarchical view of relationships in which they are obedient to those above them and demand absolute obedience from those be low.31 Unlike most tyrants and visionaries, who acknowledge no other authority but themselves, authoritarians prefer to rule their countries under the symbolic aegis of some higher authority or agency such as a military junta, a political party, the Church, or a revolutionary organization that legitimizes their autocratic actions. In Horthy’s case, he justified all his decisions on the basis of God and country.