Cultures of Leadership are a Problem in Democracies Too
Scott L. Montgomery explores what kept Smith and Hamilton up by candlelight, and what its says about America’s contemporary cult(ure) of leadership.
Bad leaders are said to be a key force in history, even more than good ones. This is due to the wars, genocides, and devastation they cause, as well as the destabilizing and psychologically injurious aspects of their rule. But such leaders cannot succeed without supporters in positions of influence. We call the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot “monsters,” and lesser lights of darkness like Pinochet and Idi Amin “murderous tyrants,” leaving out those responsible for elevating them and keeping them there. Today’s world of decaying democracy is no different—attention is drawn toward one individual whose power depends greatly on the culture of leadership built around them.
Consider, for example, the phenomenon of billionaire males deciding to support Donald Trump. Many reasons have been given for this; not all are convincing. Though a relatively small portion of the giga-wealth community, the amount of money this cohort has donated to the Trump campaign is in the $hundreds of millions. At the head has been Elon Musk’s own America PAC (Political Action Committee), to which the world’s richest man has given $119 million and which is now, by his command, giving away $1 million on a sweepstakes basis to individual swing-state voters who sign a petition that supports free speech and gun rights. This from a man who, only two years ago, called Trump a “gangster.”
Musk’s grandiosity, however, shouldn’t detract from the larger reality of (mostly) well-educated, high-tech and finance-savvy types siding with an ill-mannered, deceitful, threatening ex-president. Such, after all, is far from a rarity in history over the past century, though rarer in liberal democracies. But that is the point: it is very much an element of illiberalism today.
To say that it reflects either pure pecuniary self-interest or part of the populist surge would be an error. By far, the greater portion of the business, banking, and corporate mandarin class views Trump as the danger he truly is, a threat not only to democratic but to economic stability. As noted in a recent New Yorker piece by Susan Glasser, it turns out that no CEO of a Fortune 100 company had donated to the Trump campaign by summer of this year, before President Biden had dropped out. The wedge that Trump drove between more traditional Republican donors and far-right, libertarian, and activist ultra-wealthy now seems permanent. And yet, as Glasser shows, members of the former group admit they will still vote for Trump. This is rationalized in various ways, e.g. hold your nose and do what’s better for business (i.e. Trump’s promise of eliminating government regulation). But some also defend the choice this way: “We had more economic opportunity and the world was a safer place under Trump’s leadership” (an actual quote). Holding one’s nose is therefore not enough; part of the culture of Trump leadership is to adopt his modus of patent mendacity.
What all this means is exactly what Alexander Hamilton most feared for America’s future. In truth, it is also what Adam Smith warned against in Wealth of Nations. A significant portion of the tech community, hedge-fund/private equity managers, and big-time investors share the belief that government isn’t necessary for things like innovation, research, investment, market solutions, and the like. Government’s job is to get in the way, muck things up, create rules to weaken the true producers of new wealth and success in society. It is the old Reagan-Thatcher line but now with spectacular levels of weaponized cash whose owners seek their own influence over politics and the course of the nation. These types might never refer to themselves as a new ‘political elite.’ But that is precisely what they are. That is what kept Smith and Hamilton up by candlelight—democratic government made transactional to the “merchant class.” A class, they well understood, that cared little about public welfare or something called “the common good.” What they believed is that this would be the dirty work of corrupt officials. They didn’t dream it might be done through legal means.
America’s cult(ure) of leadership on the right has been called an anthropology of despair. It’s hard to argue with this, when even such educated, wealthy people are willing to believe Trump is the better choice for anything. Some of them, Musk included, have seized on the immigration issue, repeating and spreading (Musk has nearly 200 million followers on X) such conspiracy ideas as that illegals are secretly allowed in to vote for Democrats. Whether Trump’s rich supporters actually think this is true, they have evidently accepted his eugenic view of what most immigrants represent: a weakening and degrading of America by more primitive human beings.
Such is obviously not limited to the U.S. Cultures of leadership centered on anti-democratic ideas and values in other democratic states today routinely combine the urges of opportunism and true belief. This was clearly true in the case of Brexit, and it is no less real in such cases as Orban in Hungary and Modi in India. None of these examples could have succeeded without the engines of promotion and patronage that gave them solidity. Trump has depended no less on a willing Republican Party in Congress and, to a significant degree, a reactionary Supreme Court.
It is hard to believe that Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson—arch political rivals but Enlightenment colleagues—would not find America’s current political situation a grotesque, even appalling version of what they’d hoped to create. Kings, they’d find, have been replaced by autocrats; courts and aristocrats by oligarchs. Returning to 1787, year of its birth, what might their arguments be for a re-write of the Constitution?
Scott L. Montgomery is an author, geoscientist, and affiliate faculty member in the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, Seattle. He has 25 years' experience in the energy industry, where he worked on projects in many parts of the world. His many technical publications include papers, monographs, articles, and textbooks, mainly focused on cutting edge hydrocarbon plays, technologies, related impacts and issues.
Photo by Brett Sayles
