In contrast with leadership, followership suffers from a charisma deficit. Being called a great follower lacks the prestige of being called a great leader. The ideal of the great man of history existed even before the 19th century when Thomas Carlyle popularised the idea that great men with attributes uniquely fitted to the needs of the time drive human progress. The great man theory is now considered simplistic and outmoded. (It was always great men. Neither Catherine the Great nor Catherine of Siena would get a look in.)
The great man theory still has a grip on our imaginations, even if a particular individual is largely perceived as negative. Yet most of us spend far more time in followership mode than in leadership. Followers enable leaders, for better or for worse. Without his armies, Napoleon would just have been an annoying little man.
Complex social factors influence every ascent to power. One of these is the means of social communication which influences every era. The Reformation was facilitated by the invention of the printing press, even if Gutenberg went bankrupt. Napoleon skilfully used military bulletins where he lied brazenly, and later, newspapers and official portraits to implant the idea of his greatness. Barack Obama was hailed as the first internet US president. Obama’s campaign controversially utilised advanced data analytics to deliver highly personalised messages to voters in key battleground states. He was also the first president to have an official account on Twitter, to go live on Facebook from the Oval Office, to answer questions from citizens on YouTube, and to use a filter on Snapchat.
The digital age makes the invention of the printing press look insignificant. It has changed everything from the way we shop to how we interact with politics. And it has changed leadership and followership. Again, the relationship between means of communication and political power is not as simple as a hypodermic needle injecting views into a supine public. As Simon Harris learned, social media cannot always be controlled. His tired and cranky interaction with Charlotte Fallon, a disability worker, went viral for all the wrong reasons. If Harris was the TikTok Taoiseach, Justin Trudeau was the Instagram prime minister, using his photogenic face and family to highlight the Liberal Party’s agenda. But it was not enough to save Trudeau from a humiliating resignation early in January. Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been described as a wartime leader for the social media age, masterfully wielding Instagram and Twitter/X to keep Ukraine at the forefront of international consciousness while maintaining morale at home. Yet there can have been few leaders as desolate as Zelenskiy this week.
A lot is written about great leaders, but what the world needs now is great followers
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What about the uber-troll, Donald Trump? Fourteen seasons of reality television on The Apprentice followed by era-defining use of the platform formerly known as Twitter cemented Trump’s appeal or lack of it to US voters. He was also helped enormously by newspaper and broadcast coverage. Right-leaning media fawned on him. Left-liberal media couldn’t look away either, but completely failed to understand the rise of voter disenchantment with the Democratic Party, perceived as the party of wealthy elites. Left-leaning media seemed unable to parse this disenchantment as anything except incipient fascism, which in turn led to greater alienation among the subjects of their scrutiny. Without the 77,284,118 votes cast for Trump, none of his recent actions would be possible.
There is a truism that in democracies we get the leaders we deserve. If only it were that simple. The most sophisticated voting systems can only produce a crude representation of voters’ desires and the US popular vote and electoral college are not sophisticated. Many appear to have voted for Trump out of frustration with conventional politics.
And yet it’s not even Trump but the unelected and unaccountable tech bros who are the real power brokers of the digital age, including those who are clustering around the White House, the so-called broligarchy.
David Foster Wallace began a commencement address in 2005 with a parable about two younger fish being greeted by an older fish who asks them, “How’s the water?” After swimming onward, eventually one of the younger fish asks, “What the hell is water?” Wallace’s point was that sometimes “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about”. No matter where we live in the world, we are swimming in the cloudy, muddy waters of the digital age.
Whether in Europe or the US, the world needs more great followers, perhaps even more than it needs great leaders. A great follower is aware of the human tendency to excuse or rationalise the behaviour of our tribe but is still willing to challenge egregious behaviour, not just with ideological enemies but friends.
