With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Are great leaders a thing of the past? Maybe it’s just that our world got larger

Looking at the “class picture” of the leaders at the recent meeting of the G20, a student of history might be inclined to despair. What became of leaders past, that we should now be governed by such minnows? How could we have gone from Churchill to David Cameron? From De Gaulle to Francois Hollande? From Roosevelt to Barack Obama? From Macdonald and Laurier to Stephen Harper? Where’s the vision? Where’s the daring? Where’s the leadership?

It is a familiar lament. Writing in the current issue of Policy magazine, the political consultant Robin Sears compares the current crop of leaders with those of mid-century, for whom it was typical “to fight for improbable ideas, to spend years overcoming resistance to them, to endure the sneers of defeated opponents and to be vindicated for their courage.” By contrast, today’s leaders “tremble at the prospect of major risk-taking, long-term thinking or strategic gambles.”

Is it true? Are today’s political leaders as small as they seem, compared to their forebears? Is greatness a thing of the past? One plausible answer: yes. There is no historic necessity for everything to be in the same state at all times. It is possible for things to get better, and it is possible for them to get worse. It is no answer to say “people said the same thing a hundred years ago.” They might have been wrong. Were they around today, they might well say “we’d no idea how much worse things could get.”

Alternate plausible answer: no. Perhaps past leaders benefited from a kind of cult worship that is impossible in today’s world, with its intrusive media, declining deference and so on. Were they around today, perhaps we would treat them with the same scorn. Maybe it is only the passage of time that has enlarged them. Maybe some of today’s nobodies will be celebrated by future generations as towering figures, compared to the nobodies then in power.

Or not. One popular explanation, in the “there were giants then” vein, might be called the Norma Desmond theory. (“I am big,” the faded movie queen protests in Sunset Boulevard. “It’s the pictures that got small.”) The leaders of the past, on this view, were given great material to work with: Depression, World War, and the like, far beyond our trivial modern problems. Bill Clinton used to complain that he never got to govern in wartime. How was he supposed to take his place in history as a great president?...


Read entire article at National Post