The Myth of the Strong Leader

Gorbachev was not, in the conventional sense, a ‘strong leader’. He was not overbearing and was willing both to make tactical retreats and to absorb criticism. In particular, he did not fit Russians’ traditional image of a strong leader.

it true that heads of governments in democracies have become more dominant over time?

One is that a viable party system is an indispensable pillar of a democracy and that when parties are manipulated from above, rather than allowed to develop an independent and influential existence, a country in transition from autocratic or oligarchic rule has got little or no chance of becoming a consolidated democracy. A majority of the successor states to the Soviet Union, including post-Soviet Russia, are cases in point.

It is much easier for a party leader – certainly in Britain – to get a good press by distancing himself from his own party than by standing up to media proprietors

In the United States there is a widespread tendency to expect the president to do too much, more than is possible for any chief executive within a system with as many checks and balances

* The most successful authoritarian regime, monarchies aside, in arranging orderly and regular leadership transition over the greater part of the twentieth century was the Institutional Revolutionary Party – the PRI – in Mexico. Mexican presidents were limited to a single term of office and the party leadership thus constantly renewed itself, retaining its single party rule over seven decades.

Hungary under Kádár was sometimes called ‘the happiest barracks in the camp’ (a reference to the Soviet bloc of European Communist states).

For Orwell, totalitarianism was what Max Weber called an ‘ideal type’ (by which, needless to say, Weber was not in any way implying a positive evaluation). Weber argued that it was analytically useful to express in extreme or pure form what was meant by a particular political or social category – as, for example, bureaucracy, the subject of one of his most famous analyse

The first, and perhaps only, dictator to use the adjective ‘totalitarian’ as one of warm approval was Benito Mussolini in inter-war Italy.

In the aftermath of those Arab uprisings which have succeeded in removing essentially secular autocrats (all of whom, however, paid varying degrees of lip-service to Islam), the advantages of a leaderless revolution turned into a disadvantage (as in Iran in 1979). The best-organized groups moved rapidly to fill the vacuum and the new leaders were more intent on imposing their will than on building consensus and democratic institutions.