BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
The argument that people deserve the leaders they get is a seductive one. I heard it expressed in a Janners pub this week. It is simple, clean, and fits neatly into the moral framework we like to impose on the world. Bad people get bad leaders. Good people get good ones. But the world is hardly so tidy. It is messy, complicated, and often cruel.
To say that people deserve their leaders is to ignore the weight of history, the roll of chance, and the quiet suffering of those who endure under regimes they did not choose.
Take Palestine. Hamas rules Gaza, and many say the ‘savages’ there merit the crooks and psychopaths who lead them. But what of the child born into the rubble of a war the child did not start? What of the mother who votes not out of belief, but out of desperation? Or Iran, where the clerics hold power with an iron fist? The streets of Tehran are filled with educated men and women who dream of freedom, yet they are silenced by batons and bullets. In Honduras, corruption runs deep, but the fisherman who casts his net at dawn does not deserve the thieves in suits who steal his future.
And what of the educated, the enlightened, who end up with leaders who betray them? The bollard that is Keir Starmer, the man who promised honesty and delivered lies, sits atop a country that prides itself on its democratic tradition. The British people are far from foolish, yet they find themselves governed by a deceitful and incompetent leader, who heads a party that holds its majority not through genuine public support, but simply by being the last party standing.
In America, a nation built on the ideals of liberty, Fauci-pardoning Biden sat recently in the Oval Office. Did the American people deserve him? Or was he simply the product of a system that rewarded corruption over integrity?
Then there are those great souls who suffer under oppressive regimes. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer who exposed the horrors of the Soviet gulags, lived under a tyranny he did not choose. The people of North Korea, who sing praises to a dictator they fear, do not deserve the chains they wear. In China, where poets are silenced and artists are censored, the spirit of a nation seems crushed under the boot of the Communist Party. Yet, within that oppression, entrepreneurship and individuality still find a way to thrive. Tencent and Alibaba are world-beaters, their success built on the backs of people who cannot speak freely let alone fight against the Chinese regime.
History is not a straight line. It is a river, twisting and turning, shaped by the land through which it flows.
Regimes tend not to be born out of the moral failings of a people, who often never get to choose, but out of the chaos of history and the randomness of chance. The French Revolution gave birth to Napoleon. The fall of the Weimar Republic led to Hitler. The Arab Spring brought hope, then despair, as old tyrants were replaced by new ones.
People do not deserve their leaders. They endure them. Some can fight them. Most aim to survive them. And sometimes, if they are lucky, they overthrow them. But to say they deserve them is to ignore the complexity of the human condition. It is to blame the prisoner for his chains.
The truth is this: leaders are not a reflection of the people they rule. They are a consequence of history, of power, of happenstance. And until we understand that, lazy thinkers among us will continue to mistake the symptom for the cause.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books.