We should abjure our pathetic obsessiveness with political personalities, and ridicule talk-show-host sensationalism for being what it is: an insult to our intelligence. Surely the media has the duty to report accurately, but also to put things in context. Does the coming of the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition herald a new age in Britain’s long history? One doubts it, since they in their turn have to grapple with the massive deficits, the overstretched armed forces, the immigration issue and the contorted relationship with Europe. Does Putin’s rule in Russia make much of a difference? What can even his authoritarian government do to alter the mass alcoholism, the demographic disintegration, the mutterings of the minorities and the incompetencies of a non-incentive social order?
Do Leaders Make History, or Is It Beyond Their Control?
By Paul Kennedy
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/opinion/22iht-edkennedy.html
Some 70 years ago, on the evening of May 10, 1940, a controversial British politician entered Buckingham Palace for an audience with King George VI. The king asked him to become prime minister and to form a government. The politician then left to carry out his new job. His name was Winston Churchill.
To this day, that change in leadership — with the appeaser Neville Chamberlain shuttling off the stage — has been regarded as decisive. The dishonest decade of the 1930s had gone; now came “blood, sweat, toil and tears” — and an eventual, hard-fought victory. If anything proved Thomas Carlyle’s argument about the importance of the Great Man in history, then here it was. There was also ample contemporary evidence for this leader-centered theory in the form of Hitler (who adored Carlyle and was still reading him in his bunker in April 1945), Stalin and Roosevelt.
Nor is there any reason to doubt that Churchill’s accession to power did indeed change a lot of things. He unified the British nation, bringing Labour and Liberal politicians into his national War Cabinet, making Clement Attlee, the Labour Party leader, his deputy prime minister, unifying the separate defense command structures, and assuming enormous executive powers.
Churchill brought with him his extraordinary talents for rhetoric and language. As more than one observer noted, the new prime minister mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
His visits to the bombed-out houses of East London, his surprise flights to the troops in Egypt, his incredible interest in new weapons, new forms of fighting war — anything, anything, to bring Hitler down — re-energized the British nation, and many smaller nations as well. Little wonder that he regularly tops the polls — American as well as British — as the most significant figure of the 20th century. Here was a man who placed his stamp upon world affairs.
Yet was he — or, indeed, any of the other Great Men — really all that decisive in altering world affairs? What, after all, changes the course of history?
Interestingly, the most important challenge to Carlyle’s great-leader theory came from his fellow Victorian, that émigré, anti-idealist philosopher-historian and political economist, Karl Marx. In the opening paragraphs of his classic “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” he offers those famous lines: “Men make their own History, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
What an astonishing sentence. In it Marx captures not only the agency of human endeavor, but reminds us of how even the most powerful people are constrained by time and space, by geography and history.
And so it was with Churchill. For all the powers he gathered under himself, he could not prevent the Nazi Blitzkrieg from sweeping across Europe. He could not prevent the Japanese capture of so much of the British Empire in the Far East, (only the Americans could turn the tide there). He could not prevent the Red Army from gobbling up Eastern Europe. And he could not prevent the decline and fall of his beloved British Empire.
In sum, Churchill’s accomplishments were staggering; but he could not alter the larger tides of history, and he had to make his policies within the limits he had inherited, just as Marx observed. By the 1940s, there were deep forces at work — forces like the rise of Asia and the relative shrinking of Europe — which were beginning to change the planet’s geopolitical landscape and which are still advancing today. The marvel is that Churchill and his relatively small island-state achieved so much, and for so long.
Is this practical point, about the natural limitations of any leader and government, not true of any of our great men of history? Just consider the chief candidates of the previous century. Hitler stomped his way across Europe; but when he rashly went to war against the Soviet Union and the United States in 1941 — while already fighting the British Empire — his Thousand-Year Reich was swept away. Stalin survived Wehrmacht attacks, not through his own pathological genius, but because his armies had the best anti-tank guns in the world. Years later, Kennedy and Johnson lost in Vietnam because fighting guerrilla armies in dense jungles and swamplands was hopeless and, more broadly, the West was in retreat from Asia.
What does this mean for national and international politics today? To me, it means that we should abjure our pathetic obsessiveness with political personalities, and ridicule talk-show-host sensationalism for being what it is: an insult to our intelligence. Surely the media has the duty to report accurately, but also to put things in context. Does the coming of the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition herald a new age in Britain’s long history? One doubts it, since they in their turn have to grapple with the massive deficits, the overstretched armed forces, the immigration issue and the contorted relationship with Europe. Does Putin’s rule in Russia make much of a difference? What can even his authoritarian government do to alter the mass alcoholism, the demographic disintegration, the mutterings of the minorities and the incompetencies of a non-incentive social order?
Such conclusions bring us logically to a few thoughts about the Obama administration. Its policies have been, in essence, ones of damage control. How could it have been otherwise? President Obama took office when the U.S. banking system and the international financial order appeared close to collapse. He inherited an impossible-to-win war in the Hindu Kush and still has to figure out how to handle it. His administration has also inherited environmental disasters, not caused but surely exacerbated by lax regulations and the profligate misuse of natural resources. He is governing a country where the social fabric, especially in a great many inner cities, is badly damaged — yet without funds for repair.
And his administration, and all who watched Obama’s amazing electoral campaign, entered this troubled political and economic field far too deeply influenced by over-large expectations and exaggerated promises. The powers of the president and Congress are huge, and there is much that can sensibly be done to improve national and international affairs. But all those powers are set within limits, and national leaders should be humble about that.
And, who knows, perhaps the time may be coming when even inward-looking American politicians might read a little of the early Karl Marx, and ponder on his observation that men only “make” history under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. They might then be a bit less glib with their promises to transform the world if only they are elected.