January 7, 2010

Parties and Leaders

Posted in History, Intellectual History, Political Philosophy, Politics, Society at 5:58 pm by Paul Sagar

Yesterday’s ridiculous abortive coup against Gordon Brown got me thinking about leadership in democracies.

A consistent complaint against Brown is that he hasn’t been directly elected by the people. And it’s the conventional wisdom that if he were decapitated, whoever takes over the Labour reigns will have to hold a snap election. The People of this green and pleasant land wouldn’t tolerate another “unelected” leader, apparently.

Toryboy Nick Robinson repeated the mantra yesterday:

“Weeks before the country gets to choose who should be its next prime minister Labour MPs are considering taking the decision for them. If they succeed a man or woman who has not been elected by the public would replace a man who has himself not been elected by the public.”

The conventional response to this is to repeat the truism that no British Prime Minister is ever elected by the public directly. Anyone with basic knowledge of the UK constitution understands this. The Prime Minister is the leader of the party which gains the most seats (and not even necessarily the most votes) at a general election. The only people who “elected” Tony Blair in 1997 were those living in Sedgefield. Ditto for Margaret Thatcher and the people of Finchley. Gordon Brown has been elected by the people – the people of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.

Yet this conventional response is banal and misses what is interesting about people’s complaints – and they are common – that Brown has not been directly elected. For what people mean is that he has not been chosen – as Blair was – to be the leader of the country after an election campaign in which he was the clear, undisputed head of a party which threw its weight behind him and deferred to him as figurehead.

Whenever Number 10 does things that large sections of the commentariat don’t like, the old cries about “Presidentialism” and the need to return to a (mythical) golden age of “Parliamentary Sovereignty” abound.  But what’s interesting is that in certain ways the British people don’t seem to want parliamentarism. They don’t want the leader of the majority party simply to have been selected by internal party machinations in Westminster- they want him to have been returned after victory in a popular plebiscite as undisputed leader of the nation.

And this isn’t something new. Max Weber noted in 1919 that during the 19th Century the phenomenon of the “party machine” had emerged. He was especially intrigued by figures such as Chamberlain and Gladstone, so-called “charismatic leaders” who could command the obedience of enormous party structures, who in turn campaigned successfully for their election as “plebiscitary Caesars”:

“The man whom the machine follows now becomes the leader, even over the head of the parliamentary party. In other words, the creation of such machines signifies the advent of ‘plebiscitarian democracy’.”

And Weber thought this was a good thing. Eternally preoccupied by the rise of unaccountable bureaucracies which were fundamentally a-moral and unable to make proper political decisions, Weber felt that modern mass democracies desperately needed mechanisms by which “true leaders” could emerge; men who could resist a bureaucratic amoral nihilism and make hard political choices. Those with the true “vocation for politics”.

Yet Weber was adamant of the permanence of what he called “the principle of the small number”: that minority elites always rule in any political system. Although applied to modern industrial societies, his sentiment is close to Rousseau’s observation that:

“In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist. It is against natural order that the great number should govern and that the few should be governed.”

However Weber believed that mass democracy held out the promise of ensuring new kinds leaders emerged; not privileged notables or landed gentry, but men with charisma who could carry the trust of the masses and be propelled forward to exercise genuine leadership in the face of state and party bureaucratic nihilism.

Of course, the real world is a complicated place. But here’s an interesting postulation:

It looks like the British people to some extent want what Weber wanted: not any-old-leader emerging through the hidden, back-stabbing, pole-climbing patronage structures of the Labour Party, but a man (or perhaps woman) with charisma in whom they can believe and who is tested through the conflict of a national plebiscite.

Under Brown as under Blair we are ruled by privileged elites and cliques. Yet the over-riding preference in the public mood is apparently for the leader of the clique to have been tested through what Weber called the inherent struggle of politics.

Democracy, such a funny thing.

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