The Terrible Impulse to Rally Around Bad Leaders in a Crisis

And this from xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/2287/

I’m surprised he hasn’t been declared the dem’s presumptive nominee.

It is not just that people seem to have bad impulses and intuition about leaders as persons, but they also have bad judgments about policies in principle.

I once got into a major struggle over the drift of the Wikipedia article on the Maginot Line. Apparently there are people who think it is a false myth that it was an ill-conceived failure as a strategy for defending France from German invasion.

There are always easy pluralities for balanced budgets and for pointless wars. Skepticism about M4all is easy to gin up. Even “experts” can be found with predictably had judgment to back all kinds of foolish schemes and to deny the consequences.I

Good, humane judgment requires work and recognition and often does not get either.

Does the average American even distinguish the office of the presidency from the nation let alone the office from the man?

My community steadfastly believes supporting the President and supporting the nation are one in the same. And, they strongly believe the man and the office are one in the same. Even when they complain about a leader they don’t like the complaints are mostly about the leader drawing attention to a distinction (normally between the man and the noble office) and forcing them lose the holistic view they love. To them you are the role, it is you, and if it’s a position at the top of the hierarchy then it is also us.

Blindly following a charismatic ‘leader’ to suicide, GlassHammer?

Dragging the rest of us with you?

I can explain it: bare-footed barely literate rubes sprawled drooling Pavlovianly across a ‘couch’ the backseat out of a 1969 Chevy Suburban drunk on the Ambien, Prozac, Viagra and crotch-shots on Fox Kool-Aid, blindly following a charismatic ‘leader’ to suicide, dragging the rest of us with them.

A minority, by-the-bye, imposing a tyranny upon the majority, upon the rest of us.

There’s an Amendment for that.

I’m not speaking with my sister because I’m refusing to fix things anymore for her incompetent husband, for only a gas money payment. Yet before that, she rationalized having my fixed income father pay a complete stranger double the going rate for simple services which I could easily do for free. For most of her life she wasn’t a self-delusional nutjob and understood basic moral concepts like reciprocity and family decency.

Something bad has happened to her.

What does this have to do with the post? These are the kinds of people who rally around Dear Leaders like Trump, Obama and Biden. Greedy, corrupt and stupid. I theorize that in better managed times, they’d be kept in some kind of check by a better common wisdom culture, or something. But apparently some kind of mental pathology has taken hold or some kind of critical cultural restriction has been removed.

the only thing about this sudden lurch to Cuomo is evidencing exactly what was going on with the sudden enthusiasm for Bloomberg: even the Dems know that Biden is a disaster and have limited enthusiasm for him, his only rallying cry being “vote blue, no matter who”. so anyone who shows up emulating a “take charge” of get-it-doneness is going to get a surge behind them. too bad that surge wasn’t behind Sellout Bernie.

you can take that for what it is worth, which is not a lot these days.

Cuomo is an interesting example. In the current crisis, he has shown himself to be a very good executive. That is he executes a policy well. The problem is that most of the policies he has backed up to now are neoliberal garbage.

I agree with anon y’mouse. The media and the Establishment Democrats have talked up a whole string of candidates, even before Biden entered into the race in hopes of keep Doddering Joe out and then as an alternative to him. Even after they pulled the rug out from the primary process and coronated Old Joe, anybody but Sanders dontcha know, they would replace this empty suit in a second if they could.

Quite the DNC pickle. Cant have Bernie gotta get rid of Joe. AOC can be seen on Fox News criticizing Cuomo for favoring the rich, and then Cuomo gets sick. I await the miraculous recovery and then leading America heroically away from Trump, Bernie and Joe. This whole thing is like a bad soap opera on powerful drugs.

i don’t take it as a “bash Cuomo” post, necessarily. but people in our culture are very easily soothed by the image, and care little at all about the substance or details. and the inverse is quite true with someone like Sanders—no one will listen to him spout out the absolute correct solutions to this crisis because he is “old” and “shouty”, seems like a “cult of personality” and hasn’t “gotten things done”. it seems to matter not at all what someone says anymore, as long as they do it confidently and with flourish.

lots of scared children out there need big strong Daddy to ride to the rescue.

let’s face it, most of what put tRUMP onto the map was his ego and bluster.

Hugh

Cuomo is an interesting example. In the current crisis, he has shown himself to be a very good executive. That is he executes a policy well.

That’s my take as well. “Competency” is a double-edged sword, it’s highly desirable when someone attempts to do something good, but highly undesirable when someone attempts evil. Reagan was a dumbass, but he did appoint competent (but evil) people; and we’d been better off if he had appointed incompetents.

If you’re in a car and the incompetent driver seems determined to drive you over a cliff, one hopes for incompetency.

The Maginot Line was suppose to enable a successful defense of France from a rapid German invasion — that it did not do. In retrospect, it did not do anything except absorb resources, design the French army for immobility and create a false sense of security.

The Siegfried Line in the 1930s did not amount to much more than a propaganda talking point. In 1944, of course, the Germans got more serious about it and poured resources into it. U.S. casualty rates especially among infantry had a lot to do with Eisenhower’s dubious choices. Did the Siegfried Line enable the Battle of the Bulge or did Eisenhower’s missteps? That requires deep expertise to argue.

But, the Maginot Line as exemplary failure is an easy argument, because the context is one of catastrophic failure. To argue that the Maginot Line was a success on its own terms sounds like the surgeon congratulating himself on a successful operation despite the death of the patient. The frame of the argument is untenable because of the historic outcome of the only test of the strategy of which the Maginot Line was an integral component part.

it seems to matter not at all what someone says anymore, as long as they do it confidently and with flourish

for quite a long time, the professional critics of politics with few exceptions have engaged in theatre criticism of an insipid kind.

you can certainly argue that there appears to be a market demand for such a thing, but the only fact is that there is a market supply. the ptb seem to like rule by idiocy

i think a lot of Trump’s appeal back in 2016 was that in the wild meanderings of his stream-of-consciousness speaking style, he would stumble into saying some truth or at least something not-so-coded that the listener needed an interpreter

American elites generally are a stupid, incompetent lot who cannot bear to admit that they are rightly mistrusted. But, most speak “seriously” in a coded language meant to be impenetrable.

Trump is personally absurdly incompetent, but the incompetence that has gotten the U.S. into catastrophic failure territory runs very, very deep in a whole social class and in a neoliberal economic system shaped by elite betrayal of the country as a whole.

Trump’s inability to speak coherently is a cosmetic issue. The morons at the CDC who could neither develop a test nor distribute it nor write strategically sensible protocols for its use — that is more serious. The people who went on morning talk shows poo-pooing the need to wear masks in public a few weeks ago illustrate a more systematic level of social breakdown.

Now, maybe, we are in the quiet time before violence begins to erupt on a large scale. That is when authoritarian “seriousness” goes vicious. We will see.

Did you see Harari’s Time.com essay? It fairly dripped with the self-regard of the PMC that got us into this mess. He actually gave U.S. leadership in the GFC of 2008 as a positive example of global cooperation with no hint of irony.

Gonna’ have to think about that a bit Stir, lol, but first impression: eyup.

Cuomo has banned the use of hydroxychloroquine for use, in NY, against covid-19, except for clinical trials. No reason given. So much for a guy who crows about his transparency. If he was smarter, he would have urged Trump to order the production of massive quantities of it, to meet any and all anticipated domestic need for it. (Any leftover could be donated to countries dealing with malaria.) It costs a few pennies per pill, in Africa.

Even if, for now, a ban has some justification, so that legacy use of it for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus isn’t interrupted.

Of course, if Trump had half a brain, he would have done so, already, unless he knows for a fact that the “free market” will meet the potential demand. You know, just like it’s done for PPE and masks. /s

Dr. Oz, in an interview with Sean Hannity, has stated that he believes the reason for the ban is to allow for the legacy users to have their regular supply. Sean Hannity, apparently, just hopes that Trump is making sure that potential demand is met; or else, will luck out, with small enough net fatalities that everybody forgets about all his boneheaded decisions, and non-decisions. Sean Hannity, who has the President’s ear, doesn’t urge Trump to use his authority, under the Defense Production Act, to ORDER domestic production of HQ. (India has recently banned its export.)

Hope is not a plan. What is it that these people don’t understand about “exponential growth”? With a doubling period of just a few days?

“Hope is not a plan. What is it that these people don’t understand about “exponential growth”? With a doubling period of just a few days?”

Years they understand, it is the “miracle of compound interest.” Days is a fraud with humans – reeks of MLM.

On the French tank controversy: Almost 80 percent of French tanks didn’t have radios. A military force can’t do — or deploy to counter — maneuver warfare, if it it can’t communicate to act as a networked, cooperating force.

And I’ve heard the claim that in the minority of French tanks that_ did_ have radios, it was one-way radio because the French command wanted to send orders but didn’t want its forces talking back or discussing its orders. French tanks vis-à-vis German Panzers were well-enough matched. The Germans simply ran rings around them.

The French had form on this sort of obtuseness.

in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, both sides had machine-guns, forex. But the French mounted theirs on railroad cars and could only get them as near the front line as railroad lines happened to run, while the Germans mounted their machine guns on horse-drawn carts. As in WWII, the German ran rings around them and advanced all the way to capture Paris.

As for the French high command’s obtuseness in WWI, most of you have seen Kubrick’s PATHS OF GLORY, which tells part of that appalling story.

As a consequence of knowing they’d be shot if they refused to fight, the French poilus in WWI several times marched into the front line and then no man’s land making baa’ing noises en masse —a collective bit of gallows humor/protest about being lambs sent to the slaughter. Come to think of it, the motto of the French Foreign Legion is, “March or die.”

A networked force will always run rings around a less networked force.

(Well, unless it’s the American military, and even then nobody doubts the American military’s superior capability to destroy everything. But that doesn’t necessarily win wars.)

@bruce wilder
@Hugh

The Maginot Line worked exactly as intended. And it wasn’t any kind of political compromise.

The widespread understanding of the Line and its ‘failure’ amounts to “the stupid Frenchies built an impenetrable wall to keep the Germans out, and the Germans just went around it, hurr hurr, stupid frogs”. This is completely wrong.

The Line was designed to be too costly to directly assault not to prevent a German invasion but to force the invasion to go around the Line, along predictable routes through Belgium. This was directly inspired by the German’s Schlieffen Plan getting bogged down and thrown off its time table in Belgium at the start of WWI.

And none of this is historical revisionism. The entire French defense plan leading up to WW2 was closely coordinated with Belgium. What I’m describing literally was the plan cooked up in the 1930s.

The Line worked perfectly. Where the plan fell apart was in the second stage with the field armies. But that doesn’t make the Line a failure.

And since it came up, the Siegfried Line actually was a failure. Both in practice and in conception. Because it actually was designed to be used in active defense. But fixed fortifications are a bad idea in modern warfare, especially when your enemy completely controls the skies and has artillery dominance. The Maginot Line was designed to force a battle of field armies, which it did. The Siegfried Line was designed to actually be held, an impossible task, and thus it failed.

@Benjamin

The Line was designed to be too costly to directly assault not . . . to force the invasion to go around the Line, along predictable routes through Belgium.

A fair summary of intent. But, in the event, the Line did NOT succeed in forcing the Germans to pass along the predicted lines thru Belgium.

In the event, the Germans passed not thru northern Belgium in a redux of the Schlieffen wheel on a path toward Paris, but through the Ardennes on their way to the Channel aiming to flank and encircle the French overextended in Belgium. The Maginot Line had not been extended far enough to block the passage thru the Ardennes.

“The Line worked perfectly” is an absurdity. It did not force the Germans to “pass along predicted lines” and the consequence was the misuse and misplacement of the field armies.

If anything, the Line fed the delusion that France was secure enough that it would have time to respond, time to build up its forces, et cetera. And, that France, with British help, could win a long war. Or, that it could and should adopt a defensive posture. The furious effort in 1939-40 to extend something similar to the Maginot Line along the Franco-Belgian border thru ill-suited terrain reveals how far strategic thinking had broken down into incoherence on all levels of the French state.

It is a narrative hook to say something like, “contrary to received wisdom, the Maginot Line . . . blah, blah, blah”. My objection to that storytelling motif in this context is that the rhetoric undermines the insight that successful policy succeeds by cooperation; policy must be coherent, its elements must work together. It is true that some of the major fortresses of the Maginot Line resisted and even some of the minor ones required a huge German effort to overcome, but that is too narrow a criteria for success. In the context of events, it ought to be clear that the Line both as an idea and as actual military fortifications contributed to the incoherence of French thinking and planning that was their undoing.

Narrowing the context to look, the Germans were not able take such and such fort for four days, misses the point that the Line unhinged French strategic thinking. And, given the sequence of events from 1918 to 1939, it is not hard to trace the twists and turns down that dark alley to defeat.

In the context of this thread, it stands as an example of how a people can rally around bad strategy as well as bad strategists.

Sorry, said Vosges. Meant the Ardennes.

@bruce wilder

No, it worked perfectly. It did exactly what it was intended to do. The Ardennes wasn’t blocked off because it was (incorrectly) viewed as already being a natural barrier that didn’t need supplementing. The fact is that the purpose of the Line was to force the assault through Belgium. It did exactly that. The failures came from elsewhere.

“It is true that some of the major fortresses of the Maginot Line resisted and even some of the minor ones required a huge German effort to overcome, but that is too narrow a criteria for success.”

Good thing this was never the purpose of the Line then. It wasn’t meant to resist attack. It was meant to be too much trouble to seriously assault, forcing an attack through Belgium. Basically it was designed to not be used, like a fleet in being.

I get the point you’re making, that all parts of a plan need to work together for full success. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Maginot Line part of the plan worked as intended, contrary to the popular myth that presents it as some sort of naive failure (“the Krauts just went around it! Silly surrender-monkeys!”).

In some alternate universe where the French won the Battle of France, I’m guessing the Line would be the part of the plan that wasn’t changed much or at all. It was the field armies that failed, not the Line.

If you take it that the purpose of the Maginot Line was to deter a German attack, then it failed. On the other hand, you could argue that the Line worked exactly as planned –for the Germans, keeping much of the French army tied down in the Northeast as they attacked in the Northwest. On the other other hand, the French were correct that the Germans would lose “une guerre de longue durée,” a war extending over a long period of time because they would eventually be outmatched by the resources their opponents could bring to bear. They were incorrect about how the Maginot Line would play into this or that this would be accomplished,not by the French and English, but by the Americans and Russians.

Mark Pontin:

That’s the worst kind of strategic planning and the mark of an incompetent, arrogant elite.

No, the French high command may have been incompetent (but then again, the Germans were also lucky, and the French plan could still have and would have worked just given just a few slight alterations in luck here or there) but they were not ‘arrogant’. More “terrified’, “intimated’, “spooked”, or “having an inferiority complex”. But that should be completely understandable given the holocaust the French went through. Americans, to my mind, have no damn business criticizing the French as even our Civil War did not exact the same relative death toll the French suffered; we have no conception of its impacts. The French knew full well their strategic weaknesses, and planned for it. Their failure was one of execution, not of conception.

What is the myth in WWII is not that the Maginot line was a failure, but that ‘fixed fortifications did not work’. But they did work; they won battles, or even after they failed they exacted fearful costs on the attacker in both lives and time. In fact, they tended become more and more effective as the war went on, instead of less so.

Also, in fact–although I myself repeated as a cause of for the French defeat that “the French to a much larger extent distributed their armor across their infantry divisions, while the Germans had piled them into panzer divisions”–all true enough, by 1940 terms But even here, the French were not being “stuck in the past” or hopelessly misguided. Quite the contrary, in fact, one could argue that the French were *prescient*, for as the war went on *everyone* started to do likewise. The triumphant Allied armies that rolled across Europe in 1944-45 had a *greater distribution of armor in infantry divisions as opposed in armored divisons*, relatively speaking, than did the French. The Germans too, had started following suit in 1943, shifting more and more of their armor production into tank destroyers/assault guns, to be meted out to their infantry divisions to bolster their antitank capability, and the Soviets started adding independent tank regiments and assault gun regiments to their rifle corps. Everyone by mid-war and later was adding more armor to their infantry divisions, based on the lessons being learned by combat. So how does this make the French ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘stupid’?

The concept behind the Maginot line and the French approach in 1940 was fine. In chess terms, they were playing defensively and ‘safe’ (see my comment about timidity), something like Caro-Kann defense, an opening that has a reputation for being solid and hard-to-crack. And the Caro-Kann is a perfectly sound defense on the Grandmaster level–it’s a favorite of World Champions such as Capablanca, Botvinnik, Petrosian and Karpov, Yet if you play it and make bad moves and blunder away your queen, then you’re going to lose against any competition above absolute novice chess. But you would lose because you made inept moves and tactical errors, not because your conception was bad or that the Caro-Kann is an inferior opening destined to fail.

Same with the Maginot line stratgey.