Leader-centered movements become vulnerable to ad hominem attacks on the whole
Evidence
Crucially, this exacerbated dependence of a movement on its leader can easily turn into a fatal weakness. The more it delegates to a star player, the more a team will collectively suffer from his injuries. When the identification with a down-to-earth, (supposedly) morally irreproachable figure is the prime glue holding a political force together, that figure becomes a sitting duck for any adversaries who—by accusing Corbyn of antisemitism, by pointing at Mélenchon’s short temper or Iglesias’s expensive tastes—can smear the left-populist camp as a whole. The old-fashioned mass parties on the left had at least one great virtue: an internal ruling class ready to assume leadership should the party ever have its head abruptly cut off. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 271
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Strong leadership signals the weakness of the underlying social movement — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 272; The Leader’s infallibility structures the movement, not the truth of his words; Totalitarian movements’ rank-and-file dissolved class divisions via shared fear