On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century
By Tony Blair
Crown, 368 pages, $32
I once thought of Tony Blair the way I did of Princess Diana: part of my fading childhood memories. After a decade as prime minister, Blair was rejected by his party and disgraced by the Iraq War. He looked doomed to a career of lucrative yet obscure consultancy. His forays into politics after Brexit, such as his failed attempt to launch a second referendum, seemed like the archetypical example of an out-of-touch former politician who didn’t understand the significance of the post-2016 populist revolt.
I was wrong. After 2016, the Iraq War became ancient history. Brexit and Trump’s election became the defining political events of the early 21st century. Elites pivoted away from anxieties about American overreach and focused on stopping populism. Blair emerged from exile, welcomed by those who had once spurned him. At precisely the moment when Blair’s political interventions in British politics seemed worthless, his stock was rapidly rising. It hasn’t declined since. Blair has created one of the world’s most powerful nongovernmental organizations: the Tony Blair Institute. Employing nearly 1,000 people worldwide, it is a unique operation, functioning simultaneously as a think tank, public-policy engine, and political consultancy. Blair is now better positioned than anyone to influence the British government as well as other governments abroad.
That’s why he’s written On Leadership: Lessons for the Twentieth Century. The book contains precious little moralizing and, mercifully, no tedious apologias for the author’s political career. Instead, it offers counsels on how to gain, wield, and relinquish power. Blair echoes Machiavelli’s The Prince—most clearly when he argues that it is better to be respected than loved or feared. On Leadership is a manual for 21st-century princes, a guide for aspiring Caesars.
But like Machiavelli, Blair isn’t just offering gritty realist advice. He has a project, which is what makes On Leadership so intriguing. The book shows that the left was correct 20 years ago: Blair really is rather right-wing. The basis of his program is a kind of post-liberal progressive rightism that promises to co-opt the progressive left while crushing the populist right. It’s the sketch of a coalition that will probably define the 21st century.
“He rejects the liberal model of the state.”
Blair is a post-liberal because he has abandoned the paradigm of 20th-century liberal democracy. He rejects the liberal model of the state and devotes a whole chapter to “the reimagined state” of the 21st century. Just as when he was in office, Blair wants new institutions that work beyond the liberal demarcation between the public and private spheres. Government efficiency matters more than protecting rights.
Blair regularly invokes Covid and the Ukraine war, but he doesn’t waste time with Western elites’ standard clichés. There are no sanctimonious speeches about defending “our democracy,” nor hall-monitor monologues about the problems on “both sides.” While Blair detests populism, he has a sympathetic account of how it emerged. Most tellingly, Blair doesn’t talk about liberalism. The only time in the book that Blair uses the world “liberal” is when he uses it alongside “social,” as in: “social and liberal issues such as gay rights.” Nor is Blair interested in democracy. Indeed, almost all the book’s advice for leaders falls not within the realm of democratic theory—still less social-democratic theory—but in the realm of elite theory.
Blair entices his would-be Caesars toward progressivism, but this is not the progressivism of the 19th- and 20th-century left. Blair is concerned about the welfare of the whole community. He rejects “no such thing as society” paeans to individualism (indeed, he helped turn this 1987 Thatcher remark into a media controversy). However, he isn’t trying to implement a classless society or abolish inequality. Neither a yearning for social justice nor a sense of historical inevitability drives his progressivism. Instead, the motive underlying it is a commitment to unlimited, unrestrained technological progress, and a belief that this will bring about a better world.
Otherwise, much of On Leadership makes Blair sound rather conservative, at least by contemporary American standards. He’s tough on crime. He wants to control immigration. He only has nice things to say about Elon Musk, and insists on the importance of economic growth. Blair also supports industrial strategy; protectionism is legitimate, he says, as long as one remains open to high-skilled immigrants and foreign capital investment. In policy terms, all this is Trump 2024.
But this isn’t much of a conservatism. Blair’s sympathies with rightist thinking are revealed not so much on this terrain, but in his critique of democracy.
Early in the book, Blair explains that democracy is in tension with progress. In a democracy, you can’t be in power for a long time. “I reckon it takes 10 years to change a country,” he writes. “And that is 10 years of focused change-making. At a minimum. Fifteen is better and 20 optimum.” Blair raises a unique problem that democracies face. Democratic leaders aren’t supposed to stay in office for two decades. As Blair knows well, even one is extremely rare and usually not without controversy. “A degree of consistency through changes of government” may not trouble autocracies. Yet in democracies these changes are inevitable. For Blair, that’s why democracy is a risky form of government.
In traditional democratic theory and practice, those changes are the point of having democracies. We distrust rulers who stay in power for too long. They cease to represent the people, begin to serve other interests, and may begin to harbor aspirations to rule permanently. So democracy is first and foremost about a set of procedural commitments—including frequent elections and rotating elected officials making decisions. Moreover, democracy is supposed to solidify the habits of civic involvement in public life. Just like ancient assemblies of representatives, frequent elections oblige democratic leaders to rule not through force, but by persuading others, fostering the habits of rational argument and civic respect. Citizens learn a similar set of lessons. If there are regular changes in government in response to voters’ concerns, citizens conclude they can and do influence those in power. They are encouraged to participate in public life. In all these ways, a democracy teaches citizens how to rule and be ruled, in turn.
“Blair takes the neo-reactionary position that the truly effective leader is a CEO-king.”
None of that matters to Blair. The archetype of the leader as the great persuader or great communicator is passé for him. Instead, Blair takes the neo-reactionary position that the truly effective leader is a CEO-king. Persuasion is for campaign time. After that, he writes, the leader must “metamorphose into the Great CEO.” Democracy (like any regime and any large corporation) is legitimized by what it delivers, but its own procedures work against consistent delivery. The solution is, for Blair, straightforward. Leaders interested in change need to work harder to stay longer in office. They will deliver the results, and those results will win democratic legitimacy. The issue becomes teaching leaders how to prepare for the long haul.
Blair recounts a story about a consultancy client who became president. This client was the first person democratically elected in his country after a long dictatorship. To cement the transition to democracy, the client—cleaving to democratic ideals—promised to serve only two years then make room for someone else. Blair is scathing:
Very noble; but unfortunately, also very naïve. At our first meeting, I told him bluntly that if he continued to govern on that basis: The system would not take his instructions seriously; his Cabinet would spend their time positioning for the succession, not working for the country; and he would not only be a lame duck, but one that was effectively stationary.
The client followed Blair’s advice, and is now in his second term. A political scientist would hesitate to classify that regime as a democracy. We need to see more peaceful transitions of power to know. Blair sees effective action, however, and that’s enough for him.
Blair may be contemptuous of democratic theory, but that doesn’t mean he’s contemptuous of democracy. His views mirror those of modern Caesarists, which presuppose mass democracy. Modern Caesarists are democrats in so much as they believe the leader should represent the nation and its people. However, Caesarists argue that mass democracy renders traditional democracy impossible. It does not create a community of rational equals nor one where the leaders channel the people’s voice. Mass democracy attenuates the function of representative institutions and the expression of popular will. The first book to theorize Caesarism in a modern democratic context, Auguste Romieu’s Era of the Caesars, published in 1850, argues that public opinion isn’t something the leader discovers in order to follow. The leader is in charge; he rules to shape opinion in the direction he wants. For Romieu, men don’t represent a set of reasonable interests that the leader should simply seek to mirror. There is no rational public, and the “eternal error … is to search for institutions that render men reasonable.”
Modern Caesarism may presuppose democracy, but that doesn’t make it liberal. The leader makes the decisions. He waits neither for the people nor their representative institutions to deliberate. As Blair writes, “The Leader sets out for the people what they need and not simply what they want. Otherwise the Leader is just a follower.” Democratic theory imagines the people as civic-minded and attentive to politics. Blair is scornful of this. Most people don’t want to think about politics at all. They want someone else to take care of that for them.
Romieu argued that an obsession with the written and spoken word exaggerates the significance of deliberation, making people think that the ancient assembly could be recreated, and leading to an overestimation of the value of parliament. He also thought an inordinate concern with words led to an overvaluing of the worth of the press—an opinion that scandalized liberals.
On both points, Blair isn’t far from Romieu. On the rare occasions in which Blair mentions parliament, he boasts about how he made it less important, freeing up more time for the prime minister to govern. Romieu’s dismissal of “nonsense” from the press is mild next to Blair’s polemics against modern media as, “angry,” “inaccurate,” “distorting.”
For its most sophisticated adherents, Caesarism is less about force and more about controlling public opinion, disciplining fickle masses based on the assumption that the masses want to be led. Blair agrees: “Never underestimate the degree to which the people crave leadership.” Blair argues that successful leaders are those who devise the policy first, then do politics—not the other way around. “The politics”—the retail of selling it to the people—is “layered on top once the answer is decided.” At times, this leads to adversarial relationships between the leader and the people, but that’s what leadership is. It is “standing in front of a crowd that is expecting to be pleased but instead being prepared to displease it.” Strength is what satisfies the people. In this, Blair echoes another modern Caesarist, Charles de Gaulle. In a private letter to his wife, the French leader wrote: “He who can will the most effectively will definitively bring the sheep of the crowds with him, not only in deed, but also in their minds.”
Blair, in other words, has a hierarchical conception of how power functions—an attitude traditionally associated with the right. For him, power flows not from persuading equals, but from establishing superiority through expertise, then commanding others to act and having them obey. This is evident in his hostility toward the permanent bureaucracy, probably the most challenging entity that leaders of modern states must face. Bureaucracies diffuse power and responsibility. Individual action is stymied by best practices. Leaders who conform to bureaucratic systems find that they have no room to make consequential decisions. Caesarism can’t abide this insolence of office; personal power must be regained.
Blair’s advice is blunt. The bureaucracies must be bent toward obedience: “All bureaucracies are the same. They’re not conspiracies for one side or another in politics; they’re conspiracies for maintaining the system, and they have a corresponding genius for inertia. They can be utilized and driven but should not be left with the first or final say.”
He echoes this view in his treatment of the problem of the deep state, which—somewhat unusually for his class—he acknowledges exists. In democracies, Blair hints, the way for a leader to establish control over recalcitrant intelligence agencies is to threaten them with humiliation. They are averse to doing “anything the media, which adores a conspiracy, might find occasion to sink its teeth into. Their greatest anxiety” is to be caught out in public, to be “summoned in front of inquiries, committees, and commissions and be criticized.”
In democracies, you can’t stay in power forever. Caesars overcome this fact by creating institutions within the state apparatus that outlast them. “The best reforms,” Blair writes, “are those which become self-sustaining—that is, they don’t need the Leader or the government to be constantly on the case because, once done, the reform has injected an agent of change into the system which has its own momentum independent of government oversight.” FDR on the administrative agencies—or Curtis Yarvin on FDR—couldn’t have put it better.
Leftists and some conservatives have accused Blair of harboring elitist, authoritarian sympathies. Those looking for evidence of Blair’s inclination toward a Führerprinzip will find what they’re looking for, starting with his odd decision to capitalize “Leader” throughout the book. Yet the real question is why Blair, who wants to remain comfortably within the confines of respectable elite opinion, explicitly disregards democratic niceties. There are three reasons.
Blair grasps that post-2016, progressives don’t really care much for democratic theory and practice. Once, Blair at least tried to talk like a social democrat. Those days are gone. Whatever ancestral pieties leftist progressives might have toward social democracy, Blair knows how to sweep these aside. He openly defends technocracy, because he knows that he only needs to invoke the specter of Brexit for the left to come rallying to the side of technocratic elitism. Elitist practice has long been in vogue on the left; embracing elite theory is just catching up with that reality.
The second reason is more novel. Blair speaks not to influence mass politics, but to shape the intra-elite struggle that has emerged following the populist revolt of 2016.
While the post-2016 landscape is still a contest between elites and populists, this isn’t the full story. In 2016, the populist diagnosis of Western malaise inspired Brexit and propelled Trump to the White House. At least in the United States, the revolt was successful because it forced elites to question their priors, provoking intra-elite debates over China, trade, and immigration.
The next stage of this intra-elite struggle is a conflict over how we are governed. Progressive elites adore the managerial-therapeutic state that governs most Western countries; it is staffed by members of their class and promotes their values. Right- and left-leaning elites, starry-eyed about diversity and antiracism, used to unite to defend that regime. But in the past few years, something has shifted. Most elite institutions are still aligned against the right—the legacy media, government bureaucracies, the intelligence agencies, the NGO complex, and academia. Yet segments of the business and tech sector broke off from this consensus. They did so in large part because they came to regard the managerial-therapeutic state as unjust, incompetent, and dysfunctional. This is just what the populists have said for years. In 2024, this dissident, right-leaning elite allied openly with the populists to help Trump win again.
“These right-leaning elites aren’t real populists.”
However, these right-leaning elites aren’t real populists. Populism has its roots in economic and cultural concerns. Populist voters want restricted immigration and a better welfare state. They also want elected representatives who have the power to make and change the laws. Their goals track with those of older 20th-century democratic movements. Conservative populists talk about undemocratic institutions that re-engineer society and culture. There’s an anxiety about how technological progress accelerates this reengineering and destroys what’s left of the old democracy.
Right-wing elites, by contrast, tend to talk about stagnation—the absence of technological progress. Blair notices this difference, which is the third reason he dispenses with democratic niceties. He wants to speak directly to those elites—namely, to the right-wing progressives.
This strategy emerges midway through On Leadership in how the author treats “strongman Leaders” such as Vladimir Putin, their Western sympathizers, and the problem of populism. Rather than repeat the progressive party line that blames the authoritarian impulses of the proles for making populism and Putin attractive, Blair blames the “economic stasis and cultural relativism of traditional democratic Leaders.” The cultural-relativism critique is a version of the old conservative charge that Western decadence is its own worst enemy, partly responsible for Putin’s appeal. Once again, Blair sounds conservative, but deceptively so. By flagging “economic stasis,” Blair indicates that he believes the real vice gripping Western societies is stagnation. Western leaders have failed to accomplish anything significant. If you have “paralysis,” he contends, the strongman begins to look attractive. He gets something done. Blair has returned to the problem of output legitimacy. Democracies aren’t delivering.
That’s what right-wing progressives have argued for years. Right-wing progressive critiques of sclerotic bureaucracy, state capacity, and the immobilization of key innovating industries fit into the narrative of paralysis. Efforts to change any of these sectors runs against both entrenched interests and the fickleness of democratic majorities.
This doesn’t mean that right-wing progressives reject democratic legitimacy per se. Rather, they argue that democratic processes are unreliable guarantors of effective government. Saving Western democracy requires us to change the contours of Western governments and overhaul the state apparatus itself. The best way to do that, they argue, is to recover real executive power in the state—saving government from administration—and jump-start the technological revolution the caretaker class of manager-leaders have denied us.
Blair’s concerns and solutions are aligned with theirs. To save democracy, his solution is unabashed techno-optimism. Democracy can only regain its output legitimacy by wholeheartedly embracing technological change, especially in the realms of Big Data and artificial intelligence. It is for this reason that the heart of the book is devoted to sketching out all the possibilities unleashing these changes will achieve.
Blair writes that if leaders embrace unlimited technological progress, including digital IDs and centralized personal data, they will have more power than ever before to “make change happen.” Populists might have their qualms about this. They might warn about a “police state” (Blair tells them he knows what real police states look like, so they needn’t worry). Populists might complain about the high levels of immigration Blair continues to encourage as necessary for progress. Blair chastises them for their xenophobia, but the populists are ultimately wrong because of their techno-pessimism. They’re akin to the Luddites resisting the Industrial Revolution. Because of that, they’re the enemy.
On important points, Blair differs from more subtle right-wing progressives. He’s not an individualist. He thinks expertise is the same as competence. Notions of personal excellence, nobility, and struggle elude him. He never discusses natalism or reproductive technologies, and so he leaves unanswered the most pressing philosophical questions about our humanity becoming a market commodity. Discerning readers won’t shake the feeling that his system produces the perverse despotism of scientism. His enthusiasm for Covid lockdowns—he thinks we learned from the Chinese that they worked, up until the onset of the Omicron variant—will horrify many. Unlike Musk, Blair sees internet free speech as a threat, rather than an opportunity. Yet Blair has one great advantage over an individualist like Musk: He’s religious.
Since he left office, Blair has at various moments discussed the importance of his Christian faith. Blair’s eclectic Christianity has turned him into a zealot for progress. In On Leadership, Blair compares the leader to Moses. It’s a notable reference, because Moses isn’t just a biblical figure. He appears in The Prince as an “armed prophet.” Moses succeeds in the “difficult” task of keeping the people persuaded by controlling them (sometimes through force), and by appropriating divine providence for his own objectives. This is how he succeeds in establishing a lasting constitution and home for his people, even if he doesn’t get to see it himself. Blair seems to have learned his Moses from Machiavelli. “I liken governing to leading people on a journey,” writes Blair. “Moses had to put up with the ‘stiff-necked’ attitude of the people. But he also countered it by continually explaining that he was leading them to a land of ‘milk and honey’ where their every need would be better fulfilled.” Like Moses, Blair is an eschatological politician. He leads the people toward a promised land.
We’ve seen Blair’s eschatological revolution before. In the 1990s, critics of Blair and Clinton wrote them off as soppy centrists who didn’t really believe in anything other than staying ahead of opinion polls. They were mistaken. Blair’s revolutionary spirit remade the world. Along with Clinton, Blair launched a revolution in governance and sold all aspects of globalization, from the open society to open borders, as necessary, inevitable, and good. The opponents of globalization, mass immigration, and “state-society” partnerships became fringe figures. The West has never been the same.
Nor have its leaders. In Blair and Clinton, there was a degree of competency and confidence that hasn’t been seen since. This absence of effective leadership—capitulation to the caretaker class—is one of the reasons progress has stalled. Blair returns not just to provide a paradigm for wielding power well, but to bring the rejuvenating spirit of the old-time religion. He talks about algorithms with the same sense of faith and purpose with which he once talked about globalization. This is what makes him so dangerous.
Blair’s political career may be over, but he is the armed prophet of a new fusionism. His faith in power and progress made his paeans to globalization so seductive to the left and the right at the end of the 20th century. That faith may prove just as seductive in the 21st.