Leadership at a Loss: Why Britain and the U.S. Mishandled the COVID-19 Crisis

Cross Channel reflections

Starting mid-May, I completed two long drives from South West France, along near-empty highways, to England and back again. It was a bizarre experience.

In Calais, wearing a regulation mask and gloves, with all my needed paperwork duly filled in, I boarded a ferry—without having to show a ticket! My only shipmates were pale Polish truck drivers and swarthy Romanians in vans, all similarly protected. The on-board restaurant being closed, a Styrofoam boxed “full English” (scrambled eggs, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, and bacon) was presented to each daring traveler. Ten miles past Dover, I stopped for a large Starbucks at a filling station, delighted to have made it to a 21^st Century land where you can get such comforts, but appalled to see no one masked. This sight became commonplace throughout Kent and only changed very slightly in central London.

During my stay in England, the death toll in the UK and the U.S. spiraled to outstrip the earlier-maligned Italians and Spanish. In the early lockdown, the British were compliant; then they got bored. They were never given clear commands like the French. But Britain is a pirate nation—the founders of our East India Company that morphed into the British Raj was a group of booty-rich buccaneers, as William Dalrymple tells us in The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019). We refuse to carry ID cards or arm our cops because we don’t like being told what to

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do.

The French, on the other hand, according to Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts (1852-1870, 1991), will obey any authority. They cannot leave their homes without papiers on a normal day and God forbid they do anything between midday and 2 pm but have lunch! However, they have handled the crisis with exceptional clarity and discipline, and their government is the first in power to see their popularity rise in the polls in 20 years.

So, for me, a serious question arises from this experience: why have Britain and the U.S. handled the COVID crisis so spectacularly poorly? My answer, which won’t surprise anyone who has followed my Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion: A Psychohistory (2014) thesis, is that both nations have sub-standard political leadership, rooted in defense and duplicity rather than competence and values. While some suggest our current leaders have personality disorders, I don’t analyze those I haven’t met. But I do recognize what Nilda Maxwell calls a “psycho-class” (Nick Duffell, The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System, 2000). I prefer a systemic perspective and tend to believe we get the leaders we deserve.

To begin logically, let’s consider what elements the two leading Anglophone nations have in common. I see the following points as highly relevant.

A shared history, combining calamity, incompetence, and liberation with a tendency to see the bully as external rather than identify with home-grown aggression. An exceedingly dynamic language structure, based on verbs rather than nouns, which permits the rapid development of new conceptual realities and perspectives and therefore permits what our profession calls “re-framing” all too easily.

A political and commercial scene dominated by traditional elites, raised in a hyper-rational education system prioritizing left-brain thinking over right-brain—short-term detail over global perspectives and context, as Iain McGilchrist explains in The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2010). A unique elite education system specializing in taking children out of the family: this—as I have been writing about for some 30 years (Thurstine Basset and Nick Duffell, Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege: A Guide To Therapeutic Work With

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Boarding School Survivors, 2016)—encourages dissociation and duplicity as a default operating mode.

Because of what elsewhere I have called the “Rational Man Project,” hyper-rational elites are at war with themselves in a way that mirrors colonial history: an internal war against the “Inner Indigenous”—the un-made self, composed of emotional and sexual impulses. The vulnerability being perforce utterly disowned in these elites, they cannot understand or manage the socially vulnerable, which hampers political decision-making especially in times of crisis. Anachronistic “top-down” social structures, which have failed to morph into social democracies, as in Western Europe, Scandinavia, and New Zealand.

Societies dominated by unintegrated, semi-conscious fears, continually fed since the end of the 18^th century of what we used to call “the mob,” and, paradoxically, also of government. These twin anxieties give little room for creativity in current affairs and often erupt into a cherished paranoia followed by disastrous decision-making. There is not space here to unpack all these ideas, but let’s start with the last hypothesis.

The Psyche through Time

One unseasonably hot day in 1850 an old woman’s thoughts turned to events of 50 years before. “It was like this in the French revolution, I remember,” said the grandmother of Thomas Hardy, one of the greatest figures in English literature and one of the few to successfully climb the class ladder and be lauded in his lifetime. As a young woman in 1793, Hardy’s grandmother had been ironing her best muslin dress when the news came of the execution of Marie Antoinette. She put down her iron and froze. Years later, she could still call up the exact pattern of the muslin in her mind’s eye.

Here lies a psychohistorical conundrum: we are influenced by more of the past than we think. The great historical movements of thought, feeling, and action take time to be integrated. Even though we think we live in a momentary present, 200 years of history is well within our psychic span. Even we tend to overlook the impact events have on individual human lives in the ever-present flow of news; our responses and attitudes toward them can have transgenerational significance. Doris Lessing has said: “Great public disasters that mark the psyches of a people, a country, live in people’s nightmares but take time to come out into consciousness.”

The human psyche seems to have a lifespan of about 200-

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250-years, something like three generations backward and forward in time. Imagine during a healthy lifetime having met a great-grandparent and a great-grandchild. This recalls the Native American belief that acts have to be valued on their effect over seven generations. An event may have been forgotten but our collective unconscious psyche may still be trying to integrate it. The French Revolution, remembered by this Victorian countrywoman, instigated as much worldwide fear, and its consequences were as far-reaching as 9/11, the assassination of JFK, and Pearl Harbor put together.

A Strange Island

In Britain, the French Revolution instigated, I believe, society-wide repression—an internal contraction, just as the society was engaged in a massive outer expansion, which is a curious state of affairs. It resulted in a lasting political context where the lower classes were feared and despised as ungovernable raw nature, even when, after universal suffrage, they had to be wooed for their votes.

While Britain has enviable individual liberty, we fear the mob and have very strict laws restricting public assembly. At the same time, we suspect the government. We have a long tradition of checks and balances going back to Magna Carta (1215), have decapitated one king in our precocious revolution, and the British Empire has its roots in piracy. The Neo-liberal revolution of the late ’70s and ’80s compounded the problem as the influential corporate barons chorused their “small government is good” mantra.

Arguably, it’s great for boom times, but impossible in crises. You cannot command the people because you have disposed of citizens and replaced them with consumers—even our railway stations announce to “customers” not “passengers” now—you have to seduce them. Bread-and-circus politics are very short term.

Worse, when the leaders’ personalities are built on bluff and bluster, such as British leaders of the last two decades and the incumbent in Washington, we have concealed fragility restricting creative thought, an extreme version of what I called the Strategic Survival Personality. Akin to Winnicott’s False Self, all psychic energy is invested into the outer carapace that defends an internal void (or wretchedness or unassuageable loss). A breakdown is the only way to heal, but of course, collapse is deeply feared. One of the many rumors abounding during COVID is not that Bill Gates is actually Darth Vader but that Boris Johnson may have had a mental

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rather than a physical illness at the start of the emergency.

British elites cast their shadow on the whole society. In Wounded Leaders, I proposed that our working class is no longer salt-of-the-earth material but, after 200 years of domestic slavery and psychic ingestion of the disowned and projected out vulnerability and savagery from our elites, they are in trouble. As a group, they are compliant but unconsciously depressed and outwardly angry. The normalized bad behavior in the UK is unimaginable to European neighbors. Our riots are fueled by sunshine and beer, not values or social injustice. As our shopping malls empty and become no-go areas, the post-viral beach has become the place to drink, challenging the high standards we have on our police.

Guns are U.S.

Turning to the U.S., we see a similarly polarized but different situation. The sacred myth of liberty means the government is always questionable and the status quo unalterable. To potentize civilians against George III, the nation has the right to arm itself while successive Presidents have limited authority. Never mind the U.S. domestic history of slavery and genocide or that more people die every year by having guns in their glove-compartment than in the 9/11 attacks. No one dares tackle the NRA or indeed the normalization of the lobbying system in general. Corporate pressure on the president during COVID made the lockdown tardy and re-opening jittery.

But the fear of the mob (I don’t mean of the Mafia) is similarly out of proportion. Union busting goes back to the 19^th century and protest is barely tolerated. In a BBC broadcast, “Four Dead in Ohio” (May 4, 2020), the London-based American journalist Michael Goldfarb retold how the National Guard fired on several hundred middle-class students at Ohio’s Kent State University 50 years ago. Four were killed, nine wounded. Two weeks later, two students were gunned down at Jackson State in Mississippi. America is violently divided, now as it was then, with regular schoolyard massacres and multiple police assaults on Black men. No leader tackles it because “it’s the economy, stupid” that rules.

It will take an alert, committed people, and a very competent leader to change direction in either Anglo-nation.

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