"We are an age without leaders. We stopped having leaders at the end of the 20th century"
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Fallaci’s line lands like a door slammed on the triumphalist story we were sold about the post-Cold War world. “An age without leaders” isn’t nostalgia for a strongman; it’s an accusation that power has become managerial, aesthetic, and risk-averse. The verb choice matters: we didn’t lose leaders, we “stopped having” them, as if leadership is a civic muscle that atrophied when institutions discovered they could survive on press releases, polling, and procedural competence.
The timing embedded in her marker - “the end of the 20th century” - is doing heavy work. It gestures toward a hinge moment: the collapse of grand ideological conflict, the rise of globalization, media saturation, and a politics increasingly performed for cameras rather than forged in hard, unpopular decisions. In Fallaci’s worldview, leaders are defined by consequence and courage, not by brand discipline. After 1989, politics could pretend history was over; the result, she implies, was a class of executives in suits who manage crises rather than shape futures.
Subtextually, Fallaci is also indicting the public. “We are” makes the void collective: a consumer-citizenry that rewards comfort and punishes clarity. Coming from a war reporter turned combative public moralist, the statement reads as both lament and provocation: if leadership has vanished, it’s partly because we prefer the soothing fiction of inevitability to the discomfort of direction.
The timing embedded in her marker - “the end of the 20th century” - is doing heavy work. It gestures toward a hinge moment: the collapse of grand ideological conflict, the rise of globalization, media saturation, and a politics increasingly performed for cameras rather than forged in hard, unpopular decisions. In Fallaci’s worldview, leaders are defined by consequence and courage, not by brand discipline. After 1989, politics could pretend history was over; the result, she implies, was a class of executives in suits who manage crises rather than shape futures.
Subtextually, Fallaci is also indicting the public. “We are” makes the void collective: a consumer-citizenry that rewards comfort and punishes clarity. Coming from a war reporter turned combative public moralist, the statement reads as both lament and provocation: if leadership has vanished, it’s partly because we prefer the soothing fiction of inevitability to the discomfort of direction.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
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