The Myth of the Great Man
There's a habit in mainstream political commentary of treating history as a chain of individual personalities: one man causes the crisis, another man fixes it. Trump becomes shorthand for American fascism. Obama becomes shorthand for "change." This is a version of what historians call the "Great Man Theory" — a 19th-century idea, popularized by the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, holding that history is driven primarily by the decisions of exceptional, powerful individuals.
The theory has been challenged for well over a century. Herbert Spencer and later Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued the opposite: that individuals act within economic and social conditions that produce them, rather than personally generating those conditions from nothing. Engels put it directly in an 1890 letter — if Napoleon hadn't existed, someone else would have filled that historical role, because the underlying conditions in France demanded it.
What the "Trumpism" Framing Leaves Out
Framing fascism as something one man "brought" to the United States skips a longer, documented record. Scholars of fascism (Robert Paxton among them) generally describe it as an outcome of specific economic and social pressures — an elite/business class turning to authoritarian nationalism when liberal democratic capitalism can no longer manage a crisis. On that reading, the U.S. has flirted with these pressures repeatedly and for a long time, not starting in 2016: the Red Scare prosecutions of labor organizers after WWI, COINTELPRO's surveillance and disruption of civil rights and socialist organizations in the 1950s–70s, and the U.S. government's documented support for authoritarian, anti-labor governments abroad during the Cold War (the CIA-backed coups in Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973 are declassified, well-documented examples).
Likewise, "Obama brought change" and "Trump is uniquely the villain" both under-describe the record. The Obama administration continued and expanded the drone-strike program, deported a historically high number of people, and bailed out the financial sector after 2008 largely on Wall Street's terms — continuities, not ruptures, in the underlying system. None of this is a claim that individuals don't matter. It's a claim that individuals operate inside constraints — economic incentives, institutional pressure, class interests — that shape what "change" is even possible.
Kenya: The Uprising Wasn't One Man
Kenya's independence movement is often told as the story of Jomo Kenyatta. But the actual armed uprising against British colonial rule — the Mau Mau (Kenya Land and Freedom Army) rebellion of 1952–1960 — was fought and sustained by tens of thousands of ordinary Kikuyu farmers and laborers dispossessed of land under colonial rule, organized through oath-taking networks and forest-based guerrilla cells. Kenyatta himself was imprisoned by the British in 1953 on charges of managing the movement — a claim historians now regard as weakly supported — and was not directing the uprising from the forests. Britain's own 2013 legal settlement, in which it formally apologized and paid compensation to Mau Mau torture victims, is itself an acknowledgment that the conflict was a mass colonial struggle over land and labor, not the work of one leader.
Ethiopia: A Revolution From Below
Ethiopia's 1974 revolution, which ended Emperor Haile Selassie's decades-long rule, is another case regularly flattened into "an emperor was overthrown." In fact it was driven by a wave of strikes, student protests (the Ethiopian Student Movement, active through the 1960s and early '70s), and mutinies among junior military officers over pay and famine mismanagement — pressures that built for years before the Derg, a military committee, formally deposed Haile Selassie in September 1974. The Derg itself was a committee, not a single ruler, precisely because the upheaval was too broad-based for any one figure to claim ownership of it.
The Point
None of this argues that individuals are irrelevant or interchangeable robots. Leaders make choices that matter, and different choices produce different outcomes at the margins. But treating history as a scoreboard of "great men" and "great villains" — Trump vs. Obama, Selassie vs. the Derg, colonial governors vs. Kenyatta — trains people to look for a hero or villain to vote in or vote out, rather than to examine the economic and institutional structures that produced the crisis in the first place. Structures don't get removed at the ballot box. They get changed by organized, collective pressure — which is exactly what actually moved history in Nairobi's forests, Addis Ababa's streets, and, historians would argue, in Washington too.
