“Of the major leaders of the world since World War II, interestingly, there were only two who stepped down voluntarily, Nelson Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew. All others were voted out of office or they died. Evidently, once you have succeeded in high office and have gotten a good opinion of yourself, you are not likely to change that opinion and step down.”
Conversations with Coleman · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Coleman Hughes asked whether a benign dictator is possible and whether Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew was one. Diamond says yes, and notes that leaving voluntarily is unusually rare among successful leaders. Hughes then offers a possible third case, Jerry Rawlings of Ghana.
Transcript
…politician. Like de Gaulle and like Roosevelt, he got people to do things that they did not want to do. And my guess is that if Lincoln had not been assassinated, the period after the Civil War would not have been as unhappy a period as it was at least for the remainder of Lincoln's term in office.
…the case of Lee Kuan Yew, I mean, I don't know much about him, but I know anytime I talk to someone from Singapore, they have almost only good things to say about what he did for the country. So I guess two questions here. One, is there such a thing as a benign dictator? And was Lee Kuan Yew that?
Yes, of course, there are benign dictators, just as there are benign democratic presidents and there are evil democratic presidents. And yes, Lee Kuan Yew is an outstanding example. Lee Kuan Yew was the founding prime minister of Singapore. Singapore did not seek independence. Singapore was expelled from Malaysia. And when Singapore became independent, Singapore had big problems, risk, tiny statelet, risk of invasion by Indonesia and by Malaysia, no armed forces of its own, ethnic polarization between Chinese and Malays. Lee Kuan Yew trained as an economist. He recognized that if he let anybody open their mouth and say anything that they wanted, then Singapore would quickly be occupied by Indonesia and Malaysia. Free-for-all democracy was not going to work in Singapore. He had the trappings of a democracy. In some respects, Singapore was democratic. He was very successful in that Singapore rather quickly became a first world state. But I visited Singapore for the first time in 1979, a decade or so after its independence. And it was a joke that people said in Singapore, not only does the government tell you not to have standing water…
I believe there was Jerry Rawlings of Ghana might be a third example with an asterisk because he was a dictator and then he was elected and then he chose not to run, but he could have, he kind of chose to turn Ghana into a democracy. So in spirit, similar, but maybe not technically quite the same.…
Margaret Thatcher, again, the biographic, biographic method, but I believe a strong argument could be made that she made a difference. British people today are divided between those who admire what she did and who hate what she did. But virtually everybody agrees that she made a difference. She…
So the final thing I want to ask you about is the case of sports coaches. And in the book, you, you know, obviously we're talking about politics and religious leaders in the book, which we haven't covered here. But you defend sports coaches as a particularly useful example of how to study this…
More from Conversations with Coleman
