There often seems to be an assumption that leaders everywhere are the same: that there is no real difference between leaders in different countries or at different times.

It’s true that leaders generally share some attributes: almost all want to lead and want power. But beyond that, no.

Think a little about how leaders changed over time in America. Can you really say that the same port of people run politics or corporations today as when FDR was in charge or during the post-war period?  The people then were builders who were expanding the social safety net and increasing the middle class, not the upper. The corporate leadership was dominated by engineers, not by MBAs, and many had started at the bottom and risen to the top.

Or think about the leadership of Europe before and after it was conquered by America and the USSR and split up. These were not men who were automatically subservient to outside powers, without national pride and without ambition.

Think about China under Mao and then China today. The people who ran China under Mao, then during the Deng era, and even in Xi era, while they have some continuity, show significant changes. Over the entire history of the CCP party members are selected, not self-selecting and under Xi’s rule, they’re increasingly chosen based on technocratic accomplishments combined with belief in Party principles. To compare them to the shysters who run America, or the bloodless technocrats of Europe is insane.

In the past we’ve chosen leaders primarily based on military skill and heredity. Leaders of hunter gatherer bands (smaller groups, not all hunter-gatherers have had band formations) were often chosen not for aggressiveness but patience and lack of temper.

Leaders are different in different societies, whether different in space or time. They have different characters, different abilities and different goals. The political elites of 33-68 or so in America are very different from those who replaced them and that’s a relatively minor change compared to the replacement of feudal nobles by centralized court aristocrats who were then replaced by elected officials and appointed bureaucrats. Let alone the rise of the bourgeois and capitalists. Men of business think very different from aristocrats competing from court favor, let alone nobles who rule their own domains and armies and who consider even the King simply the greatest among equals. Such nobles are vastly different from Roman imperial bureaucrats or the Senatorial families and elected officials who ran the Roman Republic and were forced to come up thru the Cursus Honorum and actually learn how government works.

Of all the things we do as a society, selecting our leaders and deciding what power to give them is possibly the most important.

It’s something we’ve been very bad at for a long time now.

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