I'm not a "progressive" in the sense of expecting people to be the best versions of themselves. Nor do I believe they'll perversely strive to be worst versions of themselves. My assumption is that they'll half-ass personal growth and land on mediocrity 80% of the time. Like me.
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Politics (and any kind of large-scale management where population effects at aggregate level kick in) is basically the art of designing for acceptable possible outcomes under these assumptions of individual behavior distributions, adding in an ergodicity assumption.
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The ergodicity assumption is that if everybody has this distribution, then at any given time, 80% of the people will be behaving in mediocre ways, 16% in craven ways, 3.2% in lucky-good ways, and 0.8% in excellent ways. And nobody is lucky or excellent at all times and situations
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It is a mistake to identify excellence of particular outcomes with general excellence of character and outcomes. I do believe in character --> outcome causation in a specialized sense. If you prove one excellent math result, I'll bet you'll prove more. But politics isn't math.
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A "specialization" can in fact be defined as a scoping of effort in ways that 0.8% excellence and 3.2% lucky-good translates to a LOT of good output, worth a lifetime achievement award. Very few people find the right scoping of their life efforts early enough to get there.
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Well structured disciplines going through a golden age where a lot of people are being profoundly and excellently productive tap into what is a good scoping for a lot of people and provide the parlaying/leveraging mechanisms to compound the effects of excellence and luck.
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But things like politics are structured by necessity rather than the contours of a golden-age possibility. Politics is not the *kind* of activity that can experience golden ages. At best it can fund and get out of the way of activities that *can* experience golden ages.
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It's like the difference between public market investing (nobody can beat the S&P consistently) and VC (there is such a thing as a hot hand and a track record of good investments that are not fooled-by-randomness outcomes).
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I favor strong high-authoritah BDFL CEOs in business but strongly democratic politics over authoritarian rule for precisely this reason. Running a business IS the sort of activity where excellence and good emperors are possible. In VC investing, it pays to follow the hot hands.
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But in politics, believing in an authoritarian leader is basically like believing a particular investor can consistently beat the S&P. Which is why I prefer average candidates who don't pretend they're Great Men who can deliver golden ages.
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Well, to use a cliche example, Einstein had a handful of really good days where he came up with excellent ideas like relativity. I'm sure he had a lot of mediocre days too.
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