By Michael F. Duggan
I know that exceptional national leadership is the exception rather than the rule. Without necessarily embracing monarchy, one could argue that there were more great leaders among the 41 kings and queens of England since 1066 than among the 45 U.S. presidents since 1790 (although I am not sure how you compare a medieval warrior king like Richard the Lionhearted to a modern social democrat like Franklin Roosevelt). Britain is a small nation and its monarchy has been drawn from a few regal families. The United States is a sprawling land empire, whose system is increasingly open to all comers. Its political history is the history of the expansion of the franchise.
I would not go as far as Henry Adams, who saw the succession of U.S. chief executives as essentially a record of entropy disproving Darwin’s theory. Rather, there seems to be something counterintuitive at work suggesting that a larger pool of potential leaders does not guarantee good, great, or even better leaders.
Consider: The entire generation of the Founders and Framers (actually three generations, stretching from Franklin, born in 1706, to Hamilton, born in 1757) was drawn from a population of between 2 and 3 million (far fewer if we only count the white male elite population that was eligible to hold office). Lincoln was drawn from a population of around 31.4 million, and FDR from a population of around 125 million. The current U.S. population is around a third of a billion people, perhaps considerably higher, and the yet best we can do is Biden and Trump?
It seems that we have effectively fine-tuned our system to eliminate or scare off the best potential leaders among us. Either that or the brightest and most capable people today are either too greedy or cowardly (or both) to run for high office.