[dsfyu404ed]

Good systems are resilient to bad leaders. See the Roman Empire or England for example, neither has any shortage of bad emperors/kings and both avoided violent regime changes or subjugation by a foreign power for many hundreds of years (and counting in England's case)

[dragonwriter]

> See the Roman Empire or England for example, neither has any shortage of bad emperors/kings and both avoided violent regime changes or subjugation by a foreign power for many hundreds of years

Violent regime change was quite common in the Roman Empire as most people use that term, and even in ~thousand years of Byzantine history after the final East/West partition of the Empire it's hard to find a period of more than a couple hundred years without violent regime change; I'm also having trouble finding “many hundreds of years” consecutively without violent regime change in England. I mean “3” is typically the minimum value meant by “a few” and doesn't qualify as “many”, and the last change of government of the UK by armed invasions was 330 years ago, and that seems to be the longest stretch England or the UK seems to have had without violent regime change.

[dsfyu404ed]

I meant "violent" like "there was a war and plenty of destruction" not "the ruler got stabbed to death".

[makapuf]

I'll go further and say that if there is a system, it's precisely to be resilient to bad leaders. If leaders can effectively lead, why have a system over them ? e.g. a system that works when everyone acts out of good will is redundant.

[forapurpose]

> If leaders can effectively lead, why have a system over them ?

Do you mean, 'if the leader is perfect, why not give them absolute power?' The problems with that question seem obvious to me.

[dmix]

Which is why the OP proposed that (rhetorical) question... we have systems in place because we can't expect perfection, nor should the system require all actors to be acting in good faith to function.

So far I haven't seen any evidence that this has not been the case in the US (that the system of controls has failed or has been circumvented). Unless of course you take rhetoric at face value over measuring real-life actions and realistic outcomes, as is popular in partisan politics these days.

[dasil003]

Well there's also the question of knowledge transfer.