Charisma versus Competence:Styles of Politician, Polity, and Voter.

Problem: the president doesn’t know your name.

People tend to  follow the charisma/influence/coalition model because it makes sense in tribes, or other Dunbar number grouping,  where everyone knows each other.

However, it does not scale up. Larger polities are run technocratically and bureaucratically by people largely unknown to the public, who implement plans and programmes. Policy does matter at that scale, because the choice policy is the choice of plan.

Dunbar number tribes don’t build intercontinental railroads or public cool systems. Their leaders specialise in crisis management. Our  instinctive, System I judgements about who is a charismatic leader are probably well tuned to selecting good crisis managers.

Misapplying the charismatic model to advanced states results in a succession of politicians who charm but disappoint, because their technocratic skills aren’t in line with their charisma.

However, advanced states aren’t insulated from crisis.  Wartime andpeacetime leaders should be selected by difference criteria.

There are difference kinds of leaders, different kinds of social groupings to be led, and different kinds of voters. The charisma-orientated gut-instinct voters are the despair of the policy wonks, forever rejecting the well laid plans of such-and-such a politician because they judge their eyes  to be too close-set. But the wonks aren’t always right because character matters in a crisis.

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Myopia Makes Politicians Seem Worse ThanThey Are.

The job of a politician is to allocate resources between many competing interests.
Since there are limited resources, most people will have you wait for their particular problem to be fixed. (Resources tend to be scant because voters don’t like paying to much tax) If a thousand people need their drains fixed, the first ten or so might get them fixed on day one, the last ten or so will have to wait for weeks or months.

People don’t like generally notice politics when things are proceeding as normal. They notice when there is a specific problem. That specific problem is the only issue to them. They have an ants eye view. If they are number 875 on the drain fixing list,that is an intolerable delay to them. But, from the eagles eye view, someone has to be numbers 875.

Why Everybody Thinks The Other Party is against Freedom.

Everyone thinks their political perspective maximizes freedom, because people choose perspectives that allow them to do what they want (hunting, drugs) whilst forbidding the things they don’t want to do (drugs, hunting). The Typical Mind Fallacy makes them think that maximizing the kind of freedom’s of interest to them is “maximizing freedom”.