I have a feeling we're slowly slipping towards the conflict between the "impersonal forces" and "great people" views of history :-)
But I guess the question here is whether you want to discuss people or whether you want to discuss systems. Of course they are related and interdependent, but still. Going back to the source of this subthread, I find thinking about tensions between "rebels" and "nomenklatura" in US political parties to be moderately interesting (especially in the context of how they deal with the need to overpromise during the campaign). I find Donald Trump to be very uninteresting. YMMV, of course.
I have a feeling we're slowly slipping towards the conflict between the "impersonal forces" and "great people" views of history :-)
A synthesis of the two views clearly outperforms either view on its own. There seems to be a difference between, basically, forest fires and earthquakes--both rely on long build-ups (the impersonal forces contribution) and when they happen may be surprising (I couldn't tell you when the housing bubble would burst until it had but I could tell you that it would eventually), but the while there's little con...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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