Question for the Day

Sometime when I was very young, I noticed that as a nation moved toward a transforming crisis -- France at the end of the 18th century, Russia at the start of the 20th century -- the person in charge was an idiot. The question I had was -- did the crisis generate the idiot, or did the idiot make sure the crisis could not be solved? Looking at the US today, I still don't have an answer to the question.