Our politics has changed irreversibly since the founding, yet the Constitution has survived. Might that be because it rests on eternal truths?

Our parties, as liberal and conservative, oppose each other over progress in the drive toward ever-greater equality.

Our parties are the Democrats and the Republicans as electoral and governing bodies, liberals and conservatives in ways of thinking. Increasingly, Democrats are liberals and Republicans are conservatives, the phenomenon known as polarization, by which we more and more divide ourselves politically, in our parties, by our ways of thinking. We tend to think as partisans facing opponents.

It is a pleasure to find a book on political leadership that imposes no theories or models but studies actual political leaders, dozens of them from many countries, in a historical survey from the beginning of the 20th century.