That strikes me as something that might have a psychological mechanism.

If a smart person does something repeatedly it's because they think they have no better option ... which raises the question I guess of whether we're missing in our analysis the many times dictators have responded to peaceful protest by crushing it (and then gotten away with it). I don't think so, since that model of governance is all but gone from the world. Anyway, the president of Ukraine just fled to Russia and almost certainly in mid-November there were actions he could have taken that would've led to him still being in power today.

That's perhaps a fault of how people interact though; when we interact with each other, we can't know all the other things that lead up to the interaction.

The structure of hubski isn't linear, everyone's feeds are different, etc. This isn't immediately obvious day-to-day so I tend to forget it.

I suppose in the US that there are things in place that act as a vetting process, like the ability to fund raise or finance a campaign and to marshal popular support, but where are prospective governmental leaders to go to learn how to govern, except in the real world?

Well the idea is to become mayor, then senator, then governor, then president. Or equivalent. But this only works in the first world. Take al-Sisi in Egypt; who knows if he can lead in peacetime? In the US, promoting generals to president has a completely mixed track record.

Putin's grooming a stooge if I recall correctly, but that didn't work for Chavez and Raul Castro is stepping down in four years, so.... And of course glasnost only existed because the Soviets finally couldn't find another system man who was popular enough to run the country.