Until you consider that everyone is born into a quasi-feudal arrangement where they owe fealty and taxes to a country culture and government they didn't choose, and the only choices of leader are limited to those willing to climb the greasy pole of politics - typically self-selecting sociopaths.
This is unfortunate, but it's also an invariant of human behaviour. The alternative is to get leaders through inheritance, which isn't any better.
So the best thing to do is to try to nudge the system in a direction where the worst tendencies are mitigated: build institutions in which non-sociopaths can thrive politically, and allow a reasonable path for outsiders to join the political process.
The US in particular is very bad at both. First past the post election systems don't provide a path for outsiders to join, which makes them seem stable until they suddenly become very volatile. And the fact that all elections in the US are personalized favours sociopathy over competence in politicians (compare the US system to one where you vote for a party instead of a person; in the former, people who are competent but lack charisma can still rise in the ranks of a party and get to power, while in the latter everything devolves to low-quality popularity contests).
