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Definitions of revolutions differ one from the other.  And revolutions differ one from the other. Some revolutions, for example, are bloody and others are not.

But all political revolutions have at least four things in common. First, they are an overthrow of the previously existing order. Second they are directed from below against those up top. Third, they are driven by anger so intense and relentless it ends in upheaval. Finally, they require leadership, generally a single political figure who previously was an outsider, who promises a brave new world.

What has happened in America in recent months is a revolution – a revolution against the Establishment, a revolution against the political Establishment, and a Revolution against the Republican Establishment. Make no mistake about it: Donald Trump has led an American revolution.

No coincidence that Trump’s success yesterday among Indiana Republicans was mirrored by Bernie Sanders’s success yesterday among Indiana Democrats. Unlike Trump, Sanders is not likely to clinch his party’s nomination for president. But to have this previously anonymous Socialist give Hillary Clinton a run for her money is a reminder that whatever the ultimate outcome among Democrats, they crave change, just like Republicans.

Trump’s victory is not the end of leadership. But it is the end of American leaders as we have known them – and it is the end of American followers as we have known them. The former have been destabilized and the latter reenergized.

If you were hiring a contractor to build your house, presumably you’d hire one with experience building. If you were hiring a driver to drive your car, presumably you’d hire one with experience driving. If you were hiring a tailor to make you a suit, presumably you’d hire one with experience tailoring.

But for some reason this minimum standard – “experience required” – does not apply to hiring a leader. It certainly does not apply to hiring an American president.

My objection to the projection of Donald Trump on the national stage has nothing to do with psychology or ideology. It has everything to do with his lack of experience – his complete lack of experience as a political leader.

He would insist that he has been a leader and he would be right. He has been a leader, in business, and a successful one at that. But I would no more suggest someone for American president who had not a lick of experience in government than I would suggest someone for the New York Yankees who had not a lick of experience playing baseball – whose only experience in sports was playing for the New York Jets.

Nor is this time the first time. Last time around we voted into the Oval Office a man who had government experience – but not much. Barack Obama was elected president of the United State after having served in the U.S. Senate for just over one half of one term.

There is no other occupation that requires so woefully little of those who profess to practice it. It’s nuts when you think about it – that so many of us are willing to entrust the national welfare to a rank amateur.

To follow the scandal at Volkswagen is to be stunned anew, stymied anew, by our ignorance of bad leadership. We know no more about bad leadership now than we ever did – a miserable discredit to any of the ostensible experts. A miserable discredit to anyone even vaguely related, anyone in the hard sciences, the social sciences, anyone who presumes to study the human condition.

Volkswagen has already admitted to equipping some 11 million cars worldwide with software that enabled it to cheat on emissions tests. And the costs have already been huge: personal costs, professional costs, political costs, consumer costs, climate costs, reputational costs, and obviously financial costs, which will in the end be staggering.

How could this have happened? How could Volkswagen’s leaders and managers get themselves, their company into such a miserable mess? Did they not know right from wrong? Did their greed to succeed color their judgement? Did they really think that they could indefinitely get away with wrongdoing on such a massive scale?

There will, of course, be case studies aplenty of how this all came to pass. But they will all be inadequate to the magnitude of the task at hand. What this case merits is nothing less than a massive, expensive, and enduring commitment to unraveling how what happened did.

Bad leadership is a disease. It’s not a physical disease. It’s a social disease no less invasive or destructive than its physical counterpart. Unless and until we recognize the parallel, bad leadership will remain incurable, impossible to root out in the future any more than in the past. Sad. No, tragic.

For the better part of her tenure as German Chancellor, Angela Merkel could do no wrong. She was that popular at home. She was that respected abroad. And she was so successful at wielding her low key approach to power that she effectively led not only in Germany, but in Europe. For the most of the last decade it was Merkel, more than any of her European counterparts, who was the fulcrum on which the continent turned.

Those days are now over. The worm has turned. Ever since Merkel put out a humungous welcome mat for Middle Eastern migrants a year ago, her domestic approval ratings have dropped and her foreign policy creds have diminished. This was exacerbated in the last week when her new best friend forever, Turkey’s autocratic president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, put the squeeze on her. Knowing that he had gained the upper hand in containing the flow of migrants, which had become Merkel’s highest priority, he insisted that she permit prosecution of a German comic who had had the temerity to insult him. To the dismay of fully two thirds of Germans, the Chancellor buckled under heel of the president.

My point is not to remark on Merkel’s original decision to allow more than a million migrants to settle in Germany in one year. Nor on her subsequent decision to make a pact with the devil – Erdogan – to get him to help her staunch the flow. Nor is it even on her decision a few days ago to compromise on free speech, to permit prosecution of a comedian to go forward.

Rather my point is to point to the perils of power prolonged. Merkel has already been chancellor for ten years. She is tired and so are her followers. The large majority of Germans who for a decade were putty in her hands are putty no longer. Their patience is wearing thin and their desire for new blood in the Chancellor’s office is becoming palpable.  If Angela Merkel wants her reputation as a great global leader to remain intact, she had better clean up her mess as rapidly as possible and then scamper on out of the public eye.

As anyone who knows me really or virtually will not be surprised to read, it’s been hard for me to keep my mouth shut – hard for me not to blog!

So I will blog, periodically, episodically, today about one of the most under-appreciated and least-discussed trends in global business. It’s the decline of the CEO – the diminishment of his (still, almost always, “his,” not hers) power, authority, and influence.

I am not saying anything startlingly new. In fact, I blogged about just this subject on December 21^st. But in recent weeks have been fresh reminders of a trend now so strikingly in evidence it’s beginning to amount to a game changer.

I will spare you a list of examples that have piled up even in the last few months. Instead I will mention only two.

The first is what’s been going on in Sweden. After a property scandal, Swedbank lost both its chairman and chief executive officer. Another bank, Nordea, was called “shameful” by Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Lofven, for helping clients with offshore investing. (Nordea’s transgression was made public by the leaked Panama Papers.) In 2013 was a boardroom shakeup at TeliaSonera, the telecommunications company, over corruption in Uzbekistan. And in 2015, the forestry group, SCA, ran into trouble over the use of corporate jets by executives and their families.

Such upheavals are all to the good. Corporate governance in Sweden is working as it is intended to work. In so far as is reasonably possible, it is keeping management on the straight and narrow. How? By giving Sweden’s investors control over the composition of boards – as opposed to giving such control to the boards themselves. While this confirms the effectiveness of a system in which, for once, the fox is not charged with watching the hen house, it similarly confirms that greed is pervasive, even in the fantasyland that is Scandinavia, and that, increasingly, there is a willingness to throw the rascals out.

The second example of the decline of the CEO is what happened just this week at BP (formerly British Petroleum), one of the world’s “supermajor” oil and gas companies. Angry shareholders mounted an unprecedented protest again the company, rebelling against a 20 per cent pay rise for CEO Bob Dudley. Who could blame them? The board’s decision to pay Dudley nearly $20 million for 2015 came hard on the heels of a miserably bad spell for BP – the company recorded its biggest ever financial loss, axed thousands of jobs, and saw its share price crater.

What was BP’s board thinking?! Was it aching for a breaking?! Board members beware! Your failure to read the handwriting on the wall is much more likely than it used to be to result in your collective rejection and individual embarrassment.

I AM WRITING A BOOK ABOUT LEADERSHIP.  YES, YET ANOTHER BOOK ABOUT LEADERSHIP! AND ABOUT FOLLOWERSHIP… AND ABOUT CONTEXT!

I’M GOOD AT WALKING AND CHEWING GUM AT THE SAME TIME. BUT  I’M LESS GOOD AT WRITING A BLOG AND A BOOK AT THE SAME TIME.

SO FOR THE TIME BEING I AM GIVING UP BLOGGING  – WHICH, DURING THIS CAMPAIGN SEASON, IS AKIN TO GIVING UP CHOCOLATE.

So obsessed are we with leaders that we sideline those who make them. We sideline followers. The media particularly, particularly now, during the presidential campaign, is so obsessed with a handful of candidates that the American people get short shrift.

We’ve heard about the Angry American. But we have little additional sense of who is upending the Republican Party. Of who is transforming America’s political discourse. Of who come November will fashion our future.

One thing we do know or should – it is not Donald Trump. He is no more than, though no less than, the vessel into which millions of Americans pour their political sentiment. It is our response to Trump that has plucked him from political obscurity and plopped him on to the political equivalent of center stage. Had we the people not been so hysterically happy to have him into our political midst, he would have stayed in the political wilderness where he lived all his life – until he didn’t.

So who are we? More particularly, who are those among us who are Donald’s Apostles, his fervid and fervent supporters who have stuck by him in spite of (because of?) his notoriously, occasionally even obnoxiously bad behavior?

• Many are new to the Republican Party.
• Many are more populist, less ideological.
• Many are ready to break with traditional Republican positions.
• Many have an antipathy to party leaders.
• Many have an antipathy to anything that smacks of the establishment.
• Many have transitioned from being politically apathetic to being politically energized.
• Many are angry – and scared.
• Many have a high school education or less.
• Many are older not younger.
• Many are on the lower half of the income scale not the upper.
• Many are not traditional conservatives.
• Many have broken with traditional Republican orthodoxies.
• Many cheer the candidate even when he attacks otherwise sacred Republican cows.
• Many – about 60 percent – think that President Obama is a Muslim.
• Many have given up on the American Dream.

Bernie Sanders has been described as Donald Trump’s Democratic counterpart. But Trump is sui generis. He mirrors the moment. He mirrors us. He is us. Not all of us – but enough of us to change presidential politics forever.

Whatever the results of the caucus in Nevada and the primary in South Carolina, this much is near certain. The days of the dueling dynasties – the Bushes versus the Clintons – are done. There is nearly no chance that come the November election the faceoff will be what many had feared: Republican nominee Jeb Bush against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

A year ago odds makers were betting this was the likeliest outcome. Among other reasons, it was in keeping with American tradition. During the modern era the son of a president has been roughly 1.4 million times more likely to become president than his supposed peers. Calculated differently, eight of our presidents have come from just four families – the Adamses, the Bushes, the Harrisons, and the Roosevelts.  Seen from yet another perspective, so entrenched have been the Bushes and the Clintons at the top of the ticket, that Americans under age 38 can remember only a single election without a member of one or the other family running for president or vice-president.

No wonder that in the year of the Angry American the prospect of a contest between Jeb and Hillary is too much to swallow, way too much. No wonder that this year of all years we reject the idea that the wife of a former president be pitted against the son of one former president and the brother of another. No wonder that to all appearances the appearances of Barbara Bush and George W. Bush have had little or no impact on the prospects of her son Jeb, and of his brother Jeb. And no wonder that to all appearances the appearances of Bill Clinton have had little or no impact on the prospects of his once trammeled and now touted wife Hillary.

Barbara, George, and Bill seem to smack of the past, not the present, not to speak of the future. In this, the year of our impatience, of our impertinence, they insult our intelligence – as if we would vote for a man, or for a woman, based on blood or bond of marriage.

How to explain Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders? One way is as a reaction formation. A manifestation of our rebellion against politics as usual – including politics in which nepotism has played an always prominent and sometimes putrid part.

It is finally fully obvious that Bernie Sanders has to be taken seriously as candidate for American president. It will no longer suffice to ask with a smile or a smirk, depending on your point of view, “Who would’ve thought it possible?” Who would’ve thought it possible that a previously unknown Jewish, Socialist Senator from Vermont, via the borough of Brooklyn no less, is wiping the floor with his opponent, the ostensibly impregnable Hillary Clinton. It behooves us instead to take the man seriously. To move beyond his by now familiar avuncular presence, to his substance.

So far we have been satisfied to listen to him list a litany of ends – but not hint at any means. Income inequity, stagnant wages, rising costs of health care, high rate of student debt, excessive incarceration, unmistakable climate change, and decaying infrastructure – these are just some of the problems he promises to remedy. But how exactly? Well, we don’t really know. What we do know is that Sanders says over and over and over again that he will fix what ails us by taxing the rich – rich individuals and rich institutions. How this is supposed to be politically feasible without a radical change in the composition of Congress or, conversely how the composition of Congress is supposed to be changed radically, remains unaddressed.

Also unaddressed is how Sanders would lead on foreign policy. We know by now that foreign affairs are not his strong suit. But he has come too far too fast to continue to avoid the specifics. He must speak to the international system. And he must demonstrate that he is at least somewhat familiar with the international system – as opposed to being worryingly unfamiliar.

Above all, since we have to presume that he means it when he describes himself as a Democratic Socialist, we are entitled to know what exactly what to him this descriptor means.  What is Democratic Socialism in the American political context? I’m not against it – not necessarily anyway. I just want to know how Sanders defines it and how he proposes to implement it.

Meantime… Socialism for Dummies:

• Historically the words Socialism and Communism were sometimes used interchangeably. Now they generally are not.
• This stems from their origins, largely though not entirely in mid to late 19^th century Europe.
• While Socialism has at various points flourished in Europe – in some European countries it still does – it never gained real traction in the United States.
• Socialism suggests a Utopian ideal in which economic as well as political equity is widely realized.
• Socialism has sometimes been dreadfully distorted, as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which, during Stalin’s time (1925-1953), was a brutal dictatorship under which the government killed many millions of its citizens.
• Socialism, Social Democracy if you will, has sometimes been successfully realized, as in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, notably in Scandinavian countries including Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
• When Social Democracy is successfully realized – as in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden – it generally receives high marks for good governance. Moreover, the Scandinavian countries tend to rank very high by many measures including education, health, longevity, income distribution, and happiness. Yes, happiness.
• Sanders appears to admire Scandinavian governance – an admiration widely shared. But, whether one can apply say, the Norwegian model, to the US remains very much an open question. Norway is a country of some 5 million people. The US has a few more – some 313 million more.
• A Social Democrat, presumably also a Democratic Socialist, believes that politics should be democratic and economics socialist.
• Arguably there is a difference between being a Social Democrat and a Democratic Socialist, though what Sanders might think of this distinction is unclear.
• A Socialist economy is one that has relatively equal income distribution and relatively equal ownership, or even shared ownership, for example, of the means of production.
• The seeds of Sanders success were sown by the Occupy movement. The roots of his success go deeper.
• Democratic Socialism can mean many different things to many different people. Which is one of the reasons it’s high time for Sanders to dispense with his usual bromides. High time for him to tell us what he means when he declares that America should be, simultaneously, Democratic and Socialist. And high time for him to tell us how, realistically, he intends to get from here to there.
• Democratic Socialism has been alien or, at least, foreign to the American experience. It’s  why no member of the ubiquitous press thinks to ask The Bern to explain why he has called himself a Democratic Socialist –  not a Social Democrat. Or, for that matter, until recently, a Democrat.

These things happen almost imperceptibly. They happen piecemeal, and over a period of time, at least a number of years. Moreover, they happen, sometimes, in places and in ways that are unanticipated, so that we’re caught by surprise when we look close and careful and see that things have changed not in a minor way, but in a major one.

So it is with China. For some time now, at least for a couple of years, the president, Xi Jinping, has tightened the noose around the necks of dissenters, ordinary people generally who, in some way, register disapproval or withhold support. For a time, this noose-tightening was, or so it seemed, gradual. Moreover America’s overweening desire has been to make peace, to, in the interest of comity with the world’s other major power, look the other way even as repression there rises.

Which raises the question of when do we stop? When does the U.S. government stop playing nice for the ostensible sake of its long-term, multi-layered relationship with China? And, at what point do we, the American people, stop, say, traveling to China, or buying Chinese products, because we do not want to support a government in the habit of punishing, severely, its critics?

China has one of the world’s worst records in human rights. Dissenters are arrested or disappear on a regular basis. Moreover, there is a crackdown on civil society that is impossible any longer to pretend does not exist.

As anyone who has studied dictatorial leadership knows, concomitant with the squelching of the followers is the exaltation of the leader. And so it is in China. Particularly in the last year Xi has demanded from his subordinates, and received from his subordinates, their absolute loyalty. And he has sent to the Chinese people the same unmistakable message: every day are references to the “core” leader in China’s state-run news media, and every day his portrait dominates government messaging.

China is by no means alone in its recent turn from citizen activism to citizen repression. Russia is similar under the thumb of Vladimir Putin, as are Egypt under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But Xi Jinping takes second place to no one in his quest to resemble the dictators of times past. Times we thought had come and then gone.