Charisma and the Fall of Rome

Augustus's principle is the closest that we've come to a political system built around charisma. And there's an argument for it in the sense that if you have a very, very bad emperor,. There's an excuse built into the Roman Empire's political system for deposing bad emperors. But it causes a lot of civil conflict. The Vandals were able to escape from a Roman general who had them pinned down because that Roman general was distracted by a civil conflict.