Counterfactual counterfactuals about leaders shape the most persuasive political judgments

Evidence

Political life regularly generates such contrary-to-fact conditionals as “If Kennedy had lived, such-and-such would or would not have happened.” Counterfactual propositions are not directly testable, but many of them are so compelling that even the most cautious historian would find them persuasive. Most historians would agree, for example, that if the assassin’s bullet aimed at President-Elect Franklin D.Roosevelt in February 1933 had found its mark, there would have been no New Deal, or if the Politburo had chosen another Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko, or Yuri Andropov rather than Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, the epochal changes of the late 1980s would not have occurred, at least not at the same time and in the same way. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1121

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier treatment of counterfactual reasoning about decisive battles (e.g., the Armada chapter’s claim that decisive battles only validate already-probable outcomes) — here the same logic applies to individual leaders.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is there empirical work on how historians actually weight counterfactuals, or is this purely rhetorical persuasion?