Comentario sobre Job 12:17

madness Heb. שולל. It is a noun, ‘madness.’ He leads them away with madness when He wishes to confuse and destroy their wisdom, as in (Isa. 59: 15), “and he who turns away from evil is considered mad (משתולל)”; (Ps. 76:6), “The stouthearted became mad אשתוללוּ.” The “tav” in משתולל and in אשתוללוּ [is inserted because] so is the structure of the Hebrew language: in a word that has a radical “shin” or “sammech,” and which is used in passive or reflexive conjugation, a “tav” is placed after the first radical, like (Ecc. 8:10), “and they will be forgotten (וישתכחו) in the city”; (Micah 6: 16), “For the statutes of Omri are kept (וישתמר)”; (Exod. 9:17), “You still exalt yourself very high (מסתולל) above My people”; (Ecc. 12:5), “and the grasshopper shall drag himself along (ויסתבל).”

The decline into tyranny or corruption that almost always afflicts even the best self-governing political and national institutions is indicative of the illusion of free-will. Even the wisest of leaders ultimately fails, for everything is predestined by God's foreknowledge.
Malbim identifies two types of government:

Me makes...fools Heb. יהולל, He makes mad, an expression of folly and foolishness.

He regards verses 17 and 18 as referring to the one-man rule of a monarchy

and verses 19 and 20 to the representative government of a republic.