There is at least one consensus on this thread and that is that the media and advertising need to be “sorted out”.
I am not sure how to do it, but limiting spending would certainly be one thing. Perhaps newspapers should be obliged to give all parties the same space and TV limited in the same way it is in the UK. I’m not sure what can be done about social media though.
It occurs to me that there are organizations actively working to recruit better people to run. Here’s an example:
I wouldn’t go so far as to say they must have worked minimum wage (I don’t think low wages or high wages necessarily make you a better or worse person or more effective politician) but I do think that pulling the majority of the political elite from a narrow educational and employment background is not optimal.
There’s no such concern with my methodology.
Assuming we keep the current method of voting then the big items are:
If the candidate isn’t sure that he’s actually receiving any benefits for a vote and the donators aren’t confident that they’re getting anything for donating money then the whole system collapses. Likewise, spending money on advertising and all of that.
It’s what happened when we switch to the Australia system. Politicians used to pay citizens for their vote. Once people could vote in a private booth, secretly, the politicians stopped trying to buy votes. People just took the money and voted how they were going to anyways, if the payor couldn’t verify that the person had done what they were paid to do. Why spend the money?
This is in theory what many think parties are supposed to do. But when the focus is solely on winning elections, Trump proved the party does not necessarily mean anything. In case his message was misconstrued, he is declining to attend a debate for president exactly that reason.
But I get you are talking about a corporate idea of inviting the best candidates to apply. It certainly has some merits, though also some similarities with technocrats or elites or authoritarian regimes choosing based on compliance rather than competence. The lack of civility will turn off some.
Is the lack of civility inevitable? The persuasive design and variable rewards used by social media and corporate psychologists does not just merely distract us for an hour but tries to change the picture of the world we carry in our heads. Even how we define important matters. People were initially interested in the online firehose of performative anger and suffering precisely because it was not the norm. Seeing life as reflecting that norm means to be bracing for confrontation and disaster; to be always upset.
Rather than being the basis of a fulfilling day, the attention economy makes people less empathetic and induces anxiety. Portraying opponents as beyond persuasion or unworthy of engagement, we have seen unscrupulous politicians overwhelm opposition with constant and disingenuous outrage; even condemning it consumes attention - so helps it spread. This is cyclic, but tomorrow’s politicians try to use what they think works well today. There is nothing inevitable about this, and it will eventually be viewed more objectively and for what it is. But it isn’t going to make it easier to educate or inform anyone. People will be uncivil if this is rewarded, instead of reviled, when this is taken to extremes.
Then those folk will have their chance to elect a different sort when they get called in for duty.
I had a friend who used to say that an avowed desire to hold office ought to be sufficient to exclude someone. I think he advocated appointment through lottery for single terms. Essentially like jury duty. Not sure how far down from President to dogcatcher, but I’m not sure it would result in tremendously worse officials.
Didn’t seem to in ancient Athens, at least for a while.
How is anyone to tell who to vote for or against in regards to incumbents, if we have no way to tell what they did while in office?
First, let me note that you and me and everyone know near nothing on almost every topic. That’s the same for me, as said, I’m not insulting you, I’m just pointing out the fact that literally no one is an expert in everything. The only way to know what is the right way to vote is by assembling experts, talking with them, reviewing hundreds of pages of legislation and analysis, and negotiating with other folk - some of whom might be insane and don’t understand that you can’t and almost are never going to be able to achieve anything like an ideologically pure and perfect result.
You and every other voter are as fit to judge the legislative choices of our representatives as they are to judge the decisions on how best to build the James Webb telescope.
Imagine that a guy goes around saying, “James Webb costs billions of your tax dollars and you had no input into it! If you were in charge, instead of those ninny scientists, we’d be answering the questions that really matter. We’d be looking over Xi Jinping’s shoulder and know exactly how to respond to keep American manufacturing ahead of those rice eaters! We need to make sure that we’re in charge! We need to make sure that the lense is set for looking at Earth! We need to make sure it’s pointed at Earth. Vote for me! Together, we’ll reap the rewards of the most powerful telescope ever invented by man!”
And so, great, the voters get to see if that guy really does what he said. Woohoo? Are you confident that, that’s good?
And do they? Trump passed an executive order that barred Federal money from going to police departments that treated suspects harmfully. He, literally, ordered the Federal government to “defund the police”. He then proceeded to claim that Joe Biden wanted to defund the police, even as Biden clearly said that he had no intent to and - to my awareness - hasn’t. Trump is the guy who reduced sentences for Federal prisoners and Biden is the guy who increased the number of ways for a Federal prisoner to get the death sentence. All of this conflicts with the popular conception of these two individuals and any cites on the matter will just die the death of “facts that just get in the way of reality”.
So, yes, you won’t know how they vote. Instead, you would have to vote for them based on whether they seemed like the sort of person who fits the job description: Willing to sit down with people, to understand the issues thet they’re encountering; able to come up with ideas about how to solve those issues; willing to listen to everyone who would be impacted by potential legislation; and willing to change or discard the law as feedback seems to make seem more reasonable.
You’d just have to vote for them based on whether they seemed trustworthy.
That is the goal of the democratically republican system of government. It’s to find and empower trustworthy people into positions of power over us. It is not to have a personal sock puppet who goes and acts for you, regardless of how ignorant, selfish, or unreasonable your position might be. The ability to hold and jerk a leash only causes the issues that we see in our system.
Elect trustworthy people and you don’t need to question their choices.
Can you name some US presidents throughout history who pass your trustworthy test?
Then there’s no accountability for bad Congressmen. What if 51% of Congressmen voted to make their salary $10 million a year but voters now have no way of knowing which ones were the culprits? Every single Congressmen could claim plausible deniability.
One of the ways that I judge that is by whether their votes accord with their publicly stated positions; and, when those votes don’t so accord, whether they can give a reasonable explanation for the difference.
– I think the electoral college setup may have been originally meant to have people, all the way along the line, voting for those who they knew personally, and whose trustworthiness they were therefore able to judge from such personal knowledge - voters would vote for state representatives who a significant number of the voting pool at the time knew, the state representatives would vote for electoral college members who they knew, the electoral college would choose a POTUS who at least some of them knew. It obviously does nothing of the sort at current population levels.
In the current situation, I have no actual way of judging trustworthiness other than whether their actual actions in office line up with what they said they were going to do, because I don’t know the people.
If votes aren’t recorded, I have no way of knowing whether the representative who said they’d fight for clean air and water voted instead to let the coal company dump what they left of the mountains into the rivers. Do I know and understand the details of how the bill that would have prevented them from doing so needed to be written? No, I don’t. That’s what I hired them – and what they hired all those aides – for. If the representative says ‘That was a terrible bill, it would actually have done x while pretending to do y’, I’ll read the explanation. But I still need to know how they voted on it.
People interested in politics often make the false assumption others share this interest. Yet less than five percent of Canadians are members of a political party. Most want good decisions, as it affects them personally, then vote for the other guy when these fail to manifest.
As an academic, I value education and expertise. Politicians often don’t, as good policy may be politically risky and few want to expose previous crappy decisions even en route to making better ones. And many experts are no such thing, only see through one lens, or have their own motivations. An ideal council of experts may be the best way. But no one would agree on who should serve, experts often lack humility or wide-ranging experiences, and they are still subject to politics, posturing, influence, coercion and corruption.
The Electoral College system seems a useless relic from another time. However, there is little chance of changing it. Anyone doing so would almost certainly try to further game the system. And parties can’t even agree on a budget or even the value of democracy. But that won’t last forever.
Washington. But let’s say that it’s zero and let’s say that it’s all of them. I’m not sure what difference you think it makes?
Let’s say that, until today, we chose who gets to be the person that guards the cookie jar by drawing lots. I propose that we switch to a system where we run a background check on people and if they’ve ever committed a felony then they’re removed from the list of candidates. Otherwise, we still draw by lots.
And now you say, “Well, which people would have passed your test?” Maybe some, maybe none, but what does that have to do with whether the system is better or worse than the existing one?
And how is that good?
Donald Trump holds people to a loyalty pledge. They must be his very obedient yes men. And what sort of employee does that bring him? Does it give him the best and brightest?
Let’s say that I call up a plumber and say, verbatim, “The water in my sink is backing up. What will you do to fix it?” And he says, “You have a calcification in your pipe. I’ll use a chemical agent to dissolve the blockage.” I don’t want to hire that guy. He hasn’t come to my house, he hasn’t analyzed my situation. For all he knows, my kid dropped a bunch of legos down the drain or someone closed a valve somewhere in the building. He has zero basis for his belief that the calcification idea is correct, it’s just something that sounded good.
If someone’s running for office for the first time, they can’t promise doodly-squat. If they are, they’re lying. They haven’t had the position to be able to do the job of analyzing the issues. So if they are giving you a precise recommendation, they’re lying to you. If they do what they said they’d do, it’s inordinately unlikely that they should have.
What should a plumber say, if I call him and give my complaint? He should say, “I would need to look at it, sir. I can’t tell you what your issue is without coming in and looking over your system.” That’s what an honest candidate should say, running for office. Anything else would be a lunacy. So how often do you see that? How do these people know the answer, when they haven’t had the chance to investigate? Why is it good if they do what they said they would do, with that being true?
Does that really change, much, if someone’s running for re-election?
Let’s say that our plumber came in and fixed our clog before (or didn’t). Should we hire him based on his new promise to “pull the Legos out”? If it was Legos before, why didn’t he get the job done before? Is there another plumber saying that it’s something different? Maybe that other guy is right. Maybe they’re both untrustworthy idiots because our current guy didn’t get the job done and the new guy is giving a very specific answer when we know that he hasn’t had a chance to investigate my sink. Again, the right answer is to find the guy who just says, “Look, I’ve got 10 years experience as a plumber. Here are my references. I can’t fix your issue until I investigate it and I can’t promise that you will like the price tag on the repair work. Maybe it will be a little maybe it will be a lot. The fact that these two other guys are both claiming that it’s something easy, yet never seem to be able to get it done makes me a bit suspicious that we’re not going to like what we find out. If you really want to know what the issue is, I swear I’ll tell you.”
How would you hire a plumber? Would it be based on his references or based on what he promised to do, sight-unseen? Would you re-hire him based on whether he did what he promised to do - dump chemical down the drain - or based on whether you got the result you wanted?
Has our health care spending started to come down to a reasonable level? Has immigration been reformed? Do you trust your congress people to tell you the raw, unburnished, hard truths of reality?
Hire different. Keep doing the same thing and you’re just going to keep getting the same result.
Gift link from the New York Times on the opinion page.
The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way.
The better way is to pick people by random lottery.
Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He should persuade his school to select the Dean by a random lottery of all Americans and have that person serve for five years. Then we can test this theory before applying it nationally.
It matters a lot for multiple reasons. We actually have to pick people who are good enough to represent us in Washington and the trustworthy test is just vibes.
A lot of Americans would put Washington on their trustworthy list in spite of the fact that he owned human beings. A large part of why owning human beings is now illegal is the fact people decided that slavery was an issue that was worth disrupting the existing washington consensus over. People could have voted for the most trustworthy of the entrenched political class during the slavery era, which was dominated by slavers. Fortunately people both ran for office and voted based on the practical goal of making the slavers less powerful and eventually abolishing slavery entirely
The idea of ‘hiring panels’ above is reminiscent of citizens’ assemblies - people chosen by lot to be representative of the socioeconomic and political make-up of the community, and invited to give up some of their free time to in-depth consideration of expert evidence and advice - but on a policy issue, rather than individual candidates. That’s what’s credited with settling public opinion on abortion law in Ireland, and in the UK, one was used to develop a consensus on various ways of dealing with climate change.
I suppose our political parties’ vetting of potential parliamentary candidates could and should have that function - but then again, Boris Johnson, Nadine Dorries, and duds/crooks in other parties too.