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Edit: In terms of political fantasy, it would be a lot like the president in the show Designated Survivor, an everyday Joe or Jane with their mind in the right place, no real experience, but an eagerness to do right by the populace even if that means going against the grain of DC. Of course, even in the show, that first required the destruction of the existing power structure during a state of the union address. It’s inspiring fiction, though.
Brown_eyed_girl, I do have to say that the question of “Would a political outsider be a better leader” is a great one, and I hope you’ll start a GD thread or similar, if you’re interested too. I don’t have much more to say on that topic but would love to hear what others think, not limited to the context of Biden vs Kanye.
My faith that every randomly chosen person would have their mind in the right place and an eagerness to do right by the populace is a whole lot less than yours.
Some people, sure. But nowhere remotely near everybody. And some people’s idea of ‘doing right by the populace’ is terrifying.
I do wish there were some way of making ‘wanting to be POTUS’ an automatic disqualification for the office. But I can’t think of a way to write the amendment.
For democracy to work, don’t we have to believe on some level that people in the aggregate trend towards good, and that history in long enough spans trends towards justice? If so, yes, there is always the risk of bad apples amongst commoners, but I’d argue statistically the populace overall is far less sociopathic than most politicians and corporate leaders. We have a system right now that propels the worst among us to the most powerful posts. I’d take my chances with the average person, especially in that hypothetical scenario (where their power is already diluted).
In the current electoral system, regardless of who was elected president, there should’ve been a system of checks and balances to prevent, well, most of what Trump has done. The failure of that system I would blame the GOP for, and their purposeful attacks on not just the ideas of their opponents but the structure and values of American democracy itself. We were never supposed to have gotten to a point where the executive, senate, and judiciary are aligned into an unaccountable power bloc designed to exploit and murder Americans, but here we are.
Put it another way, I’d choose incompetent benevolence over competent malice (or incompetent malice, ugh) any day. Governing and politics is something you can teach anyone. It’s a lot harder to teach someone to be ethical, especially someone who actively seeks power by virtue of their career, ambition, personality, genetics, whatever. Those people, like you said, shouldn’t be president.
Agreed, but jeez, what a choice. In a country as great as this, we should be able to expect more of our leaders.
I have hope that a new crop of young women in congress will mature into a generation of benevolent leaders. Time will tell, but they are a lot more inspiring than the dinosaurs.
There were candidates more interesting, younger and likeable. But Biden is experienced, sane, dependable, understands complex issues in detail, has proven somewhat flexible, will likely pick a somewhat “progressive” VP, sets an example by wearing a mask, has some charisma and uses words like “malarkey”. Fiddlesticks, sunshine. Stop boondoggling with all your shenanigans.
Was that my question though? Sounds like something you should start.“Political outsider” is not even a qualification (it isn’t actually), nor an attribute that I consider at all relevant because I don’t believe that simply being a “political insider” alone equates to a lack of good intent. You seem to think so though, but I think that says more about your cynicism toward career politicians (perhaps not totally unfounded) than it does about Biden or any other “political insider” specifically.
Also, if I may continue this tangent, define “political insider.” How many elections does one have to win to become one? Do you think it would be more beneficial to have a government that restricted elected political service to one term or a specific number of years? Is it better for our society if political service just a passing short-term job instead of a career?
Sounds like a lottery would do the trick, but then from what pool would you feel comfortable drawing on to appoint the POTUS?
Please make that argument because it sounds like pure supposition to support your cynicism. Which statistics support your position that sociopathy is more prevalent in politicians and corporate leaders?
I’ve never understood this sentiment. Some of our greatest Presidents were very ambitious men (Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon said his ambition was “a little engine that knew no rest”). Can one be overambitious? Of course. Do some people seek the Presidency for the wrong reasons? Well, duh. The incumbent is Exhibit A. But wanting to be President is not, in and of itself, a disqualifying factor in my book.
Getting back to the topic, would you say that Biden is the latter while Trump and Kanye West are the former? Based on your previously stated support of Kanye West (other than the God-bothering), what about him gives you the impression that he is benevolent? I still don’t get it, but it’s fascinating to me nonetheless. Is there nothing about Biden that seems benevolent to you? I’m not at all his biggest fan and I’m more than a little bit wigged out by his touchy-feely behavior, but he seems to me like a guy who cares deeply about improving the lives of Americans, even if I disagree with the incremental way he wants to achieve that. I don’t get that at all from Kanye West who seems like just another narcissist looking to use a political position to benefit himself.
Political science can be taught to anyone but that doesn’t mean that everyone who learns the concepts is going to be persuasive or effective. Ethics can also be taught and is definitely part of a political science education, but behaving ethically is less about knowledge and more about personality. Political ambition or the desire to be a member a functioning democratic government is not indicative of a unethical person any more than working a minimum wage job is indicative of a lazy person. I’m not saying that nobody who goes into politics is self-serving and power hungry for all the wrong reasons, but I am saying that assuming that everyone is and that there’s no altruism in government at all means that even political outsiders are corrupted simply by seeking elected position. That’s a level of cynicism that is completely unreasonable and I don’t even know how you fix that perception.
No. A lottery would indeed include the people who don’t want the job; but it wouldn’t exclude the people who do want the job.
The job has gotten too big and too complicated for anyone to do properly.
It needs to be done anyway; or, at least, to be attempted. But wanting to take on a job that’s guaranteed to be beyond you is very likely to indicate either not understanding the size of the job, or not caring whether you screw it up.
I grant that there may be a few people who look at that problem and think not either, ‘I can do this’ or ‘I can get enough out of it that I don’t care that I can’t do it’: but may think instead ‘somebody’s got to take the job anyway and I think I’ll screw up less than anybody else who’s running.’ But I suspect that most people who are at that sort of level of combined competence and sense don’t run; especially because in addition to the main problem, there’s a huge level of just plain hassle involved both in running and in holding the job, not only for oneself but also for one’s family. Weeding out the people who want to run, if it were possible to do so, might force more of them out of the woodwork.
Or it might not. Maybe it’s just as well that I can’t figure out how to write the amendment (not that it would have much chance of getting enacted, even if I could.)
That’s been said since at least the Seventies (when Ford and then Carter both sometimes seemed overwhelmed by the job). I don’t hear it said much anymore. I think most of the Presidents since then have been up to the task, even if I disagreed with them (sometimes vehemently) on policy. The incumbent’s immediate predecessor did very well in the job, I’d say.
You cut off my sentence and didn’t address the question:
Do I understand that your ideal pool of candidates for POTUS would be comprised of individuals who did not want the job? And you think that would be an improvement because they aren’t motivated by ambition?
Your mileage, of course, may vary but IME people who really don’t want to be doing the job they have don’t put a lot of effort into doing it well. Exhibit A, I guess, would be the guy currently holding that office. And yes, I’m making the argument that Trump didn’t actually want to be POTUS, but rather he just wanted the adulation he perceived to come with the title.
I think I answered that in post #193. Let me try rephrasing.
We need somebody in that job who understands that it’s too big for them. Most people who understand that it’s too big for them won’t run for it. There may be occasional exceptions.
Trump’s problem isn’t that; I do think it apparent that he doesn’t want to do the actual job, but I think it’s because he thinks he’s too big for it, rather than his understanding that he’s not up to it.
Well this seems to be moving the goalposts. So believing in religion is a mental illness, but who isn’t these days? Are you just making things up as you go?
FWIW, Biden does make his faith central to his life and a lot of his policies stem from his religious beliefs. There was a nice write-up recently about it in the National Catholic Reporter. It’s one of things that really makes me like him. Admire even, going back to the OP question.
I think it’s boring in the sense of not inspiring people or getting them excited about voting for him. For me, it’s enough that he isn’t Trump but I don’t know if that’s good enough for a lot of other voters.
I understand your anger. We have a really cool system set up in this country where the candidate that received fewer votes can win the election. Brilliant, eh? Combine that with a population prone to believing obvious bullshit, and a large percentage of simply nasty people, and it ain’t easy for the good guys to win.
I was addressing the “I’ll never understand the lure of an outsider with absolutely no education, experience, or apparently even interest in political science” part of your later reply, but if it’s not interesting to you, let’s drop it.
I do, if it’s done in excess, i.e. more than a couple terms or say, a decade. I really do believe that professional managerial classes should not exist in democratic societies, whether in government or in the workforce. Managerial duties will continue to exist, but they can be distributed amongst workers/citizens without creating an entire class of manager-ruler-priest-politician-kings.
I do, yes. At the extreme end, I definitely don’t think the Supremes should be serving life terms, no matter how good their music was. At the other end, terms of less than 2 years is probably too short, not enough time for people to even get the hang of the job or understand the nuances of all the issues involved.
So as for concrete numbers, I don’t know, why don’t we start with two 3-year terms and go from there? Or do you have a better suggestion? I think of good government, like good science, as a process of trial and error, and evolving the democratic process itself – without sacrificing its values – is necessary for the sustainability of government as society itself changes. Ours simply cannot keep pace with technological and social innovation. Large swaths of our ruling class refuse to even believe that social innovation is or should be a thing.
And again, I don’t think elections should be the only way to enter public office. I’d prefer a mixture of drafts and elections, with perhaps some weighting given to domain subject-matter experts, e.g. unelected career civil servants with extensive domain knowledge and experience, but who may not want a political job and/or should not have too-extensive power lest they become an entrenched force unto themselves. Just checks and balances. Keep working at it until we find a formula that works. The current one doesn’t work because most of the electorate is arguably disenfranchised.
The details can be worked out afterward. Governments seem to start ok when you put a bunch of idealistic 20-somethings in a bar, surrounded by crisis, and force them to come up with something better.
OK, I’ll admit I didn’t read the primary lit on this; it was probably one of those things I skimmed a few articles on and then internalized in passing. Here’s a few random links, though:
(I will also note that the difference between sociopathy and psychopathy aren’t entirely clear to me. If the distinction is of great relevance in this context, then I apologize and stand corrected.)
Honestly, sorry, there’s been many sub-threads going on and I think they’re getting globbed together?
Neither Trump nor Biden’s degree of religiosity particularly bother me. Biden’s seems relatively harmless, if unfortunate. Trump could probably use a few good Bible lessons, if anything. Or just any exposure at all to basic human decency, religious or not. Kanye’s religiosity DOES bother me.
It is not someone’s degree of faith that bothers me, but their attitude toward pluralism, i.e. whether they feel a need to force their religion upon non-adherents. I don’t care per se that Kanye is religious; I do care that he is anti-abortion. In general I don’t think the proscription of religion (e.g. China) is effective; I’d prefer pluralism + secular science education.
As for benevolence, I think Trump is incompetent and malicious. I think Kanye is incompetent but not malicious OR benevolent, just – as you said – narcissistic. Kanye has an interesting, multicultural background at least. I think Biden is competent and maybe edging ever so slightly towards benevolence, but is also corrupt and corruptible in other ways. I wouldn’t go as far as to say he “cares deeply about improving the lives of Americans”, necessarily. I view him as only a little benevolent (towards Americans), in the same vein as, say, Bush Jr, and somewhat less than Obama.
To me they come from the same good-ol’-boys club (Bush and Biden, I mean; Obama less so) whose basic doctrine goes something like “America is the greatest country ever, under God, and we few chosen ones have been carefully groomed to be elites, and thus we shall serve our country the best because we know the best; where disagreements exist between us, they are minor and repairable, since we both serve the common underlying goal of American prosperity.” It’s not exactly malice, just out of touch with the lived experiences of many American households, both in terms of statistical differences in income and social mobility and also in terms of the values and lived experiences of many minority classes. More pointedly, I did not – up until he released his climate action plan – believe he would be interested in addressing the failures of the status quo. But that climate plan is an order of magnitude more revolutionary than anything I’ve seen or would’ve expected from a Democratic insider. Maybe, to his credit, he does listen.
As for outsiders in general, put it this way: if instead of Kanye, Opera or Taylor Swift or Natalie Portman or maybe even Elon Musk (not my favorite, but possibly worth considering) were running, I’d be more enthusiastic them than most of the current crop, yes, in large part just because they’re outsiders.
As an example, Portman in particular has values – at least in the public eye – that largely seem to reflect mine, even though she is both religious and lacking political experience. I’d not only vote for but would probably campaign for her. On the other hand, if Bloomberg or Bezos were running, yes, they’d get a slight plus for being outsiders, but huge negatives for being asshole billionaires.
When I was younger and not very politically informed (not to say I’m an expert now), I voted for Schwarzenegger because he was an outsider. That was before I truly understood how evil the GOP was in the process of becoming. I’m not sure if Schwarzenegger knew that, either.
Nowadays, my preferred outsider is simply AOC – assuming, fingers crossed, she stays starry-eyed and left-populist after a few terms in DC. Her, I’d take a bullet or ten for. Given the way this country is headed, that probably isn’t too far off.
Exactly. I think you can teach political and ethical frameworks to anyone, but “ethical behavior” is largely, I think, a product of one’s value systems (which is partially, but not only, informed by personality). That’s much harder to drill into someone past their teens or 20s or so. It’s part of the reason I would prefer younger people, whose neuroplasticity hasn’t decreased so much yet, to be in power. That, and they also have less entrenched wealth/status/family/tradition to protect, and are thus more willing to take revolutionary leaps into the unknown.
I do think there is very little altruism in United States government, especially among the elected officials. Not none, just little. But I also don’t think there is rampant malice in government, except in the GOP – which has become the straight-up Party of Evil. Where I advocate a revolutionary change to the government, it is not because I think mainline Democrats are evil, but because I think they are too beholden to the current power and economic structure, not only by virtue of their incumbencies but also the amount of amassed wealth and power they’ve accumulated, i.e. they have too much vested self-interest to consider anything outside the status quo. They fundamentally do not believe our current democratic system is broken. I do. That doesn’t make them evil, it just makes them non-aligned with my political desires.
How can you look at American politics in 2020 and not be cynical?! As for how to fix that perception, well, you fix the damned broken system, and keep fixing it year after year, decade after decade, in pursuit of that “more perfect union”. Sometimes it calls for small incrementalism. Other times, like today, it calls for radical leaps forward.
I am not sure if I’m being unclear, or if this is some game of attempted “gotcha”. Religiosity isn’t a binary thing, but a continuum. In summary, this is what I think:
- Religions are stupid and irrational
- People are allowed to believe stupid, irrational things
- A large percentage of the world suffers from some form of mental illness, from slight to severe. Some of it involves religion, but not always.
- Shaping one’s life around a belief in an stupid, irrational thing is a form of mental illness. The severity of that illness is correlated with the severity of that belief, from mild (“Christmas and Easter”) to moderate (“My faith won’t allow me to have an abortion, but I won’t try to legislate away that right, or attack gays”) to extreme (“I am a fundamentalist Mormon who believes the state of Utah should be an independent theocracy”).
- People with mild mental illness should not be precluded from office, any more than reformed felons, Muslims, gays, people born in Hawaii, whatever.
- People with severe mental illness, whether because they’re religious extremists or otherwise, should not be voted into office
It’s really that simple, and as with any other individual running, should be evaluated case-by-case basis. With Biden in particular and that article you mentioned (this one?), he said:
“I accept my church’s position on abortion. … I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews.”
Great. As an agnostic with atheistic leanings, that’s really all I’m looking for. A tolerance for people of different religious backgrounds.
Look, someone can worship virgins, water-walking zombies, or George and His Merry Band of Laser-sword Muppets all they want. If they don’t use that as weaponized legislation or a divide-and-conquer strategy, it’s fine with me, even if it’s not ideal. But if they cross that line and try to impose their religion on a secular or multi-faith society, then it’s a deal-breaker.
And there is the rub. The as shown in the recent primary, the far left Sanders/revolution supporters make up less than one half of the left most party we have which itself is about half of the electorate. So being generous, they make up a little over 1/4 of the electorate. We live in a Democracy, so 1/4 of the electorate doesn’t get to decide which way we go, despite how much they want it or how much they “know” that they are the only thing that can save us. No amount of yelling on message boards of boycotting elections is going to change this. Or rather it might change this but not in the way that they want, as reelecting Trump might put the kabosh on the whole democracy thing.
Just playing the odds, for all of Biden’s milquetoastness, there is far and away a larger chance that he is actually a radical in disguise who will enact all of the reforms that you believe in your desire, than there is that your strategy of staying at home out of spite (and convincing others to do so as well) will result in a totally revamping of our entire political system to suit your whims.