The US isn’t really a democracy,that’s kind of the problem; the politicians and elites took away any influence but still left people with a vote - like it’s supposed to mean something.
The country was a reasonable democracy for around 25 years, from the Voting Rights Act to the decision cancel the Fairness Doctrine - approx 1965-1990.
The electorate has always been dumb. Look at how many play the lottery. Anyways, this is why we have a representative government. Unfortunately, we even have the dumb getting elected. There is no good solution though.
It’s kind of a hard sell to claim that a big part of the Trump problem is money in politics since of all the GOP candidates* he spent the least per campaign day during the primaries. The GOP moneyed elites were against him, and yet he prevailed.
Just goes to show, all you need is good ideas and a charming personality!
But seriously, I’d be up for more checks and balances before we go off and start giving people literacy test to vote (what could possibly go wrong with that!). The president can’t get much done domestically without Congress, but he or she can start wars with impunity. That needs to end.
*For practical purposes, let’s say those that made it to the adult table for the debates.
If you’re worried about voters being too stupid, why not stop trying to make voting so convenient and make people go to their polling place to vote unless they have a real reason they need to vote absentee?
Because most plans to “fix” the voting process consist of figuring out ways to make it more convenient for the supporters of one party and more inconvenient for the supporters of the other party.
it seems to me that complaining about money in poiltics is the last thing Democrats should be doing right now. Big money gave them their candidate, and pretty much no money gave the GOP their candidate. Democrats have re-embraced almost all the rest of politics as usual, from earmarks, to strategic lying, to interest group politics, why not just embrace big money in politics too?
Hoping for smarter voters or qualified candidates is a bit much, but requiring the candidate to pass an examination on US Civics (or state civics, as appropriate), would be very reasonable.
Passing a civics test doesn’t mean they’re competent for the job, but it would be nice to feel like the candidate is aware of the job responsibilities and limitations.
How do you put power in the hands of the smart? Is there a panel to vet every voter/politician and say “OK, he’s smart, he passes” and “She’s dumb, she is ruled out?” You would have an absolute firestorm of controversy and corruption and finger-pointing in the process.
Exactly. The number of people who seem to think that we’re electing a King, Emperor or third-world style dictator when we’re electing a President astounds me. As does the power that they ascribe to the sitting President- “he’ll take our guns!” Well, no, Congress would have to do that. There’s precious little a President can do unilaterally, other than executive orders, which could be overturned by congressional legislation (assuming they can bust the likely veto), challenged in Federal court, or simply overturned by the next President through another executive order.
It depresses me quite a bit that my vote, and those of people like me, from intelligent and concerned citizens who are doing our best to keep the nation’s interest as a whole in mind while choosing the candidates to vote for, might be cancelled out by some dumb-shit who thinks Obama is a foreigner, and that Clinton is an illuminatus, and will take our guns and do anti-Christian things.
It’s not even a partisan thing; if someone really puts a lot of rational thought into it and decides for or against a particular candidate, that’s fine, but basing their votes on myths, half truths and outright lies from glurge they got in their inboxes alongside penis enlargement spam really ought not be countenanced.
It’s like having a vote on the direction of the internet by internet message board users; would you really want the 4chan user base to be allowed to vote?
But, this could work, if we are going for such a system.
You have 2 houses, right? You have those who score in the top 20% vote on the members of one house, and those who do not pass vote on the members of the lower.
That way, your more informed population has a greater weight, but the rest of the population is still represented.
Have the lower house in charge of creating and administering the test, then you don’t need to worry about “Ivory tower elitists” making the tests.
It’s true that no party is immune from the corrupting influence of money in politics, although historically Republicans have been by far the greater beneficiaries of it. Beyond that, almost none of the above is correct. Hillary’s nomination was pretty much inevitable not because vast amounts of money were spent to promote it, but because of entrenched political power stemming from long history. And Trump’s nomination could never have come about if he had not exploited his wealth over the years to build name recognition, and secondly, it was largely boosted by a peculiarly warped effect of money in politics, namely, rebellion against a clearly broken political system that isn’t serving the public interest well, and the tragically mistaken notion among the gullible and uninformed that this self-serving con man is going to somehow “fix” that.
Point #1: HRC damn near lost the nomination, and it’s entirely possible that w/o her big money donors (that goes hand-in-hand w/ the party establishment’s endorsement) she would have lost to Bernie and his grass roots green backs.
Point #2: Celebrity gained prior to an election can hardly be classified as “money in politics”. One can imagine ridding politics of money, but one cannot imagine ridding the nation of celebrities. Further, there is broad consensus that government is “broken” and the monied interests did not collude to trick the American voters into thinking that Trump could fix things. In fact, the monied interest tried to do the opposite.
Except that the Constitution is subject to the popular vote. That’s how a bunch of morons decided in 1919 that this very document should prohibit the sale of alcohol across the board nationwide, then decided again in 1933 that it had been a horrible idea. That’s how a bunch of bigots decided at various times to amend state constitutions to show how much they hated gays, though they never succeeded in doing it nationally. Nevertheless, what has the Constitution ever done to protect the civil rights of African Americans or gays? It took, respectively, major federal legislation and major federal ass-kicking to even begin the process of protecting the former, and a Supreme Court ruling to start a similar process for the latter.
One could argue, in fact, that the Constitution itself has sometimes become an instrument of abuse; in recent years, the Supreme Court has engaged in extraordinary acts of judicial activism wherein, on about half a dozen separate occasions, the role of money in politics has become ever more firmly entrenched, and a mind-bogglingly bizarre interpretation of the Second Amendment has equally entrenched the problem of gun violence.
Getting back to the subject, I think it’s fair to suppose that nothing like an epistocracy is likely to ever happen, but the very fact that it’s being proposed by serious political thinkers is indicative of the fact that there is a pretty serious problem that needs fixing.
It’s instructive, though, to try to imagine what the political landscape would be like if such a system could be instituted. Let me do a devil’s advocate thing here and imagine it. If, say, everyone who voted could at least name the three branches of government (about a third of American voters cannot), and knew who their own representatives and senators were (incredibly, fewer than a quarter of voters know who their senators are, and half don’t even know that there are two of them) and their policies and voting records (clearly, even fewer have this level of awareness). It’s hard to believe that this wouldn’t result in a far more intelligent level of political discourse and far more effective and sensible legislation. You wouldn’t have total morons like James Inhofe in the Senate or Louie Gohmert in the House, and there would be zero chance of a clown like Trump getting anywhere near the nomination.
I would imagine that for a very short time, such a system would give Democrats a strong advantage, but the result would be that Republicans would have to up their game considerably. In fact both parties would need to become more fact- and policy-oriented and less dependent on lies and being judged by their hairstyles. Gee, you might even have a Republican party that represented conservatism instead of idiocy and anti-science fact denial. How is that a bad thing? In fact it sounds to me like much the kind of government that the Founders wanted.
I bet dollars to donuts that George Clooney runs for President after Hillary has her run. He’s probably not as stupid as Trump, but I’m not sure he’d be my pick for the office. But he’s a celebrity, a bunch of people would vote for him for no other reason.
I think there should be testing, for sure. Let’s test the candidates. Before you can run, you have to pass a rigorous government exam. Before you can accept any contributions, you have to sit before a panel, uncoached, and present your dissertation. Let’s weed out the idiots on THAT end and let the people have their say.
Remember, just because liberals tend to view themselves as the educated, a lot of Democrats in general are just as dumb and uneducated as their Republican neighbors. You don’t want to alienate that whole voting block with voter qualification tests.
First of all I’m not denying that money played a role – I am, after all, arguing for the malign influence of money in politics in all parties, though it’s not an equal influence. The statement I was disputing was “Big money gave them their candidate”, as if Hillary’s nomination was bought outright. Nonsense. Her nomination was never in serious doubt (IMHO) because she was the only candidate who combined solid name recognition with one of the most extensive resumes in politics and mainstream appeal. She got money because she was the most viable establishment candidate, not the other way around. Bernie made a good showing but never really had a chance because he wasn’t mainstream – he is much too far left for mainstream American politics, which is a tragedy in itself but that’s another story.
You can’t credibly argue in point #1 that Big Money propelled Hillary into the nomination but had nothing to do with Trump’s nomination! The influence of money in politics is not necessarily direct or immediate or the result of direct electioneering. Part of Trump’s appeal arose from having commissioned and paid for a book promoting his alleged brilliance in having made himself allegedly extremely wealthy. Far from disproving the influence of money in politics, Trump’s candidacy practically uses money as a proxy for the candidate himself, redirecting the admiration and worship of wealth to a glorification of the candidate himself. Where would Trump be if he was financially just an average guy but with good ideas? Nowhere at all, that’s where. But as a self-proclaimed very rich dude with no ideas at all, he’s on the verge of becoming the next president.
Cite? Ancient Persia, Greece and Rome, thousands of years of Chinese government, modern Singapore and South Korea all seem to argue against your thesis.
Of course I don’t claim that a dictatorship will always outperform mob democracy. But it’s also wrong to assert that democracy will always outperform a well-functioning “epistocracy.”
Governance in the U.S. functioned fairly well for most of two centuries. Rather than generalities about “philosopher kings” perhaps it would be better to understand what, if anything, has gone wrong here.
Andrew Jackson, widely despised today, was a key figure in the change of the U.S. from rule by the elite to rule by the masses. But did things really change so much? At the local level, towns chose “wise men”; wise men met together to choose wiser men and so on. Some of these “wise men” weren’t really so wise, but at least they were steeped in the facts and politics about the issues.
But those days are gone. If candidates were still selected in smoke-filled rooms Donald Trump would not be on the ballot. Trump is a product of rule by the mob, by “democracy” in its purest form.
“Smarter and more educated than ever” yet with huge numbers choosing Trump? :smack:
It is a paradox! I won’t try to address it in this post, but maybe in earlier times the ignorant people retained enuugh common sense to know how ignorant they were.
We are more educated than ever, but more educated doesn’t necessarily mean we’re operating from the right set of facts. For example, it’s still the conventional wisdom that you should vote based on the issues. Sure, if all else is equal, but rarely are all things equal. There is usually a huge gap in experience, competence, character, and ethics between the candidates. Elections shouldn’t be nearly 50-50 affairs. Sometimes they should be 70-30, or ideally, 90-10. But most people, probably 75%-85%, just vote party preference regardless of whether their candidate is actually objectively better than the other candidate.
We’re educated, but we’re taught to believe certain things that can be wrong in many situations. And educated people can sometimes be amazingly stupid. Such as normally intelligent people deciding that someone is fit to be President because they gave a great speech. And unfit because they gave a poor speech.
BTW, we already live in a mixed democracy/epistocracy. We vote for elected leaders, but we also demand activist government getting involved in extremely complicated issues that not a single elected official is qualified to even begin to understand unless they make it their sole focus for 20-odd years and serving on the appropriate committee. So our elected officials delegate power to “experts” who actually govern us. To some extent this is fine, but not when we actually start to see the bureaucracy as separate from the elected branches of government, which is what’s starting to happen. According to the law, the President, and in some cases Congress, is responsible for what the unelected officials do. Yet we don’t hold them responsible and Congress and the President would rather have no part of any of it unless it’s an issue they decide to care about that week because they want to institute a policy change. So we actually do have an unelected fourth branch of government, and it’s the most powerful part of the government as far as its ability to ruin our lives. If your Congressman or President is doing something that hurts you, you can write to them and threaten to make them pay with their jobs. If a bureaucrat is hassling you, maybe your Congressman will help, maybe he won’t, maybe he can, maybe he can’t. Maybe you have due process, maybe you don’t.
You can always cite an example of educated, informed people making the wrong decision if you look for it hard enough, but that isn’t the question – the question is: are educated, informed voters much more likely to elect candidates who advocate rational fact-based policies that are in the public interest than they are to elect idiots whose policies are based on lies, delusions, and deliberate deception in pursuit of hidden agendas? I think the answer is pretty clear.
And what’s this BS about electing someone because he gave a great speech? I still remember the old TIME article praising Obama’s famous convention speech and predicting that this is a rising star in the Democratic Party, which indeed he turned out to be. But that speech is only what brought him to public attention. What brought him to the presidency was a long, hard-fought battle and an articulate policy platform, and what stands today is his legislative accomplishments and the respect and popularity that he commands in the nation, wingnuts and racists excepted.
Including (according to recent HHS figures) 20 million people now covered by health insurance that weren’t covered before the ACA. Including transforming an executive-branch culture that under Bush II demonstrated an appalling contempt for science, and changing it into a culture of scientific enlightenment where Obama doubled NSF funding early in his first term, encouraged scientific innovation, and instead of having Dick Cheney running around lobbying on behalf of the oil companies and denying climate change, brought the US some international respect by signing the Paris climate accord and setting the stage for environmental progress.
I fail to understand what this is about. Executive branch power comes from the president and his Cabinet and filters downward. Incompetence and malfeasance among civil servants is ultimately the responsibility of the president and his officials, so the public is best served by electing competence at the top.
As for this business of delegating power to “experts”, no, what happens in complex situations is that advice is sought from experts, and it’s the wisdom (or lack of it) from elected Congresscritters and/or executive branch staff that determines whether or not that advice is heeded.
Let me give you some specific examples. One such advisory body that has great international respect is the National Academy of Sciences, established by Abraham Lincoln to be the premier advisory body to the federal government on scientific matters. Under Bush II, reports issued by this body on the subject of climate change were censored and falsified by a gentleman named Phil Cooney, who had been appointed by Bush to chair the Office of Environmental Quality. Cooney was an oil man who was formerly a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, and when the NYT exposed the long-ongoing scientific fraud, Cooney resigned in disgrace and went to work for … Exxon Mobil.
Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Barton (R, TX) had been abusing his elected authority by threatening and harassing climate scientists, including Michael Mann who was hated by Republicans because he had raised public awareness of climate change through his research on long-term temperature reconstructions and the famous “hockey stick” temperature graph. Right-wing motivated witch hunts precipitated multiple “investigations” into Mann’s scientific integrity, all of which exonerated him and indeed praised his accomplishments. Ignoring a National Academy report that also exonerated Mann and ignoring NAS offers of assistance, the idiot senator James Inhofe (R, OK) ignored the NAS entirely and commissioned a political hack to produce an absurd contrary report supposedly exposing flaws in Mann’s research methodologies, which was nothing more than a discredited political hack job. As if that wasn’t bad enough, former Virginia Republican AG Ken Cuccinelli also harassed Mann, demanding all his emails and all records relating to all of his grant applications. Cuccinelli is not just a Republican but a far-right Tea Party lunatic, and his harassment of Mann continued all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court, which finally threw it out.
Just a few small examples of what happens when uninformed idiot voters elect idiot politicians, and reality and science are thrown to the four winds in favor of politically motivated self-serving agendas.
