• The_Sasswagon@beehaw.org
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    1 day ago

    I agree, the president should be the best we can get, but infortunately we don’t elect people to be good at the job. The nature of elections selects the person who is best at elections at that moment. Sometimes that person happens to be really competent but that seems to be the exception and not the rule.

    I’d like to think this is a problem with American voting specifically, or maybe first past the post election systems, but I worry that this is the trend of democracy as a whole. It seems like all democracy is sliding that direction, and I can’t think of many safeguards in place to resist it.

    I sat with it for a moment, and I think parliamentary systems do seem more resilient since they require experts to be appointed or hired to do the real work, while the elected officials are steering the general direction. That falls apart of course when the appointed experts are selected for reasons that have nothing to do with expertise.

    I don’t know what a solution to this is, and I think that is by design too, though it may just be the way the human brain works, I don’t know. It’s very hard to imagine new ways of doing things that are very different, and it’s even harder to see a clear path to that different future. I’m hopeful because good people are working on it, but I’m worried because the problems are so titanic.