One of the old-timey sci-fi pulp magazines or an anthology of sci-fi short stories (often from the same source) had a story about a guy who was ‘elected’ president by a ‘lottery’ run by a super-intelligent computer who could, each four years, identify the single person who was most typical/average/representative of the voting population at large.
If anyone knows its title or author…
Well, stop electing police chiefs and judges, and so on, then. Doing this says exactly the same thing.
There is a difference between functionaries and officials (‘civil servants’ as we would say in UK), and politicians which the US seems not to have figured out.
(Sorry @Katryn - a general comment in response to yours, not a personal reply aimed at you.)
Your description is similar but not identical to Franchise by Isaac Asimov. The one person selected by the super-intelligent computer isn’t to be President, but to be the ‘voter’ for President. The idea is that nearly everything is predictable except the human factor, so they submit a single human to a set of psychological tests to identify who the people would have elected. Notably, the elector never actually votes - the ‘correct’ person is chosen by the machine.
The story’s pretty good, and widely anthologised.
That sounds like it may be the one. Thanks.
Even in a large developing democracy. You’ve just summed up the presidency of Andrew Johnson.
This would, in fact, tend to skew the pool towards narcissists and assholes, but whether it would be less skewed is open to debate. I vote “hell no.” (Funny, since voting would not matter a whit in tis system.)
If you are not familiar with Catch-22, you should be.
Not to be contrarian, but literally only Americans with the political view that democracy is obsolete/failed could agree with this point of view.
Kakistocracy!
Disagree. The fascists feel democracy has failed because they lost. There are some on the left feel it has failed because things are not changing fast enough, but they (IMHO) can be won back. The fascists as a matter of principle, despise democracy. For the same reasons the KKK does. In fact, there is a lot of overlap there.
Well at least we’d only get exposed to their bullshit and lies after any chance of stopping them has passed! /s
Laterally related: One in 10 think they could sculpt a replica of Michelangelo's David. One in 5 think it's pornographic. | Boing Boing.
Having one person at the top doesn’t mean that person has much meaningful power. The Prime Minister of Canada, for example, is chosen by the party (even after election) and can be replaced at any time during his term. We vote for a set of ideas, not a person. The actual person can’t do much of anything except give speeches and try to convince parliament to do stuff. The US puts the president on a far higher pedestal than any other representative democracy. Don’t map your experience with America on to other democracies.
And, it wasn’t supposed to be that way. Congress has ceded a great deal of power to the President in second half of the US’s existence.
I wonder, though. Is it, really, not what was intended?
I was thinking earlier about how to claw back more balance in the separation of powers. And realized it’s not really necessary with successful presidents. What do successful presidents have in common? They listen to and support the bureacracy.
What creates the bureacracy? Legislation. So, if anything, the Legislature intentionally empowers the Executive branch to enact the Legislature’s wishes. What could enhance that effect is to codify the independence of cabinet departments from the president. We already have the tradition of an independent DOJ. That could be codified more firmly and spread to other departments.
Require the cabinet positions to be selected from within the department rather than from outside it. And just as congress has to confirm appointments of cabinet positions, require confirmation of removals, too.
Well, throughout the debates on ratification, and in the various Federalist papers, the idea of a unitary executive was viewed with a great deal of concern. Colonists had just thrown off one king, and were not eager to see a new one installed. The original Articles of Confederation were meant to solve that by having no real executive, and watered down central powers. When those didn’t work very well, they went with the current system, but gave the President very little actual unilateral power, and made it difficult, if not impossible, for Congress to get anything done.
I don’t think it (ETA: a strong unitary president) was intended, no. Could it work? Sure. But it requires a president who doesn’t want to exercise a lot of power. And humans are humans, so . . .
It’s especially problematic when Congress cedes power because it doesn’t want responsibility. Ie. the War Powers Act.
Hard disagree.
The 2020 election was a high profile example of democracy overcoming fascism (or at least winning a major victory against the forces of fascism) despite all the serious and ongoing flaws in the system.
If you’re going to dismiss our current system of government as unworkable then it’s on you to come up with a better one before we throw out the baby with the bathwater.
If you look up the history of “literacy” tests for voters, mostly in the Reconstruction South but no doubt elsewhere, you’ll see why this is a bad idea. Test questions can be finely honed, or deliberately misapplied or misgraded, to disqualify anyone who the test designers/graders/proctors want it to. Short form: testing was used to keep people of color from voting in many areas, with undesirables handed the kind of test that couldn’t be correctly answered, while blatantly illiterate whites would just be able to vote regardless of their answers to even simple questions.
The similar corruptibility issue is of course one of the other problems with this “random person” idea: who decides what’s random, how secure the system is, and who the actual “winner” is when that system is part of the political process it is trying to control in the first place? All it takes is one corrupt individual who can slip in some extra code, or do some slight of hand around the rotating bingo cage to make sure the right slip of paper or ping pong ball ends up being selected.
Even as recently as 2017, a major lottery (Hot Lotto) was corrupted by a man, who also was found to have corrupted lottery systems in several states on a recurring basis - systems that had passed all checks and tests just fine and otherwise met all regulations.
All it takes to spoil an entire lottery system, it seems, is the canonical “one bad apple.” Let’s not let that be the person who rules our country, even if God loves him so much that his name is the only one ever pulled out of the hat for decades at a time.
The early treasury department (itself responsible for a great many other things, such as District attorneys) was closely supervised by Congress.
Literacy tests to vote is not the same as requiring that a candidate for office have some basic understanding of how government works. Not even sure how you made that leap.
Well, let me spell it out for you.
To prove you have a basic understanding of “how government works,” you would have to take a test of some sort.
Tests, historically, have always been biased towards some privileged group. Even things like I.Q. tests were discovered to be biased in many ways (culturally, socially, economically), and even most universities and colleges recognize the problem even in the gold standard SAT and ACT such that only 4% of such institutions even require such a test.
Add politics to the testing process, and you’ll have Republicans or those more interested in power than equality making sure that liberals, those who don’t have the same view of the role and mission of government, and anyone else they can force into an “incorrect” answer doesn’t pass the test, and therefor is ineligible to be a candidate.
While all this is avoidable, who’s to say that such a test wouldn’t be legislated to only be held once per lottery, cost $100,000 to take, require a month off of work, and require 100% correct answers to pass, with the questions being so convoluted and confusing that even a Constitutional Scholar wouldn’t be able to answer them without committing treason, but which the pre-chosen elites have already been given the answers to?
And that’s exactly what happened with the literacy tests. They started out with the idea that if you can’t read, you shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and bloomed from there to a tool that could prevent, or allow, anyone to vote depending on what the test-giver wanted.
35 years old, or not, is clear and easy, and is one of three criteria for president. We just saw, with Obama, an attempt to use one of the others, being a native born citizen, to remove him from office, however inept and insane the attempt was. We’re about to see if the third criteria, not having aided or abetted sedition, will apply for the orange turd, and honestly I’m not holding my breath given the current Supreme Court.
In short, power corrupts, politics is about power, all tests are biased, and any test for office will be politicized and biased towards the political ends of those who make the tests. If you still see a leap you don’t understand, please let us know where it is.
Much, much better to run and possibly end up with dozens of kitties and Peter Ustinov.
