Yeah, and George Washington said:
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
And we all know how that turned out too.
Succession is a tricky thing in general, and there’s no magic bullet solution, including liberal democracy.
You can keep your unelected monarchies, thank you very much.
Election is false legitimacy. I have yet to have so-called elected official actually represent me or my interests (or the interests of the majority of the population). They make promises, pocket a bunch of money, and then bugger off and blame the next person to fill their seat as the source of the problems they themselves created.
I prefer to have someone in power who actually has to think about long-term things (both liberal democracy and capitalism are antithetical to long-term thinking, apparently), since they’ll be in power (and thus held to account) and if not them, then their heirs or close family members.
In the modern world, an unelected monarch is less likely to bring about economic and social equality than is an unelected Leninist vanguard party (which historically fails at doing that, too)
Haile Selassie brought great reforms in education and improved quality of life for ordinary people. With a lot of pushback from established nobility.
You want to improve quality of life for the people, try expanding their educational horizons* and then asking them to decide what they want. If things go pear-shaped they’ll have only themselves to blame.
I agree up to the “asking them to decide what they want”. Liberal democracies present so few options, in the US there is Pepsi (=Republicans) and New Coke (=Democrats since Bill Clintons). Other countries will sometimes present more labels (Lib Dems=Tab?), but they’ll turn out to be the same sugary shit in the end. And - even if the choices were better - then you have to factor in how much deep and reasoned thought an average person is going to put in when they vote (and I’m not excluding you or me from this either). “Someone promises me an extra $1000 tax rebate now? Who cares about 5 years from now? I’ll vote for that person.” Again, lack of long-term thinking is an issue.
The best thing is devolve as much power as far as it can be devolved, without electing people. And I’m not talk “states’ rights” or anything like that. Let small communities make decisions. Not everything can be devolved, of course. And for those things, you need someone with long-term thinking and a sense of honour and responsibility, and very few people elected to offices of any import have anything close to either of those things.
