361
McConnell and Feinstein episodes raise age concerns about US leaders
(www.washingtonexaminer.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Politics
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I think that part of the problem is we need to enable younger and poorer people to run for office. Potentially with a universal campaigning platform or something similar, there needs to be a way for less privileged people to run for office if we're going to fix this country.
This is why Athenians considered representative electoral systems to be of the oligarchical political type rather than the democratic. It was apparently the understanding then that such a system is one in which the rich and powerful rule by way of money and influence, as opposed to a democracy in which rulership was determined by lottery.
The money in politics and the fact that the Supreme Court can act unilaterally to decide that unethical-and-disastrous decisions are "OK" because they appointed 2 supreme court seats when one branch of the government suddenly decided they could not do their job, but only when it caused a constitutional crises in THEIR favor. Yes, the ones who lost out on that are the majority, even though we are made to believe that minority opinion should be respected in order to ensure "democracy" when it seems like the only people who actually see the benefits of all this equality and corrupt control of congress are "rich" people, in every single instance... there's never a case where Mr. homelesss-guy-addicted-to-Fentenyl won the case and now the state pays him to rectify the horrible wrongs they had in not taking care of him when he needed it the most.
You just need to spend the next 40 years grooming law students and infiltrating the judicial system. EZ PZ
You need money to run and young people done have the money.
I forget who it was, possibly Andre yang, who said that the money spent on campaigns should come from a pool and every vote you get in a primary translates to how much federal money you are granted or something.
I forget, but there are plenty of options, but it will only take power from the people who have it , so, of course nothing will change.
To be realistic, I agree that nothing is likely to change in the short term. However, in the long term, I think things need to change or eventually the United States will face a revolution.
To me it seems the United States is heading towards civil war more than revolution. There's factionalism at play that is deeper than just class antagonisms. I read a book recently where the author was talking about how times when states are transitioning into or out of "democraticness" in when civil wars are most likely to occur. Factionalism and shifting democratic integrity means high risk for civil war. Apparently.
I largely agree with your points, but I would like to note a revolution is a type of civil war and I don't think the United States is heading toward another war of secession, and thus whatever civil war it has might be a revolution (though unfortunately it may not be a left-wing revolution).
I agree, I don’t think people in the states life the worst quality life by almost any means, but the quality of life has changed very quickly and people are having trouble dealing with a sudden much lower quality of life.
I think this will cause things to break suddenly and violently when it happens. I’m happily living in a third would country. People ask me why I don’t movie back home, but I don’t really give much of an answer. It’s like everyone understands subconsciously that it’s not a good place to live.
Australia sort of has a system like this. You have to have the money to campaign up front, but you can claim back a percentage based on how much of the vote you get. In practice it just means we end up with a ton of minor and single issue parties doing preference deals and trading favours in the senate.
Canada did as well for a few years. Then a conservative government got elected and cancelled it.
That's one issue.
Another is that most people are unlikely to vote for someone with little-to-no life experience.
As mush as youth and enthusiasm are useful traits, so is experience working in a variety of tasks and situations. (Both employment and volunteer/community service types of experience)
Electing the equivalent of student council candidates won't improve the situation.
In this context a 40 year old person would count as a young person.
There is actually a grant system for campaign finance. It's anemic as all hell, and so restrictive that it's never used, but it exists.
At least for presidential elections.
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/understanding-public-funding-presidential-elections/receiving-public-funding-grant-for-general-election/
The problem with this is you have to win the presidential primary for a major party, which is almost as expensive as the general election. It's no wonder why no one uses it, the only people eligible for this grant automatically don't need it.
It would be easier if they expanded the number of representatives to be proportional to the population of the states. Pretty much every small town would have at least one representative in Congress.
It wouldn't even be as desirable as being on the local council.