Political Aptitude Test - Standardized test requirements for politicians
Some of you might already know - I HATE politicians. For the most part, they are incentivized to lie, change their positions on everything, and manipulate people to stay in power. Even worse, most of them don't know how the economy works or just how things work in general.
A famous critique of the US political system, as Dan Carlin of Hardcore History puts it, is that "we have a system in which the people who are the best fundraisers become the candidates, not the most qualified people to run a country". He even goes far to attribute the failure of the Roman Republic and its eventual reformation as the Roman Empire is mainly due to the fact that its Republican system became so dysfunctional that a "dictator" like figure, the emperor had to swoop in (and easily done so).
Now we all love our freedom, so the last thing we'd want to see is the USA become a monarchy or a dictatorship of some sort.
So here's a radical idea. Why don't we make sure that politicians have an understanding of basic economics, US history, logic, and are generally good people without personality disorders. Simply, everyone who's running for Congress or state legislature should get tested and get passing grades on basic economics, basic logic, and US history. They should also get psychologically evaluated and not be diagnosed with severe personality disorders like psychopathy, borderline personality disorder, or narcissistic personality disorder. It won't be perfect, but at least we'll have mostly qualified people deciding how to spend out tax dollars.
Surely we don't want people like "idk WTF I'm talking about so I'm just gonna repeat soundbites" AOC and "I can't tell the difference btw investment banks and asset management" Martha McSally running our government and literally controlling our fiscal policies.
Not really opposed to monarchy.
Not compatible with democracy I'm afraid. If any adult citizen regardless of their background is electable, then any kind of qualitative restriction will create a minority that's excluded.
It's basically a slippery slope towards oligarchy.
Assuming this "test" was created by a non-partison, unbiased, organization/committee (which I agree would be difficult to ensure), I don't really see how this would harm democracy. Yes, it would create another restriction, but we already have restrictions in place- for example, the president has to be over 35 years old and be a natural born citizen. Right off the bat that eliminates millions of 'electable' candidates, as you put it, but nobody really bats an eye at that. And why should they? In a country of 300+ million people, there is obviously no shortage of qualified candidates. I would rather have a certain level of economic and political knowledge be necessary to run for office than ensure that literally every single person is capable of running for office. It kind of goes back to that George Carlin quote: "think of how dumb the average American is, and then realize that half of em are dumber than that". By definition, political office should be reserved for the most qualified candidates, and I think that having a test of some kind as Milton suggested would be a good starting point. Obviously, it shouldn't be extremely hard or anything like that, but he's right, we shouldn't be letting people that are borderline politically retarded like AOC make important decisions just for the sake of making sure that 'everyone can get in'. Sadly, because far too many Americans vote with their emotions without critically thinking, this would be a way to ensure a basic level of quality for politicians without directly engaging in interfering with citizens voting. But hell, I wouldn't even be opposed a kind of test like this to citizens. When 35% of Americans can't name a single branch of government, and 60% can't name which party controls the House and Senate, it makes you wonder why these people should be allowed to influence decisions that affect government when they don't know anything about said government.
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