How realistic is this though? Getting elected to Congress usually means having some other prior government experience, or your opponents attack you with "why would you give this person responsibility at a congressional level if they've never even worked in local politics?" Not to mention you need name recognition, a history in government that people can use to understand your values as acted, relationships in government to accomplish anything.
As I get older it seems that liberal democracy basically requires career bureaucrats to function. I'm very open to discussing other ways of organizing society, but if we're gonna do liberal democracy, seems this is the way.
I would contend there are plenty of people in lower levels who can move up or not. Was the mayor of the next town over any good and thus I want to send them onto state congress? Was a library board member two towns over good and I want them in the US house? For that matter, do they run a good honest business (there are lots of businesses) that I can check out locally and thus I want to risk them.
The real key is that term limits need to apply to everyone and so nobody will bother asking about experience as there isn't anything more on their side to fall back on.
Though in the end you are probably right - doesn't mean I like it.
> As I get older it seems that liberal democracy basically requires career bureaucrats to function.
I agree, but the people in congress should not be the career bureaucrats.
It's always funny to me how much people hand wring over politicians and then they somehow believe that putting someone who currently and actively has large personal interests and incentives to make government worse for people for their own gain is somehow a good thing
If you think politicians doing things to affect their bottom line through stocks is bad, surely you recognize how crystal clear and more direct the incentive is to do that kind of thing when your "asset" is your own business that can't be easily pivoted and depends on labor being cheap and desperate?
Nevermind that those kind of people just usually have radically different worldviews about what a government SHOULD do, and that worldview almost never allows for government preventing them from harming people for profit
Even to the extent it isn't true, a plumber followed by a chef followed by ... ensures that whatever they try to do that benefits themselves is checked soon enough by the next person.
Career politicians with most power who reach the top will always be good primarily at one thing - bullshitting their way to the top in various sociopathic manners that no power structure anywhere is immune to. Those who are inside the circus for 30+ years? Expect them to be rotten to the core while wearing very polished masks, seeing and dealing with the worst and staying on top. Not a place for a nice good hearted well intending folks.
Don't expect some common good to come out of them just because it would be nice or proper thing to do, either its by mistake as a byproduct of some other effort or some pre-election campaign.
Guaranteeing they never get good at their job, and institutional knowledge keeps decaying.
We need to stop pretending that Congress or any of these elected positions don't require skills. I think to be a Congressperson you have to go to specific trade school--let's call it Congress U--graduate with high honors, serve in some other government capacity, and your grades are public record. Only then are you qualified to even run for election.
Democracy isn't about letting any random firebrand run things. Heck, we don't even let random firebrands install electricity.
If there's one qualification test I would possibly support it would to pass a high school AP US History exam.
I don't know if you've been paying much attention to US politics since the year 2000 but the vast majority of them are no good at their job regardless of how long they've been there.
> We need to stop pretending that Congress or any of these elected positions don't require skills.
I don't think anyone does? But currently the only real skills you need for attaining high US office are 1) be rich and/or have enough rich people in your phone book or 2) the ability to make Donald Trump feel like a special boy.
> Democracy isn't about letting any random firebrand run things.
waves in US/UK/Argentina/Brazilian politics over the last decade
It's uh, king for a day, with checks and balances on human cruelty via chaotic caprice. How likely is that world to be worse than ours? If so, how much worse? If not here and now, then which counterfactual geography or year would you have to transported to so that this randomized process is definitely preferable?
History has shown everything we have tried ends up worse than what we have, but that doesn't mean there are not things that could be better. Only that we need to be really careful not to make things worse in a way we can't get out of in our attempt.
For another datum consider presidents' second term. This is often where they are supposed to be able to really act out their vision for the future since they're ostensibly out of politics after this and have at least 4 years of experience at the highest level, yet they almost invariably tend to be extremely underwhelming.
I'm not arguing there is no skill, but I am arguing that just spending a lot of time in office doesn't seem to correlate much with achieving that skill.
It probably, on net, increases the power of elites and decreases the power of ordinary people, which increases the already extreme tilt in that direction. Like with a lot of things, it depends on the virtue of the elites in question whether this is a great idea or a catastrophic and oppressive one. As we can see, our current elites are so shameless they blatantly trade on privileged knowledge and can’t even manage to pass a budget for the country.
This can work. We do accept accreditation for lots of aspects of the economy, and though none of them is a perfect system, does for the most part keep quacks out of certain trades.
Also, let's take a step back:
> where does the power accumulated by long-term congressmen go
We need to take a very hard look at any supposedly democratic system in which power is "accumulated" by individuals. Deeply entrenched politicians who never face term limits nor reelection resistance have no reason whatsoever to care about the will of the people.
Ding ding! I think that's the real problem. If I were king for a day, I'd end gerrymandering and replace it with non-partisan (probably algorithmic) districting. And I'd shit-can partisan primaries and introduce approval voting or instant-runoff (or something similar).
Make an argument that actually supports this rather than asserting it.
Most people who study this kind of thing outright disagree.
Lobbying in the US doesn't happen because we let people work in government for a long time, plenty of other countries do that, it happens because we are one of the only places that legally empower rich people to pay for the campaigns of elected officials and have one of the most expensive political campaigning systems in the world and we openly claim lobbying to be a right of rich people.
Political parties in the US yet again come back to just how absurdly expensive running a campaign is in the US, largely because we refuse to regulate it. Other countries don't allow candidates to run advertisements a full year in advance because that's wasteful and stupid. Candidates are beholden to the political parties for campaign funding. Even Bernie suckles the political party teat to maintain his seat.
If you don't fix that but you limit the ability of a politician to gain mindshare simply by doing a good job in congress (because you only give them two terms) all you have done is make it easier for rich people to control who can get elected.
Indeed, even the US system used to be better! The Civil Rights Act was bipartisan, with meaningful republican support, because there used to be socially progressive republicans! There used to be racist asshole democrats! When the Clinton government was cutting programs, prominent republican representatives from Texas were actively working with prominent Democrat representatives to maintain funding to the particle collider project there. But as America continued to enshrine the right of the rich to fund politicians, and continued to let campaign costs balloon to the point that only a rich person's super PAC or the literal party establishments could afford to run one, what did you expect to happen?
Trumps power over the republican party is fascinating because it largely isn't money based. He's just so populist among republican voters that he can unilaterally control who gets elected regardless of funding. This is generally a fucking bad thing, because trump sucks, but it's just a more direct version of what the Democrat and Republican parties have done for a few decades now.
Are you aware that both democrat and republican lawmakers spend most of their time on the phone calling and begging rich people to fund their next election campaign, even right after an election?
None of this goes away with term limits. All you are doing is giving the people who hold the purse more power over elections.
How good would you be at your job if you had to spend a few million dollars every four years to keep it? How good would you be if your company's competitors were loudly offering to pay that burden?
The counter counter argument is that you could be a career politician working your way up: two terms at city council, two as mayor, two as governor etc…and by the time someone is voted into the national stage they presumably have decades of experience.
We are not the first people to come up with this idea.
I think it is generally believed that the less time legislators serve the more power accrues to the bureaucracy and other non-elected positions.
This is also an undesirable situation. Possibly worse than the disease, so to speak.
This means you want them to do a job for four years when it takes them two or three to learn how to do it.
Less sure on senators.
But on the whole I agree with term limits for Congress.
The problem is getting the house full of lifers to agree to the real swamp of government (it’s Congress).
I'm only half kidding - yes, there are outliers, many of whom probably should have retired years ago (but not because they've been around too long, but because they're simply too old to do the job - Pelosi and McConnell come to mind). But, the range of term limits that are usually discussed are already within the existing range, so it doesn't change all that much.
I doubt a minority/majority leader with only 2 terms would be as good at snaking in this kind of stuff in, or snaking their way through the politics of various committees to kill off proposed legislation before it's voted upon, that takes practice to really get good at all the underhanded techniques.
I'd absolutely support a maximum age limit, maybe e.g. if you will reach 70 years of age in your term of office you cannot run. So a senator could be elected up to age 64. A Representative up to age 68. And I'd apply that to all elected offices. My biggest criticism of Biden vs. Trump was that they were both too old.
We want the stability of someone who has seen life’s ups and downs and understands there is more to life than the petty day to days of a presidency. There is a legacy beyond them and they imbue that in their policy.
Age can be a symptom of your inability to do this, but it is not the problem.
The problem is with specific mental ailments and behavior coming into the presidency. We should scrutinize those ailments heavily, and build a culture around stepping down when life inevitably gets to you too — and having it taken from you if you do not take the opportunity for mutual dignity.
The problems that afflicted Biden could happen to anyone at any age. It is a problem if any candidate experiences it.
And I do not really think age has effectively changed Trump’s view of the world.
Also, where are you getting these numbers?
Running an election campaign as anyone but a filthy rich person means you have to accept a brown bag at the beginning with a lot of implied conditions. Sortition means it's at least possible you get someone who isn't looking for the brown bag.
I mean sure, but sortition has tons of it's own problems, and it's actually pretty easy to reduce the requirement to take a bag before you can run a campaign, because this is something every other democratic country manages.
The US is the only country that allows you to run campaign adverts years ahead of time. That's expensive. The US has no limits to campaign contributions in the first place, and no ceiling on campaign spending. The US has loudly declared that it is right and just that the mega rich oil Baron can pay for literally every single campaign if they want, and unilaterally control who has access to his funds for getting elected. The US Supreme court has declared that it is a good thing that the oil baron can always outspend average people to get their needs heard.
Maybe fix the part of our country where we allowed the supreme court to insist that more money should give you more access and control over government. Maybe fix the part where half the country insists that we should elect "Businessmen" who will run a country like a "Business" because that's somehow a good thing, and that having someone who has direct business interests that are contrary to the interest of the general public run said government is a good way to do things.
It's like thinking that Pharma adverts are bad and so we should destroy the pharma industry. Like, no, chill, just ban pharma adverts like the rest of the world.
The bigger risk with sortition is that power isn't granted through a title, but through people agreeing to respect that title. If the authority of that title ends up being undermined, then it's entirely possible for power to shift from our representatives to other, probably more entrenched, groups. One could argue that on many issues this is already the case. For instance Congress ostensibly has oversight over the intelligence agencies but the power relationship there is completely reversed. For those that don't know, Congressmen don't have classified access by default. Millions of people in the US have classified clearance, but the people representing the country at the highest level - nah, why would they need such a thing?
For similar reasons, all presidents are newbies. The benefits of having one with lots of experience would be vastly outweighed by the downsides...
To me, the above seems slightly complex, but well worth undertaking in order to stop this blatant and shameless corruption.
As we’ve seen with the current president, though, it’s much more difficult when they own and control whole businesses instead of just fungible securities. To be fair to the president, there isn’t really any reasonable way to get rid of his massive conflicts of interest besides having a pre-inauguration IPO for all his companies and retaining 0 shares - and his family retaining nothing too. But that’s a bigger problem that probably cant be solved.
Stocks though, it would be easy, they just don’t want to solve it.