Now you're just nitpicking. What proportion of U.S. representatives, senators, and governors were elected without public record? Of course there has to be a starting point, before anybody has any real knowledge regarding the candidate. But by and large, the important political offices are held by people who DO have public record to be judged. Really, that's the way it should be. It's a failure of the American system that Schwarzenegger can be elected without any type of public record. What credentials did he have before getting elected? Just another sign that the general populace is incapable of handling the burden of general elections.
The Swiss have a rotating presidency...
History Today - Switzerland: Mountains and minarets : Switzerland?s recent vote to ban the building of minarets drew widespread criticism. Natasha Proietto looks at the historical background to that decision, the result of a typically Swiss mixture
There, however, the comparisons with the US and Anglo-Saxon model end because the Swiss went further. They ingrained a rotating presidency among the seven federal councillors, so that no one leader would be able to assume personal power for long enough to mould the nation to his image. This guarantor of freedom through constant change was backed up by regular updates to the constitution throughout the course of the 19th century.
Now...Are you going to tell everyone here that this is another sign that the citizenries of functional democracies are intellectually and emotionally incapable of electing their leaders? Sounds like what I have been saying all along...That in failing to explain why communist regimes either collapse or enacted reforms, communists must resort to pointing the flaws of functional democracies to justify their clinging onto failed beliefs.
Legislators create laws and in theory, those laws are supposed to accommodate and balance diverse and competing desires among the people. Inexperience at creating laws are irrelevant but having responsibilities such as a job, raising a family, running a small business...etc...etc...are very relevant because these responsibilities indicate interactions between people. That is why legislators should come from the community they represent, or the state/province/canton they live and work, and eventually the country that accept their allegiance.
Chief Executives, on the other hand, for Americans at least, usually have their executive experience questioned. That is why Obama and Kennedy are unique, in that it is rare for legislators to get elected into an executive position. Executives do exactly what their title imply: Execute the desires of the organization, or the country's laws. That is why Schwarzenegger was elected by Californians. He was not only a movie star, he has a string of business ventures ranging from a bricklaying partnership with another bodybuilder, Franco Columbu, to mail order. So just like Ross Perot with his technology ventures and companies he founded, Schwarzenegger and Perot have no lack of chief executives experience to earn them some measures of respect among the American electorate.
For the US, the country's Founding Fathers decided that the people's share of the burden to be the greatest, hence the minimum requirements for either legislator or executive is so sparse. For the Swiss, the people decided, or came to a consensus, that running the country require more technical experience than charisma so they agreed to remove the presidential election process from the people altogether and create a political mechanism to ensure no one person can remain in that chief executive position for long -- rotating presidency. For the Swiss, the burden is transferred to the political machinery. It is said that if a Swiss President take the subway, practically 9 out of 10 Swiss would not recognize their chief executive as they stand next to each other.
Any student of political history, and I do not mean only student in the technical term but to include professional historians and institutionalized scholars, would see that the extremes of the US and the Swiss and all political systems in between have a common theme that utterly destroyed your claim that the electorate is incapable of handling elections -- choices. The people want choices but the
MECHANISMS to select a person, any person, differs. These mechanisms reflects each country's uniqueness in how the people view themselves. This is what make us -- the functional democracies -- inherently superior to date anything else the political man created so far.
Every time communists come to power, the first thing they do is to create a list of "The People's Enemies", meaning anyone who is educated enough, live among the people long enough, and is willing to speak on behalf of the people, and executed them all. The result is in one swift head cutting stroke, the communists remove the country's top thinkers like educators, doctors, engineers, scholars...etc...etc...Then they installed incompetents to manage the complexities of running a country. The result is usually economic depressions and quite often famines.
Communism = Epic Fail.
And we have the mass graves, the prisons, the political induced famines, the internal political oppressions...etc...etc...to prove the Epic Fail.
Theories explain facts, OK? When did I talk about theories? In fact, I specifically clarified that when I talk about truths, I am NOT talking about theories.
Wrong...Whenever you use the word 'truth' you are talking theoretical. The word 'truth' contains a more philosophical component than the word 'theory' but the evaluative
PROCESS for both is the same. The scientist and the philosopher cannot postulate their 'theory' or 'truth' unless each seriously examine the evidences in front of them. For the philosopher, that would mean people's behaviors, their interactions, laws, core beliefs, wars, technology...etc...etc...
Bad analogy with the 3 year old? What difference is there between a 3 year old who is incapable vs. a 20 year old who is unwilling? Neither possesses the necessary knowledge to make informed decisions. In this respect, democracy is very similar to communism: great in theory, but impossible in practice. They're both so because they both neglect human nature. Sure, it's nice to live in a society without greed, it's also nice to live in a society where everyone seeks to educate themselves in politics. But neither is happening now, is it?
As for your example of Air America, my point stays the same. People have access to facts, but few are willing to seek them out and verify them. Instead, they rely on ill-informed media talking heads to learn facts and interpret them. Sure, in theory, an ill-informed decision is still an informed decision, but that requires a listener/viewer who is capable of and willing to think independently. That's just an impossible dream, not much unlike the communist dream of people without greed.
The issue here is who is to blame. If the three-yr old gets run over by a car, we do not blame the child, do we? But if the electorate elect someone who for his term in office proved to be incompetent or even destructive, all blame rests on the people, not the democratic mechanisms that allowed the people to make the selection.
