The performative anger
It’s a master class in the performative anger poisoning American politics.
Mike Pompeo is a smart man — first in his class at West Point, Harvard Law Review — with a sharp tongue. In March 2016, as a four-term tea party congressman from Kansas, he warned that Donald Trump, if elected, would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution.”
And he was absolutely right, and he was part of the authoritarian’s administration. Why is that? It has to be because he’s an immoral man doing what’s useful for him as opposed to what’s good for everyone else. A smart man and a very bad one.
Pompeo disdained America’s career diplomats. He describes them, by turns, as un-American, deceitful denizens of the “deep state,” and “overwhelmingly hard left.” Trump’s third national security adviser, John Bolton, is a scheming leaker who “should be in jail,” he writes. Barack Obama’s foreign policies, in Pompeo’s view, made him all but a terrorist fellow traveler. Heportrays Obama’s spy chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper as masters of disinformation and the chief perpetrators of the “Russia Hoax” — the crime of reporting, first to president-elect Trump and then to the American people, the intelligence community’s conclusion that the Kremlin monkey-wrenched the 2016 election for its chosen candidate.
In other words not a hoax. Like Trump, Pompeo lies that other people are lying. Double bluff type of thing.
After the killing [of Khashoggi] sparked outrage, Trump sent Pompeo to reassure the crown prince of America’s support — and to give “the middle finger to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other bed-wetters who didn’t have a grip on reality.” As you may have guessed, Pompeo hates reporters: They are, in his words, “wolves” and “hyenas,” and their work of encouraging leaks, he says flatly, “is illicit.”
Says the guy who worked for Trump. Nearly everything Trump does is illicit.
From the Washington Post story in the first link:
Who also apparently entertains presidential ambitions of his own, adding evidence for my case that self-selected would-be careerists should be kept out of politics, and that instead, maybe politicians should be appointed the way we appoint those other important decision-makers, jurors; from an initial group selected from the citizenry by lot.
If a type like Pompeo was given to hanging around court houses, buttonholing all and sundry with eager appeals to be allowed to ‘serve’ on a jury, he would be smartly shown the door, or maybe arrested as a public nuisance.
Worth a try, surely.
My view is that children should learn about the government and electoral systems of the country in which they live from a young age. Make time by ditching religious education; interested parents can send them to their places of worship for that. Give them hands-on practice by having class councils (a third of the class gets to be on the committee for a third of the year, so they all get a go; officers change weekly) and regular visits to local council meetings when they enter their teens until they leave school.
Local councils should still be elected by adults in local elections as at present, but the pool of candidates should be selected randomly from the adult population, as juries generally are. Only when an adult has served at least five terms on a local council should they be eligible to have their names put into the pool of candidates for state/country/general elections. Get rid of party politics altogether, or at the very least get rid of the party whip and have all voting be anonymous so that politicians can vote on behalf of their constituents again instead of in the interests of whatever huge corporation has been lobbying (and bribing) the party. Peg salaries to a low multiple of the minimum wage and tax the rich so hard they squeak.
Changing to a more egalitarian system would take time and effort, and will never happen because those who would have to implement it are exactly those who will never want to.
I still think hiring is the best answer. Get rid of running; that can elect great leaders or lousy ones. Use search committees – the voters could select those if they like – and vet candidates to hire. They serve a probationary period like any of us, and have yearly evaluations. They could be put in with term limits, or it could be a job as long as they meet expectations, I don’t care.
There need to be qualifications for office, like there are for all the hired government jobs, of which I’ve worked several. Trump could never have passed the civil service exam; I’m not sure Dubya could. I imagine Obama could have, but I guess I could be wrong about that (I always guess I could be wrong about something that hasn’t happened).
This might not sound like democracy, because it really isn’t, but democracy is showing its true colors. The current situation in the US doesn’t call for a democratic answer, because the democratic process is what led to this. In a hiring pool, who would have been considered? Trump or Clinton? Definitely Clinton; she had the education and resume to at least get an interview. Trump would have been in the discard stack almost immediately after the application was date stamped (I know, it would be on the computer now, but the principle is the same).
A search committee could make a mistake; they do on faculty hiring from time to time. That’s why you have a probationary period, and make it possible to fire them.
Many cities do use the non-elected “City Manager” option, combined with an elected Weak Mayor, whose power is the same as the members of the City Council, except for being chair of the council meetings.
I’m not sure how well that would work on a national level, but it is intriguing.
I think it would be clunky. But I think the US is too large to be successfully governed, anyway. In a democracy, you need to have some awareness of your neighbors, and care about them. No one cares about 300,000,000 people who aren’t related to them.
I think of the US as a failed experiment. Now if we could only recognize that.
iknklast:
You mean to say that the Founding Fathers were something like a bunch of kids playing with a whole lot of serious chemicals they had somehow got hold of.?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ue5F57dZMU
I like the jury duty parallel. I’ve thought for quite some time that the last person who should be given power is the one actively seeking it.