More on Clinton Hatred, "Irrational" or Otherwise
I do not believe in the intrinsic superiority of “government by experts,” or what I have called “scientocracy.”
But neither do I believe that policy would be any better if it blindly kowtowed to the uninformed views of the Everyman. William F. Buckley’s famous (if often misquoted) snark about the Cambridge phone book was cute, and perhaps correct in the context of Harvard Law School, but it is not a universal axiom of governance.
I hold an alternative view: Limit what government can do, and I become unconcerned about who’s doing it.
A quick example: Another pundit bemoans “irrational” Clinton hatred:
These people are obsessed with things like her hair styles, the “strangeness” of her eyes … she kills cats; she’s a witch (this is not meant metaphorically).
…
If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.
To which I commented tried to comment*:
A society that has decided, for better or worse, that the only qualification for voting is not having died for 18 years hardly has any standing to complain when such otherwise-unqualified people prove themselves as such.The only thing that scares me more is that these people also serve as jurors.
Allowing the ignorant, the irrational or the paranoid to vote might be better than the alternative of deciding how to exclude them from voting. I think it is. But the fact that they do vote is all the more reason to constrain ex ante both what (e.g., bigot amendments) and whom (“I have a million ideas. The country can’t afford them all…”) such people can actually vote for.
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*The comment was never posted, either due to a technical malfunction or because Fish blocked it.
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Actually, I favor the "random lot" method of selecting representatives over elections. Elections are inherently political, and politics is at the root of so much that is wrong with democracy. I have been far more impressed by my fellow jurors than I ever was by your average elected official. I think de-politicizing our legislature would help with a lot of things.
I would vastly prefer to limit the power of government, as you advocate, but politicians will always be a powerful constituency for undermining those limits as long as it is in their interests to do so. Eliminating the politics will severely undermine that interest.