I’m not sure if that says more about the pair of them or the rest of us.
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I have to agree with you somewhat. I don’t know the answer but I have a couple of ideas on what you posted about. One is that the system is designed to keep the good ones out and if they manage to get in it’s made to beat them down. Look at Sanders. I’m not saying he is a good one but he wasn’t raising money the way Hillary did. It was much more grassroots. So the way he went about his campaign was, for lack of a better word, good. Yet, the DNC conspired to make sure he wouldn’t get the nomination.
Another thing is that a crisis can give an opportunity for that special leader to emerge but I don’t know if our culture is producing the kinds of people who can answer that call. And even if we are, see what I wrote above; the system is made to be so rotten that only the worms can stand it. There was a time when the Roman Republic had no problems with finding great men in times of crisis. It was a culture that created them by design. When WW2 broke out my grandfather was in a very good college as an undergrad. He and many other students left school to join the military. He saw combat in a bomber. He made it back and eventually got an MA from Harvard. I have copies of some of the letters he sent to a professor here at home while he was overseas. He didn’t brag about any of this. It was just what men did back then.
You mention MLK and who today in the civil rights’ movement compares to him? Colin K? BLM? Beyonce? Al Sharpton? You can’t have another MLK because what he wanted is not what the movement wants anymore. They won’t say it about him because of his stature but if someone today spoke about issues the way MLK did he would be called a sell-out.
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Sadly, I think us. In a recent survey, only one third of the people knew the branches of the government (IIRC), so the base of civic knowledge is woeful. People swim in confirmation bias - reading stuff that might disagree or upend what they want to believe is a dead, even scorned, activity, and both the Right and Left are lousy with the problem. People are clustering more than ever with like-minded people, despite (empty) calls for diversity.
Need a cultural measuring stick that explains our politics? The popularity of reality television. Hell, we’ve gone full Idiocracy - we actually elected a reality TV star president.
And politics itself - and the process to get elected and re-elected - is so awful the good people simply won’t run.
I’ve always been an incurable American optimist, but frankly, we live in a damnable time, and we have only ourselves to blame.
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The two things that schools should be teaching and aren’t, or at least are not doing a good job, are civics and personal finance. There are other things we should be teaching but I doubt kids will be studying philosophy although it would lead to a lot of openings at Starbucks.
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That’s easy Oak, Maple and Willow. Right?
No. It’s President, Deep State and CNN.
I know civic tests to vote could never fly because of the legacy of pole taxes and literacy tests from Jim Crow. But jeez, 33%… Maybe civics tests would help, even just a 5th grade level one.
The higher your score, the more your vote counts. That should weed out mouth breathing people on both sides. Snowflakes and deplorables will blow up Twitter when they get a 15% score lmao.
As much as I’d love a basic derp test for voting, our system already weights people pretty heavily in national elections. Adding another weight to that would be chaos.
Then again… a defacto way to troll stupid people sounds like a hellava time.
Dem rights, tho! Like the right to fuck over others under the color of law.
How about we just take the “R”’ and “D” off of the ballot, make it illegal to mention political party in the polling place and scramble which side of the ballot the candidate parties are on?
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I’m down. I mean, inevitably people will just run for POTUS because they’ve got cool sounding names and win, but it’s not like that’s a huge leap from reality tv pols anymore. I’m so down.
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What do you mean? I’ve been trying to figure it out since you posted this…
The electoral college is a weighting system in the POTUS election that adjusts the value of your vote up or down based on the state you live in.
My reasoning is. Most people on here are hyper aware of politics. For your district can you name without Googling, your:
President
Congressmen
Senators
Governor
State reps
Sheriff
Judges
Mayor
City councilmen/aldermen
Etc…
I’ll bet nobody here could get a perfect score if we listed every position they voted for in 2016 and had no list of names. Why? Well because very few people actually research who they’re voting for. You might be watching 1 or 2 races and vote for the party after that.
I was all proud of myself that I voted for a Democrat Judge cause she’s actually tough and fair on crime. Couldn’t tell you her name though. Lmao
I think there’s a decent chunk of people that just do basic research the week leading up to election day (speaking for myself as well here). I tend to just do basic research Re: the local and state officials and then their names go through my head just like most of my HS education.
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Interesting. I didn’t know that. My eldest has a civics test coming up. I’m going to pass that definition on, to ensure that she answers questions about the electoral college correctly.
It’s probably the most fundamental concept of the electoral college.
The electoral college does not adjust the value of a person’s vote up or down. Your vote = 1 vote.
It adjusts/weights electoral votes for population density so that smaller states are better represented. Otherwise, POTUS candidates would be able to ignore most states. Instead, favoring California, New York, Florida, and I believe Texas.
It isn’t perfect, but I think it’s better than a straight popular vote.
It’s lightly populated states that get the biggest benefits. A state gets a minimum of 3 EC votes. Trump still would have won if the EC was evenly distributed by population. But he wouldn’t have won if it was straight popular vote. The thing is when you win an elector at say 51/49, those 49% of people who voted against you don’t count.
“To take the two extremes, California gets 55 electoral votes for 37.3 million people (2010 Census), or one electoral vote for approximately each 680,000 people. Wyoming receives 3 votes for its 568,000 people, or about one per 190,000.”
Wild. I had no idea that the whole of the U.S. population directly elects the President with votes weighted by state.
You sure about that? I haven’t run the numbers myself. Have a source by chance?
You do realize that the whole of the U.S. population does NOT elect the President, right? We only vote for electors. State electors vote for President.