[hellogoodbyeeee]

This is such a strange sentiment to me. You would never hire an amateur Carpenter to work on your house. You would never hire an amateur DBA to build your company's key data architecture. But you want the people who run the country to be amateurs?

[manquer]

Usually it is the bureaucrats that actually run the country and they are career professionals

[barry-cotter]

Why not do away with the farce of elections then if the civil service is actually in charge?

[manquer]

The elected officials provide direction which the electorate wants the government to go in, basis which they won the vote, The civil service only execute the directions

[Viker]

But a political is supposed to be a "representative" of the people. Not some kind of professional wordsmith...

[int_19h]

Carpenters and DBAs don't have a monopoly on legal violence. Politicians in charge of a polity do.

[TangoTrotFox]

The role of politicians is not based on expertise, it's to have views that are representative of their constituency.

Our system was originally designed specifically to avoid professional politicians. The initial articles of confederation included term limits. It was only removed after substantial debate. An anonymous essay penned in response to this decision suggested that people who were elected for long periods of time would become "inattentive to the public good, callous, selfish, and the fountain of corruption" continuing with,"Even good men in office, in time, imperceptibly lose sight of the people, and gradually fall into measures prejudicial to them." It's a shame they did not sign their name to the writing as I think we could label this view as fundamentally and absolutely correct. It's perhaps ironic that term limits were likely stripped from the articles not in good faith, but by those earliest 'special interests' who longed be the first professional politicians. The same interests that perhaps drove those stating truth-hoods to do so under the guise of anonymity.

And that problem is endemic to the whole system of professional politicking. Rather than focusing on 'the mission' politicians end up focusing on themselves and getting elected again. In an ideal democracy that would mean they have to work to appease the people. In reality, most of the electorate is grossly uninformed or misinformed. Generally all that matters when getting elected is money. And where does money come from? Not from the masses, it comes from special interests and top dollar donors. An issue only compounded, though not inherently caused, by the variety of ways to avoid any donation limitations such as messaging through 'independent' politician action committees.

[scottlocklin]

Yes.

Athens picked their Senators by lot, and we probably should consider it.

[wavefunction]

I consider it foolhardy. Can you imagine our most important foreign and domestic policy being set by people who center their lives both moral and emotional around 'Keeping up with the Kardashians'? Or getting a bunch of antivaxxers in there?

There are plenty of decent Americans but we also have too many that are juvenile, superficial, ignorant and aggressively incurious.

[scottlocklin]

What's the worst thing that can happen? We just finished hailing a borderline criminal/traitor Senator whose entire career seemed to be predicated on endless war with the entire world. I'm pretty sure the average antivax Kardashian fan is less evil than that. Maybe we'd even manage to withdraw from Afghanistan after 18 years.