A possible solution to leadership failure is clear: Scrap elections and replace them with democratic lotteries. In place of elected officials would be, as the ancient Greeks envisioned, Ho Boulomenous, or “anyone who wishes.”
Instead of electing rich, polished politicians who are tied to special interests, we should be getting the masses to govern. They want to replace the entire legislature with ordinary people, selected at random in the same way we choose jackpot winners.
Wonder if this would work? I mean jurors are chosen randomly (in the USA anyway). I’m not involved in US politics, but it did get me thinking that there are a lot of problems with politics in general, and politicians. With a random process we’d also end up rotating these people like banks do for bank managers to ensure there is no entrenchment and working around the system. Can it be worse than is already happening in some countries? Clearly “elected officials” have not been shining brightly around the world.
To add to that, we also have to understand how the US evolved to where it is, we need to study history since the point of founding to understand all sides of a problem.
Ultimately their ideas never came to pass, but that’s because no matter how much they wished for it, how much they had the idea for it and wanted it, there were very real material conditions that prevented them from avoiding this political class.
I figure when you create a country on slavery and populate it with capitalists (or proto-capitalists at the time), there aren’t many ways it can end up. Some capitalist class is going to rise to the top, and they would naturally congregate towards other positions of power. They have power over their fellow man already, in the most literal sense, and they need to protect that. So it makes sense that with their money they can buy elections (I suspect some paternalism took place like we saw in Europe, but I don’t know how widespread it was), and they managed to evolve into a political class of their own – which still practices slavery today no less.
Therefore we see that no matter what the founding fathers envisioned, their analysis came short of actually understanding the material basis for their situation. The kicker is that they themselves were slave owners and capitalists. I believe they generally thought they had the right ideas, but clearly having the right ideas alone is not enough to secure a system.
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It would also be interesting that simply adding term limits doesn’t stop the formation of a dominant class. Just look at Ancient Rome. Remained a somewhat democratic Republic for over three hundred years. Yet nearly every consul comes from the same families. How many newcomers? Term limits can hamper tyranny from one man but will in no way prevent the formation of a policial class.