When Mehdi Hasan sat down with Jon Stewart last month, the roles were reversed. This time, the Emmy-winning host of The Daily Show was the one asking the questions — about corporate media, Gaza, Do…
The Dems are so bereft of charismatic folks in their ranks because their own internal power-squabbling and pressure between dusty old skeletons to keep themselves in office, that anyone who HAS the skill set has had to spend that time in the entertainment industry at best. They’re so dogmatic about internal “it’s your time” protocols that they would rather sink AOC and Bernie forever so that the political equivalent of Assistant Regional Managers can get promoted to Regional Manager.
Both parties are broken to shit, and this is why Dems aren’t doing a single thing to fight anything, they expect to just sit back and have it handed to them later. It’ll be too late by then. We need an entire wave of new blood. Fuck this 2-party system.
they would rather sink AOC and Bernie forever so that the political equivalent of Assistant Regional Managers can get promoted to Regional Manager.
I agree and disagree. The ability to successfully lead a government as chaotic (i.e. democratic) and large as the republic of states known as the US is very rare. It requires not only a strong physical and mental constitution, but also a wide set of skills and intuitive abilities that usually only make themselves apparent during trials by fire. Compared to the sometimes explosively violent centralizations of power that occur when the rare charismatic tyrants fight their way into power (e.g. Napoleon, Hitler), democracies grow in fits and starts as they rely upon a panjandrum of popularity contests to find talented leaders. In contrast to dynasties that fiercely burn hot with their founder’s fervor then languish in subsequent generations, democracies have the potential for sustained competence as long as incumbent leaders continue to hold popularity contests with the goal of finding new leaders better than themselves from as wide a candidate pool as possible.
When the contests fail to find the rare talented leader, the process does resemble a farcical out-of-touch revolving door of mediocre middle managers like you suggest: because talented leaders are rare. And even when a talented individual does prove thenselves, they cannot cling to power lest they destroy the talent search apparatus that brought them to power in the first place and which will eventually replace them with an even more talented individual in the future. To destroy that apparatus reverts the civilization back into purity-obsessed gatekeeping fascism and boring dynastic tyranny.
So, if this decade’s popularity contest is restricted to late-night comedian talk-show hosts, I say that’s better than a Trump dynasty. But, I hope winners of those contests steer government to promote talent searches with larger candidate pools than they came from. That could take the form of government propaganda rewarding people to run for local elections. Without leaders consciously promoting wider popularity contests, the people of a democracy default to choosing the photogenic faces and entertaining voices they see and hear on their screens: actors like Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger or game show hosts like Donald Trump.
Exactly this.
The Dems are so bereft of charismatic folks in their ranks because their own internal power-squabbling and pressure between dusty old skeletons to keep themselves in office, that anyone who HAS the skill set has had to spend that time in the entertainment industry at best. They’re so dogmatic about internal “it’s your time” protocols that they would rather sink AOC and Bernie forever so that the political equivalent of Assistant Regional Managers can get promoted to Regional Manager.
Both parties are broken to shit, and this is why Dems aren’t doing a single thing to fight anything, they expect to just sit back and have it handed to them later. It’ll be too late by then. We need an entire wave of new blood. Fuck this 2-party system.
I agree and disagree. The ability to successfully lead a government as chaotic (i.e. democratic) and large as the republic of states known as the US is very rare. It requires not only a strong physical and mental constitution, but also a wide set of skills and intuitive abilities that usually only make themselves apparent during trials by fire. Compared to the sometimes explosively violent centralizations of power that occur when the rare charismatic tyrants fight their way into power (e.g. Napoleon, Hitler), democracies grow in fits and starts as they rely upon a panjandrum of popularity contests to find talented leaders. In contrast to dynasties that fiercely burn hot with their founder’s fervor then languish in subsequent generations, democracies have the potential for sustained competence as long as incumbent leaders continue to hold popularity contests with the goal of finding new leaders better than themselves from as wide a candidate pool as possible.
When the contests fail to find the rare talented leader, the process does resemble a farcical out-of-touch revolving door of mediocre middle managers like you suggest: because talented leaders are rare. And even when a talented individual does prove thenselves, they cannot cling to power lest they destroy the talent search apparatus that brought them to power in the first place and which will eventually replace them with an even more talented individual in the future. To destroy that apparatus reverts the civilization back into purity-obsessed gatekeeping fascism and boring dynastic tyranny.
So, if this decade’s popularity contest is restricted to late-night comedian talk-show hosts, I say that’s better than a Trump dynasty. But, I hope winners of those contests steer government to promote talent searches with larger candidate pools than they came from. That could take the form of government propaganda rewarding people to run for local elections. Without leaders consciously promoting wider popularity contests, the people of a democracy default to choosing the photogenic faces and entertaining voices they see and hear on their screens: actors like Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger or game show hosts like Donald Trump.