An Unorthodox Proposal

First off, a nod to Jonathan Swift for providing the inspiration for this post's title.  Now, on with the show.

Alright, look. It's obvious that America's current system of choosing a president isn't working.  320 million people, and one of the final two candidates we could come up with - the one who went on to win* - was Donald Trump? That was the best we could do? Really, America?!?

You'll notice I didn't mention Hillary Clinton in the above paragraph. That was intentional.  I didn't want to lump her in with Trump.  Sure, Hillary Clinton had a fair amount of political baggage.  Some of it was deserved and of her own doing, but the overwhelming majority of it turned out to be baseless accusations peddled by the right-wing smear machine.  But she was also the most qualified candidate, by far, and she was certainly miles ahead of the walking, breathing dumpster fire currently occupying the White House.

Whoops, I got distracted and went off on a tangent there.

Back to my main point, which is that the current process for electing a president is in desperate need of reform. I don't want to get too into the weeds talking about how the institutional mechanisms in place need to be modified, although I will say that the Electoral College needs to be revamped, the Voting Rights Act needs to be restored, and alternative ideas like ranked-choice voting and holding primaries on weekends (when more people can participate) need to be at least looked at.

No, the change I propose is more tonal than structural.  Here's my idea.  Instead of the current handful of campaign debates, which are nearly worthless spectacles, we have each party's candidate (it would have to be after the primaries, because in the past couple presidential elections there would be too many candidates for this to work) undergo some kind of exam by a select panel of experts in various relevant areas.

For example, say we want to evaluate a candidate's knowledge on foreign policy. We gather a team of experts in all the areas foreign policy could be expected to cover: economics & trade, science, military strategy, and so on.  Then these experts ask the candidates a bunch of questions, to gauge their knowledge. Now, the questions could take any kind of format - I'm not too choosy.  It could be an in-person panel, like a job interview; or it could be like a college-level exam. 

The point - and this is the important part - is that the results of the Q & A are made public, to see just how much a certain candidate knows (or doesn't know.) If it's a panel interview, record it and play it on all the news networks later.  If it's a written test, publish it in a special insert in every major newspaper, and post it online. Also, just like any other test (which is essentially what this is), the candidate's performance is scored.  1 - 100, just like most tests.  Any candidate who scores too low is disqualified from running.

And that's it.  We wouldn't change anything else about how votes are cast or counted, we'd just replace debates with a process that (hopefully) prevented the country from electing a complete idiot.

I don't expect this to be adopted, of course.  It's pretty much got a snowball's chance in hell.  But I don't think anyone will dispute that elections have become way too much like a popularity contest - a certain level of that is always expected, but it's getting ridiculous. 

Anyway, I was just throwing this idea out there.

* Russia helped Trump win

Rollerblading, Demagogues, and Economic Downturns

A post-apocalyptic dystopia is a quick, easy setting for any story: just drop the protagonist(s) in the middle of a really messed-up situation, and have them fight like hell just to survive.  A lot of well-known works began in the aftermath of some catastrophic event: The Hunger Games, Mad Max, Logan's Run, 1984, and Brave New World, to name a handful of popular ones.  Naturally, there are a lot of lesser-known ones, such as the one that's the subject of this post.

Back in 1990, a B-movie called Prayer of the Rollerboys came out.  Since its major selling points were Corey Haim and rollerblading, when rollerblading came close to being cool (Was rollerblading ever cool? I thought it was, but I was probably in the minority), I'm guessing that you haven't seen it.  It was mostly forgettable, but it had a unique angle on the dystopian society setting.  The story begins several years after the United States has suffered a massive economic crash, and the Rollerboys are a powerful crime organization that rose to prominence in its wake.  The group pulls in money by dealing a fictional drug called "mist", and promotes a lot of overtly racist ideology.  I won't recap any more of the plot, because it's really not important; but the backstory and setting seemed interesting, which is why this movie gets a blog post about it.  The movie's first few minutes contains a monologue by the Rollerboys' leader, which provides important context to the movie.  It's also important to this post, so I'm going to quote it here:

"Before many of you were born, our parents caused the great crash.  They were consumed with greed.  They ignored repeated warnings, and borrowed more money than they could ever repay.  They lost our farms, lost our factories, lost our homes.  Alien races foreclosed on our nation while we--we were locked in homeless camps.  Now America belongs to the enemy.  Forget your parents.  They didn't care about us.  We are the new generation, and we are the remedy.  You need a new family--a family that cares.  The Rollerboys care.  Join with us.  Let us be your strength.  Let us be your warriors.  Help the white army win back our homeland.  The Day of the Rope is coming."

That little speech pretty much gives away the fact that the movie is an analogy for Nazi Germany, and several other parts of the movie reinforce this connection.  It also relies on the traditional wisdom about economic hardship creating an opportunity for demagogues and wanna-be despots to gain power, which has happened countless times throughout recorded history.  Some people might also see it as a cautionary tale for America, because the government's trend of racking up massive deficits has raised alarms from some economists.  One could draw further parallels to this movie by referencing any number of news headlines, because there is never a shortage of things to prompt severe panic.  Maybe America is on the verge of crashing into total disaster, who knows? I could point to events during each of the past five or six decades where a lot of people thought the country was verging on ruin too. (I might do a blog post about that in the future.)

History is like a never-ending game of Russian Roulette, and nobody can predict when the gun will go "bang" when someone pulls the trigger.  I'd tell people to not read too much into this movie, and just see it as historical allegory.