USA Bashing

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It's obvious from the antics of the recent Bush regime and the wildly variable public response to its policies that your strong doubts about democracy are fully justified. Nevertheless your adherence to the archaic and highly faulty monarchist systems seems, at least to me, to be over trusting in a system that has proved, time and again, to be, if anything, worse in the long run. There is a faint but real possibility that the democratic faults can be rectified. I don't see any way of fixing the basic faults of a monarchy.

OK, so monarchy has plenty of skeletons in its closet. Still, I would prefer some non-democratic system. The question then becomes one of how leaders are to be selected.

I would be delighted to hear your suggestions. If leadership is to be determined by competence then it seems obvious to both of us that maintaining it within an elite family seems very faulty as does the choice through mere popular approval with little or no secure standards to indicate future performance. The danger of setting up a formal procedure to accede to leadership is that it becomes corrupted in favor of a powerful elite which is what has happened in the USA at present. I have only very vague ideas about what the procedure might be.

I am also at a loss for a realistic way to choose consistently good leaders. Some sort of aptitude test? Standardized testing obviously has its own downfalls, though it would be nice if we could find some use for an analog of ancient China's Civil Service Exam. Maybe a limited democracy, with suffrage restricted to those who can demonstrate a strong understanding of economics and political thought? Of course, the qualifying process in such a system would be open to abuse. And limiting voting by educational levels would result in a massive liberal bias. By lot, like jury duty? Clearly suicide.

It occurs to me that the system used by successful businesses to determine a successful CEO has some potential but examples of businessmen getting into government and screwing up does not seem encouraging. Perhaps what is needed is some sort of formal preparation for leadership and then cautious provisions for those who get through that to be put in actual control of small political areas to prove their capability. But that somehow is not too different from what now exists and there are obvious problems of corruption and old boy networks. I have no good ideas at the moment.

That's the issue most of the ideas I'm thinking of run into. Of course, our current allegedly democratic system is very much an old boy network, so demanding that a new system resolve this particular issue may be asking too much.


I'm not sure any good ideas exist.

No need for close tabs, it's enough with a general picture of what's the person is doing. And that's reflected by society. Mayby you need to get out more.


Tell me, who many non-americans have you meat and talked to? WP dosen't count. (We aren't really prepresentative for our nations. ^^)

My Kuwaiti roommate and a number of other international students at my university. Besides that, the perspective gained from studying history that people are pretty much the same, everywhere and always.

When enough people put their shoulder to the wheel, it turns.

ruveyn

But cultures are not.

True, but they still share many features in common.

And there are many important and perhaps crucial features they do not share and that makes all the difference.

Indeed.

Humanity has yet to produce a culture that transcends that shortcomings of democracy. I'm not holding my breath.

As an American still, though located in Helsinki which seems to me almost in a different galaxy, I am pained by the awful madness of the country in its present state. I grew up loving its ideals of freedom and equality before the law and respect for the individual and the great warm heartbeat of its hope in the future. As I grew older I got to know how false all this was, about how shallow its actual dynamics were and how the poor and neglected lived and died in misery and the common man who was glorified by Norman Corwin and Aaron Copeland was just a dream as fragile as Oz and the many political fairytales taught to schoolchildren were as cruel as the unrealities taught by the major religions about the goodness of the inner nature of mankind. I know and appreciate that it's not all false, that there are real people who behave like that, but the major forces that move the world are not kind and never have been. I have been treated with kindness and respect by my fellow Americans, by people I have known in Paris, France, in Berlin, Germany, by both Arabs and Jews in Israel and by people here in Finland who have given me refuge and permitted my family to be Finns in a surprisingly civilized country when compared to the insanities now possessing my country of birth. Like the old father of a friend of mine here in Helsinki, my old America seems to be descending into some national version of Alzheimer's syndrome with frenzied cruelties tearing the country apart and I miss my old illusions.

i like this country, i dont love it. that is to say, loving an ideology just isnt my thing. but hey we do have the best food here and thats all that really matters