The Auron MacIntyre Show - September 01, 2023


Elections Are Bad for Democracy？ ｜ 9⧸1⧸23


Episode Stats


Length

57 minutes

Words per minute

183.11383

Word count

10,604

Sentence count

656

Harmful content

Misogyny

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The New York Times takes aim at the 2016 election and tries to make the case that elections are bad for democracy. Is this a bad time to be talking about elections? or is it a good time to talk about them?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:30.360 Hey everybody, how's it going?
00:00:31.820 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.
00:00:33.320 I've got a great stream that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:36.840 So today I want to take a look at a piece from the paper of record, of course, the New York Times.
00:00:43.440 Now, the headline is obviously pretty bombastic.
00:00:47.240 Elections are bad for democracy.
00:00:50.220 Now, why am I showing you a snapshot of it instead of showing you the article itself?
00:00:55.420 Well, of course, because they self-edited the headline.
00:00:58.920 As soon as they realized that it wasn't playing very well.
00:01:01.680 Now, this is something that happens quite a bit in our media today.
00:01:05.960 You know, they run out there.
00:01:07.360 They do something stupid.
00:01:08.760 They go ahead and change it and hope that most people don't see it.
00:01:11.980 This means that now people can kind of A-B test headlines.
00:01:16.260 Papers can run something spicier out there in the front to make sure it gets clicks, gets attention for a second.
00:01:22.340 And if they don't like where it's going, then they just go back and change it.
00:01:25.880 Now, obviously, you know, we still have the record there, but it's a strategy that they use to see if they can, you know, they want to get the clicks.
00:01:33.400 They want to get the attention.
00:01:34.240 They want the controversy.
00:01:35.440 They are journalists after all.
00:01:37.500 And so they're going to run out that more controversial headline first.
00:01:40.660 Now, that headline might be more controversial, but it's also relatively accurate.
00:01:45.780 We're going to see what the what the guy has to say here, what the author has to say here in just a moment.
00:01:51.200 He'll put up a new headline that is a little more on the level.
00:01:56.080 So it's something that'll that'll be a little easier for people to digest.
00:01:59.180 But both headlines are relatively accurate to kind of what he's trying to express here.
00:02:03.880 So we're going to dive into this New York Times article.
00:02:06.940 What were they saying here?
00:02:08.040 Why were they suddenly attacking elections?
00:02:11.020 Isn't this a bad time for them to be attacking elections?
00:02:13.880 We'll get into all that in just a moment, guys.
00:02:15.880 But before we do, let's hear from today's sponsor.
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00:03:43.640 All right, guys, so let's get back to our article here.
00:03:48.580 Now, as you can see, there's now the much safer headline, the worst people run for office.
00:03:54.120 It's a time, it's time for a better way.
00:03:57.120 Now, obviously, like I said, this is a dicey time for the New York Times to be talking about elections.
00:04:01.880 Obviously, the topic of elections is hot and only getting hotter as the left tries to jail the primary political opposition in the United States.
00:04:14.280 Whether you love him or hate him, Donald Trump is very clearly the most prominent person when it comes to political opposition of the left in the United States.
00:04:24.000 And so going out there and saying we're going to get rid of elections is something that's probably a little too spicy for the New York Times.
00:04:31.380 Kind of saying the quiet part out loud in a very real way.
00:04:34.740 But, of course, that wasn't the intention.
00:04:37.040 They're going to say something a little different.
00:04:38.320 They didn't just mean get rid of elections.
00:04:40.720 They're going to propose something different here.
00:04:42.400 So let's go ahead and dive into this real quick and we'll see what their plan is here.
00:04:49.180 Now, this is by Adam Grant.
00:04:51.320 He's, of course, a professor here.
00:04:54.000 He's the one that's going to be making kind of this assertion that we should be doing away with the election part of democracy.
00:05:00.760 I know what you're saying.
00:05:01.660 How could you still have democracy if you've gotten rid of elections?
00:05:04.940 Well, in this case, we'll see he's talking about just choosing people from the demos.
00:05:09.720 All right.
00:05:10.560 So on the eve of the first debate of the 2024 presidential race, trust in government is rivaling historic lows.
00:05:18.740 Officials have been working hard to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity.
00:05:24.680 So right from the beginning, we can kind of see where this is going.
00:05:27.640 Right.
00:05:27.980 So he's going to say at the beginning something that's very true, which is no one trusts the government at this point.
00:05:33.840 Very few people trust the government implicitly.
00:05:37.240 They understand that it's kind of dangerous, kind of what's happening with the government right now.
00:05:42.620 So a lot of people do not like what the government's doing, and so trust in it is very low.
00:05:48.260 But in the next sentence, he's going to say, but don't worry.
00:05:50.620 Officials have been working to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity.
00:05:55.300 No, they're not.
00:05:56.580 No, they're not at all.
00:05:58.200 That's not true even in the slightest.
00:06:00.360 Actually, officials have been working very, very hard to bend and break the rules when it comes to the electoral process,
00:06:07.020 which is why no one trusts the government or one of the very big reasons that no one trusts the government.
00:06:13.060 And again, we don't need to have any kind of conspiracy theories.
00:06:15.740 I mean, you can believe what you want about, you know, bursting pipes and water mains and, you know, magical shipments of ballots at 3M.
00:06:22.720 Like, I'll let you speculate on all that stuff.
00:06:24.720 I'm not making, to be very clear, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube.
00:06:27.680 I'm not making any official statements on that one way or another, but we don't have to speculate about that kind of stuff, no matter how obvious it might be.
00:06:38.220 We don't have to speculate on that.
00:06:39.860 There are plenty of things that are well inside the Overton window, things that have been openly admitted, that are openly documented,
00:06:46.680 that show that actually government officials have not been working at all to safeguard elections.
00:06:51.920 We've seen from the Twitter files that there's active interference by intelligence agencies, by FBI and other federal law enforcement apparatus to directly interfere in the kind of knowledge that gets spread on social media.
00:07:07.640 Even things that we know are explicitly true when it comes to a certain disease people have heard about or when it comes to, say, the story from the New York Post about the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:07:19.240 All of those things we know for sure.
00:07:22.360 We have the documentation.
00:07:23.600 Elon Musk provided it through the Twitter files that these are things that the government actively manipulates during an election cycle.
00:07:32.280 We also know for sure that people like Mark Zuckerberg bought out basically large chunks of the American electoral system through a funding scheme.
00:07:40.820 You can check out Molly Hemingway's book about that if you want to get more details.
00:07:44.540 And then, of course, we also know that Time Magazine explicitly ran an article talking about what they call a cabal, a shadowy cabal that worked together to save or fortify elections.
00:07:58.760 So all of those things, they're not hidden.
00:08:00.840 There's no conspiracy theory here.
00:08:03.440 Those are things that are openly admitted to by the government or openly admitted to by mainstream media or that we have explicit documentation from the source of kind of social media companies like Twitter.
00:08:16.200 So we know all of this stuff is stuff is going on.
00:08:18.720 But you still notice that in the second sentence, he still frames it as if electoral officials are working to safeguard the reputation of elections.
00:08:29.160 That's obviously not true. So there's nothing controversial is going to come out of this article is basically what I'm going to say right away, because we know he's hedging his bets at the beginning.
00:08:38.200 He wants to make sure that he knows he's one of the good ones, that he's not one of those very dangerous right wing people who would throw questions on the electoral process.
00:08:47.380 So this is just really a bit of kind of a navel gazing, edgy posting a little bit by this guy here.
00:08:54.560 But I want to go into it because it does reveal some interesting things about how academics might think about democracy.
00:09:01.200 The language he uses and the way he shades it, I think, reveals a number of things about the way people think about democracy, especially the ruling class that is well worth getting into.
00:09:10.240 So let's get back to our article. But if if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether. 0.71
00:09:19.000 So here we go. And to be fair, based based, right, you know, that he's not entirely wrong here.
00:09:25.680 I want to be clear. But but let's get into this a little more before I before I explain what I agree with and what I'd quibble on.
00:09:31.260 If you think that this sounds anti-democratic, think again, the ancient Greeks invented democracy and in Athens, many government officials were selected to sortition a random lottery from a pool of candidates in the United States.
00:09:45.160 We are used a version of lottery to select jurors. What if we did the same with mayors, governors, legislators, justices and even presidents?
00:09:52.260 I hate to break it to this guy, but jurors probably aren't your best example.
00:09:58.060 The American justice system isn't really known for its excellent jury trials or excellent juror pools.
00:10:04.800 Also, no one wants to do these anymore. The only people who are stuck in kind of, you know, and this is a bad sign, right, that people feel stuck kind of kind of doing this civic duty.
00:10:14.560 But the only people who end up stuck in these situations are those who don't have another way to get out.
00:10:20.840 Everyone with an excuse uses it to immediately opt out of jury duty, that kind of thing.
00:10:26.140 So, so this probably isn't a great, a great thing to begin with, but you'll also notice that he references Athens and their founding of democracy.
00:10:34.680 A lot of people do this when I taught, you know, American history and they would reference, you know, the founding and its, its ties back to Athens.
00:10:43.020 They would often leave out the fact that Athenian democracy wasn't exactly a rousing success.
00:10:48.040 A lot of people think of Athens as just the first democracy, but actually that's very late in its history and things didn't exactly go well kind of for very long after it transitioned to democracy.
00:10:59.400 So, you know, they just say Athenian democracy because they think that's something that we're supposed to like, that that's something we're supposed to kind of be excited about, but they never really go into it.
00:11:09.520 So, cause you never want the history to get, you know, in the way of, of your example, I guess.
00:11:13.900 So they just kind of sweep that aside.
00:11:15.480 But anyway, back to our article.
00:11:17.740 People expect leaders chosen at random to be less effective than those picks systemically.
00:11:22.140 But in multiple experiments led by psychologist Alexander Haslam, the opposite held true.
00:11:28.260 Now, to be fair, again, I'm all for kind of pointing out the problems systemically when it comes to group selection.
00:11:36.160 There's a lot of problems with the mechanics of the democratic process that create real issues.
00:11:41.140 And so I'm going to agree with him on some of this, right?
00:11:43.900 That there's going to be points of this where I think, I think this is actually true.
00:11:47.500 However, this experiment citation is pretty dubious because if you look into the experiment, it's just kind of a couple of groups that were selected.
00:11:56.220 You know, they're, they're supposed to be in this life and death situation, but of course, it can't really be in a life and death situation because this is an experiment.
00:12:02.940 So there's no real pressure here.
00:12:05.360 You're right.
00:12:06.260 But anyway, one, one group, they kind of vote.
00:12:08.940 The other one, they come in at random and the random ones do better in general.
00:12:12.640 But this is really in no way a good way to understand what would happen to say randomly selecting leaders for a global spanning empire like the United States or when real life and death is on the line, these kind of things.
00:12:25.320 So this is kind of one of those I cited experts and studies scenarios, you know, thing where we say this to just justify the point we're trying to make.
00:12:34.180 But there's not really a lot of weight to this.
00:12:36.300 It's not like he has some kind of scientific data that really shows what's happening here.
00:12:41.280 This isn't any kind of hard science.
00:12:43.140 This is the softest of the soft social science.
00:12:45.320 That's just kind of tagged on to here to try to give it legitimacy while he's writing his opinion.
00:12:50.700 Groups actually make smarter decisions when leaders are chosen at random than when they are elected by a group or chosen based on leadership skill.
00:12:59.000 Again, some of that's true.
00:13:00.700 Some of that's false.
00:13:01.460 I'll get into why as he kind of talks through his reasoning here later in the article.
00:13:05.920 So why were randomly chosen leaders more effective?
00:13:09.280 They led more democratically.
00:13:11.820 Systemically elected leaders can undermine group goals, said Dr. Islam and his colleagues suggest, because they have a tendency to assert their personal superiority.
00:13:23.960 When you're anointed by the group, it can quickly go to your head.
00:13:26.780 I'm the chosen one.
00:13:28.040 OK, so there's a lot here that I think is bad reasoning here.
00:13:31.880 So first, I'm willing to guess that, yeah, actually, you could, in certain scenarios, get a random person who's going to do better than elected leaders, because there are a number of perversive incentives in elected leaders.
00:13:45.380 But I don't really think they're the ones that he's necessarily identifying here.
00:13:48.780 So the first one is kind of talking about how they undermine group goals because people who are chosen randomly are rule more democratically.
00:13:58.540 So notice what's happening to the word democratically here.
00:14:02.040 So originally, most people would think democracy means selecting your leaders by voting.
00:14:07.360 That's kind of the most basic understanding for most people when it comes to democracy.
00:14:12.260 But now we've removed that definition of democracy, and we're just saying that, well, some of the officials in one democracy were selected a particular way.
00:14:22.340 Again, that's not all officials in Athenian democracy.
00:14:24.980 There is voting in Athenian democracy.
00:14:27.740 But he's just picking one specific section of one specific democracy, one ancient democracy, and saying, well, this is a norm throughout democracy.
00:14:38.240 So we're already radically changing the name of it.
00:14:40.840 And then when he says led more democratically, that just means in the interest of the group.
00:14:45.600 But of course, that's not the only way that one can rule in the interest of a group.
00:14:50.620 Democracy is not the only time and the only government system in which the government works for the better of a group.
00:14:59.840 And anyway, that's not what most people mean when they mean democracy.
00:15:03.140 When they mean democracy, they mean input, right?
00:15:05.740 The voice is the key aspect that people think about when it comes to democracy.
00:15:12.440 Everyone has their say.
00:15:14.020 We come to some kind of consensus, and we move forward.
00:15:17.460 So what he's really talking about is actually just creating a random autocracy.
00:15:22.580 So what he's really talking about is he's actually just going to create a king.
00:15:27.020 He's just going to create a monarch.
00:15:29.300 But the monarch is just going to be chosen from the people.
00:15:32.660 He doesn't really talk about, like, how often, how long.
00:15:35.480 I'm just going to assume I'm going to go with a Roman guess of, like, a year, right, for, you know, for leadership.
00:15:42.440 Like, they get chosen for a year or something.
00:15:44.200 So I'm just going to assume you become consul for a year like you would in Rome, though, again, that's not random in Rome.
00:15:52.220 But the point being is you would be selected, but there would be no vote, right?
00:15:57.520 So he's really talking about getting rid of the democracy from democracy, which, again, okay, yeah, that's probably going to remove a lot of the problems, a lot of the issues around the incentives of democracy.
00:16:09.360 But that is not democratic, and that's certainly not ruling or being led or being selected more democratically.
00:16:17.240 It's actually removing large chunks of the democracy, but you're just feeling better because you called it, like, randomness instead of, I don't know, the divine right of kings or, you know, will to power or something.
00:16:29.420 But you still have the same thing, which is basically an autocracy by another name.
00:16:33.160 It's a random selection of it.
00:16:34.860 And so this is really a lot of word games here, right?
00:16:38.440 Maybe he's stretching and twisting and recompacting the definition of democracy in a very specific way to kind of try to make a novel point.
00:16:47.760 And this is really a big problem with academics is that it's all about just kind of making this.
00:16:53.340 And it's working for him.
00:16:54.240 Obviously, he made a big splash on The New York Times.
00:16:56.620 But like I said, I wanted to dive into this because I want to note the trickery of some of this language and how it does make some reasonable points about problems with our electoral democracy.
00:17:07.000 But it then couches them in very safe and particular language to keep kind of coding himself as somebody who isn't suggesting what he's really suggesting, which is autocracy at random.
00:17:18.880 But he says, because they have a tendency to assert their personal superiority, when you're anointed by a group, it can quickly go to your head.
00:17:27.800 I'm the chosen one.
00:17:29.260 Now, I guess, again, that could be true, right?
00:17:31.680 But that could also just be true of somebody at random.
00:17:34.880 You have all the power and there's really no tie to you.
00:17:37.960 You know, there's no limits because you didn't earn it.
00:17:39.820 There's no way you got there.
00:17:40.980 But I'll get into that more in a second.
00:17:42.400 The main thing here, because he talks about it more, but the main thing here is this idea that, you know, you're going to get the I am the chosen one mentality.
00:17:50.940 That's true.
00:17:51.800 But usually through the democracy, that's because people are using the force of the people, right?
00:17:56.520 The will of the people.
00:17:58.400 So, for instance, again, a lot of people have made this point, you know, Bertrand de Juvenal, Curtis Yarvin, that somebody who speaks with the popular voice has more authority.
00:18:12.060 They can make larger demands.
00:18:13.680 The king might have been a very powerful guy, right, with a long lineage of ruling over things, but he's still only one man.
00:18:20.140 And so his interests were his own.
00:18:22.080 And he had to negotiate with many of the local or regional powers, his barons, his, you know, those kind of things, his noblemen, for him to be able to take action.
00:18:32.280 So we're kind of seeing a scenario where, again, he's really describing something that's like the strength of a monarchy, right?
00:18:39.780 Where you are an autocracy, where, like, one man doesn't have, he's not speaking with the voice of the people because he wasn't, you know, he wasn't selected in this way.
00:18:48.680 He doesn't have this force of democracy behind him.
00:18:52.160 So you're really just talking about fixing democracy by removing all the incentives of democracy, which, again, may be a good point, but it's not fixing democracy.
00:19:02.620 You're creating a different system.
00:19:06.240 When you know you're picked at random, you don't experience enough power to be corrupted by it.
00:19:10.700 Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility.
00:19:13.820 I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well.
00:19:18.420 And in one of the Haslam experiments, when a leader was picked at random, members were more likely to stand by the group's decisions. 0.56
00:19:26.420 So, again, I think there's a lot of bad reasoning here.
00:19:33.180 So, yeah, there might be people who feel this way, but I think that's only because they have grown up in the democratic system.
00:19:40.980 So it's not actually, if you look at history, apparent to people that people should be selected through some kind of democratic process.
00:19:48.520 In fact, it's rather odd that people are selected through this process.
00:19:52.200 And so the idea that, you know, you would feel bad or guilty for not being selected democratically is really specifically tied to the context of kind of modernity, especially the last, you know, 100 years of modern, you know, Western liberal democracy, where this has become the norm and everyone just kind of assumes this is how power is transferred.
00:20:12.840 So I can definitely see a bunch of people who are used to voting, used to the idea that you kind of get this vote and that's what gives you power.
00:20:21.720 I could see them sheepishly being like, oh, well, I didn't earn this.
00:20:24.960 I didn't go through the process, so I can't really take advantage of this.
00:20:28.680 I could see a first generation of people who grew up with this norm feeling this way.
00:20:34.400 The problem is assuming that this would continue.
00:20:36.540 And, again, that's the problem with this experiment in general.
00:20:38.760 It's not really an experiment, and even if it was, you can't really follow its second, third, fourth generations of what would happen after.
00:20:45.980 I think if leadership became something that was random on a regular basis and everyone just assumed this is how it would run, I think the kind of the novelty of being chosen at random would wear off.
00:20:57.460 And I think then people would really shift their incentive structure, especially when the first person who does this realizes like, hey, I get here by random.
00:21:05.620 I didn't actually do anything to earn it, and I can't lose it until it's time for someone else to be chosen at random.
00:21:12.980 So, really, I can kind of just do whatever I want.
00:21:15.280 I can loot the treasury.
00:21:16.360 I can run away.
00:21:16.900 One of the problems with a democracy we already have is that the limited time people are in charge means that it's best for them to just kind of take everything they can while they're there because they don't have to worry about passing it on to somebody else.
00:21:30.660 The only incentive to actually take care of anything in a democracy is that you might be held accountable by the voters, which isn't still very good incentive because actually you're not elected by the voters.
00:21:41.340 You're elected by a very selectorate, a very particular swath of the voters who are connected to your patronage network, that kind of thing.
00:21:50.600 And so that doesn't even work.
00:21:52.400 But now you're going to even remove that, and you're going to just basically hand the person a rental car, right?
00:21:56.720 You got a rental car for a week, you got it for free, and you'll turn it in when you're done, and you don't have to worry about it.
00:22:03.640 You can't pass it on to your children.
00:22:05.340 You don't have to deal with the consequences of what you did to it during that week.
00:22:08.880 So treat it however you like, and that's basically what you're incentivizing if you're just picking people at random.
00:22:13.500 So yeah, I can see, again, people who were raised in a tradition where a merit or some kind of election was tied to you being selected as maybe feeling sheepish and feeling unworthy and doing their best for the group because they want to prove that they deserve to be there.
00:22:30.560 But I really doubt that that would continue long term because that's just not how human nature works.
00:22:34.980 And I think that's going to be a consistent problem in this article is he's going to ignore how human nature works.
00:22:42.020 He's just going to hope that this is going to engineer the best outcome, that people are going to continuously kind of have this goodwill about them by being randomly selected.
00:22:51.120 But I don't really think that would be the case over the long term.
00:22:54.580 Over the past year, I've floated the idea of sortition with a number of different members of Congress.
00:23:01.560 Their immediate concern is ability.
00:23:04.220 How can we make sure that citizens chosen at random are capable of governing?
00:23:08.740 I don't think members of Congress need to worry about that.
00:23:11.420 They're not capable of governing.
00:23:13.320 We all saw the, I mean, how many people who are well into their 70s or 80s have like now frozen up, you know, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi.
00:23:22.680 These people, you know, we have people who can barely talk, barely think, should not be involved in government at all.
00:23:31.560 They're regularly part of that.
00:23:32.820 So I'll give them credit here.
00:23:34.340 Removing that is probably a positive thing.
00:23:37.520 You really need to put an age limit on that random selection.
00:23:41.180 I don't think he actually suggests that here, but he most certainly should.
00:23:44.780 So, yeah, getting rid of that is a good idea.
00:23:46.960 And I think any members of Congress who think that that's a problem should probably kind of check their own ability to govern at this point.
00:23:54.020 In ancient Athens, people had a choice about whether to participate in the lottery.
00:23:57.700 They also had to pass on an exam.
00:24:00.400 They had also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties.
00:24:05.960 So, wow, this is doing a lot of work.
00:24:09.000 Like, this, so this, this two sentences is doing a lot of work.
00:24:13.880 Um, so he's very, uh.
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00:24:47.660 Not specific about what you needed to be to be capable of being part of government in Athens.
00:24:55.180 And he does that on purpose because that's not how this worked at all.
00:24:58.900 Uh, people did not get to choose whether or not they participated in the lottery.
00:25:02.420 I mean, yes, if you were a citizen of particular standing and eligible, you, I guess you could opt out.
00:25:06.960 But lots and lots of Athenians were in no way eligible because they weren't considered Athenians.
00:25:13.000 Uh, what he leaves out here is that in Athens, you needed to be, uh, a free man, right?
00:25:18.440 So no women, no slaves who made up vast population of, uh, of Athens.
00:25:23.980 So there's a huge swath of people completely ineligible.
00:25:26.440 They can't opt in that that's, you can't pass a test and show their competency.
00:25:30.200 It doesn't exist at all.
00:25:32.060 And on top of that, uh, of course you needed to like be basically by blood Athenian, right?
00:25:37.860 Like maybe, you know, you needed to be part of the tribe.
00:25:40.240 Like maybe you could have been, uh, you know, there for a long time and, and intermarried and
00:25:45.020 eventually you would be accepted and you could have passed into kind of the, the, the pool
00:25:49.900 here for selection.
00:25:50.800 But, uh, but, but this, this idea that the Athens was just like, well, everybody just
00:25:55.900 sign up down at the chalkboard and, uh, you can go ahead and be part of the democracy.
00:26:00.000 I mean, that is comically not true.
00:26:02.200 And he just kind of sidesteps all of that because again, we wouldn't want any kind of
00:26:06.100 actual understanding of history, actual understanding of, uh, of kind of what made a, uh, a nation
00:26:14.200 at this time, the, the, the city state, uh, they don't really talk about that.
00:26:18.200 Right.
00:26:18.400 Because that, that, that would really mess with the narrative.
00:26:20.820 Uh, so, so he avoids all of that when he's talking about that, which is going to be a
00:26:25.200 big problem because like, then he's just ignoring all of the historical fact on which he's basing
00:26:29.940 this and saying, but we should still copy the system.
00:26:32.080 But with this totally modern thing that has nothing to do, uh, with, you know, no connections
00:26:36.580 to what actual Athenian, uh, quote unquote democracy looked like, uh, which, which again is a
00:26:42.600 theme that we'll see very often here in America.
00:26:45.160 Imagine that anyone who wants to enter the pool has to pass a civics test, the same standard
00:26:50.200 as immigrants applying for citizenship.
00:26:53.080 So anyone who's an immigrant by default can, can be randomly selected to rule. 0.98
00:27:00.640 Uh, again, uh, that's not even how the law works now, by the way.
00:27:06.320 Uh, if you are, if you're an immigrant, you have to live here for a certain amount of time 1.00
00:27:11.700 to run for Congress, to run for Senate, and you can't be an immigrant and run for president. 0.96
00:27:16.300 So to hold these offices, the whole federal office, uh, you need to have been a resident
00:27:21.320 of the United States and a confirmed citizen for, I think it's like seven years for Congress.
00:27:26.240 Sorry.
00:27:26.460 It's been a little while.
00:27:27.120 I know it's 14 years for president.
00:27:29.140 You have to live here for 14 years and be a natural born citizen, uh, for Congress and
00:27:33.320 Senate, you can, or for, sorry, uh, the house and the Senate, you can, uh, have been
00:27:37.900 born elsewhere, but you have to have been a naturalized citizen for, I think five years
00:27:42.040 and then seven years, something like that.
00:27:43.560 So that's not even how the law works now.
00:27:45.820 So you would say like, basically someone has to not live here at any amount of time, not
00:27:50.140 have any familiarity with the country, not have any idea of what's going on, not be part
00:27:54.900 of any community, had no assimilation time, and they can just go ahead and hold elected
00:27:59.620 office over people who have been here for generations.
00:28:02.840 Uh, that's, that's, I mean, that's a crazy system.
00:28:05.300 I mean, passing a civics test.
00:28:06.960 Okay.
00:28:07.320 I mean, I'm, I'm kind of down with that in general for everybody who wants to do basically
00:28:11.180 anything, uh, you know, but, but again, I, you know, I've taught this stuff.
00:28:15.780 I've given people civics tests, uh, that they weren't really ready to rule the United States.
00:28:21.240 So I don't know if that's a, that, that might be a necessary, but totally insufficient condition,
00:28:25.840 uh, for how we do this.
00:28:27.760 We might not mind up with leaders who understand the constitution.
00:28:30.940 You probably would not, uh, actually, again, having administered civics tests.
00:28:35.300 Having passed people through civics tests.
00:28:37.800 Um, uh, no, like they, they probably still don't know much about the constitution.
00:28:43.080 Uh, so a lottery would also improve our odds of avoiding the worst candidates in the first
00:28:48.080 place.
00:28:48.320 When it comes to character, our elected officials aren't exactly crushing it.
00:28:52.900 I mean, okay.
00:28:53.760 That part's true.
00:28:54.640 Hard to argue.
00:28:55.640 Uh, to paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., I'd rather be governed by the first 535 people 1.00
00:29:00.400 in the phone book.
00:29:01.780 Again, you know, William F. Buckley, I have some disagreements, but, uh, but he was right
00:29:07.940 about that in the current American ruling class.
00:29:10.480 That would be accurate.
00:29:12.220 Uh, that's because the people most drawn to power are usually the least fit to wield it.
00:29:17.500 So here we're going to get into some, some more psychologizing that I think is, is a little,
00:29:22.500 uh, incorrect.
00:29:23.440 So the most dangerous traits in leadership are, uh, what psychologists call the dark triad
00:29:28.480 of personality traits, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
00:29:34.460 So people love the dark triad, but they, they love to talk about the danger of the dark triad.
00:29:40.700 This is like every pop psychologist, uh, kind of favorite topic, especially when they get
00:29:45.940 to government, right?
00:29:47.560 So, uh, basically if you have a will to power, uh, then you should not have power.
00:29:53.440 Uh, this is something that I think pushes a lot against kind of, again, the human condition.
00:29:59.060 Uh, we'll go a little more into this so I can speak a little more on what he says, but yeah,
00:30:02.660 we'll just put a pin in here and says, I think they're ignoring this, the human condition because,
00:30:06.760 uh, they really like talking about this particular, uh, idea from psychology.
00:30:11.720 So what these traits share is a willingness to exploit others for personal gain.
00:30:15.580 People with dark triad traits tend to be more politically ambitious.
00:30:19.280 They're attracted to authority for its own sake.
00:30:21.600 Uh, so here's the thing, right?
00:30:24.140 And this is a really hard, it's a very difficult truth for a lot of people, including American
00:30:30.560 conservatives, but it's just true.
00:30:32.980 Uh, governments are naturally parasitic. 0.99
00:30:36.180 Okay.
00:30:36.760 Uh, libertarians are right about this.
00:30:38.660 They're not, they're not right about the next part of it, but they're, but they're part
00:30:41.780 about this.
00:30:42.580 Governments are natural parasites.
00:30:44.680 That's always how they start.
00:30:46.120 That's always how they exist and they, uh, they will always exploit people. 0.72
00:30:53.080 That's always how governments work.
00:30:55.080 The danger, the danger is to pretend that governments don't do this, that you can engineer
00:31:02.160 your way out of the human condition.
00:31:04.060 You can engineer your way out of the idea that governments will exploit people, that ruling
00:31:08.560 classes will exploit people.
00:31:09.920 This is a lie.
00:31:12.080 This is a false promise, especially of the enlightenment that you could engineer government
00:31:17.420 systems in which there is no predation.
00:31:20.240 There is no, uh, situation where people are being exploited.
00:31:24.200 This is not how humans work.
00:31:27.460 It's just not.
00:31:28.780 And every attempt to create this is a disaster.
00:31:32.100 See communism, right?
00:31:34.340 We'll, we'll just have a government.
00:31:35.840 We'll have a dictatorship of the proletariat, right? 0.93
00:31:38.120 This will solve the problem, but it never solves the problem.
00:31:41.860 That's not how humans work.
00:31:43.800 And so whenever we try to engineer getting away from this reality, we end up suffering.
00:31:48.980 We end up creating far more suffering.
00:31:51.860 So what we want is not a government that doesn't have people who are interested in exploiting
00:31:57.480 people because that's always going to exist to some extent.
00:32:00.920 I mean, it would be nice, you know, ideally we would want that, but that's just not going
00:32:04.920 to happen.
00:32:05.380 So what we need to prepare for is a government in which that's going to happen.
00:32:08.580 Now, to be fair, the founding fathers knew this, right?
00:32:11.060 Which is why they created a system that checks and balances, right?
00:32:15.480 This is the famous, uh, federalists, uh, you know, 51, uh, you know, the, the, you know,
00:32:20.660 angel, if men were angels, then they wouldn't need this, you know, devils, you know, the James
00:32:24.980 Madison talking about this.
00:32:26.900 They understood this problem.
00:32:28.300 Now we can argue about whether or not they correctly, uh, understood, uh, kind of how to
00:32:34.480 correct for it.
00:32:35.160 It's a good system.
00:32:35.880 It ran well for a long time, but obviously it's not running so well now, but the point
00:32:40.820 is either way, we're never going to eliminate individuals like this from leadership.
00:32:46.060 And the problem with this system is going to be like, well, if you're selecting people
00:32:50.220 at random, who watches the watchman, right?
00:32:55.320 The system's not going to be totally random.
00:32:57.700 Someone's administering the test.
00:32:59.600 Someone's deciding what's on the test.
00:33:01.920 Someone is running the lotteries, right?
00:33:04.400 And we're just going to assume that all of that stuff is out in the open and obvious
00:33:09.540 and above the board.
00:33:10.660 But from what we've seen of elections, why should we believe that?
00:33:14.020 And look at all of the things that people talk about with say college admissions, right?
00:33:19.140 As it stands now, we already have people calling things like the SAT and the ACT and the LSAT
00:33:24.180 racist and sexist because the questions are biased, right?
00:33:28.380 The questions for selection are biased.
00:33:30.760 And this explains why there's a difference with scores on those tests.
00:33:35.880 There's no other explanation.
00:33:37.660 It's because the test itself is racist or sexist.
00:33:40.940 We can't acknowledge that there might be any other factor as to why some groups might
00:33:45.840 outperform another.
00:33:47.100 The only factor we can acknowledge is racism and sexism.
00:33:50.440 Why would that logic not transfer over to a civics test, right?
00:33:54.900 If more people of one gender or one race or one background or one religion continuously
00:34:01.860 pass and do better and are selected more often, people will notice.
00:34:06.540 And all of a sudden, we're back to exactly the same problem, right?
00:34:09.980 We're back to exactly the same problem.
00:34:11.580 People blaming the same issues that they blame now.
00:34:15.400 And you have not solved your issues at all.
00:34:18.920 So I don't think this really addresses most of the issues.
00:34:22.000 It just shuffles things around, hoping that nobody notices some of the deeper problems
00:34:27.280 and some of the more interesting implications that he's actually making when he talks about
00:34:31.480 removing the democracy from democracy.
00:34:34.480 In a study of elections worldwide, candidates who are rated by experts as having high psychopathy
00:34:40.980 scores actually did better at the ballot box.
00:34:44.860 So again, rated by experts.
00:34:47.720 Oh, the experts.
00:34:49.220 We've got studies, kids.
00:34:50.580 We've got experts, people with degrees.
00:34:52.840 Not helpful, right?
00:34:54.040 Don't trust these people at all.
00:34:56.580 So, you know, and they obviously are going to...
00:35:01.180 I got a feeling that they probably selected a bunch of right-wing people for this, right?
00:35:05.500 Because that's going to be the bias here.
00:35:07.140 Those are going to be people most likely to portray those.
00:35:09.920 In fact, we've seen that.
00:35:10.920 We've seen multiple studies and multiple articles saying that the right are the people who have this.
00:35:17.000 In fact, there's the entire premise of what's that book.
00:35:20.320 I'm trying to remember.
00:35:21.160 The Authoritarian Mind or something like that.
00:35:23.680 So this has been deep in kind of the left-wing theory of mind for the right for a long time.
00:35:29.200 So the authoritarian personality.
00:35:31.140 That's the book.
00:35:32.180 So this has been a myth of theirs for a long time.
00:35:35.760 In the United States, presidents assessed as having a psychopathic or narcissistic tendencies were more persuasive with the public than their peers.
00:35:47.060 Yeah.
00:35:47.640 I mean, probably, right?
00:35:48.960 Again, demagoguery is a skill that is probably attached to that.
00:35:54.660 But again, if you're removing that, you're just talking about getting away from public opinion, which, again, is what most people think equals democracy.
00:36:02.240 So I'm with you that getting rid of this incentive for leaders to have this kind of very specific persuasive ability over public opinion might yield us better leaders.
00:36:14.060 I think that's actually probably a true statement.
00:36:16.120 But this is not improving democracy.
00:36:18.000 This is not saving democracy.
00:36:18.660 This is just getting rid of democracy, which, again, OK, you know, you don't have to sell me on it.
00:36:25.780 But this is all he's doing.
00:36:27.760 It's just a sleight of hand.
00:36:29.340 It's just a rearrangement of words.
00:36:31.200 This has nothing to do with what anyone really understands as a democratic process.
00:36:35.280 A common explanation is that they're masters of fearless dominance and superficial charm.
00:36:41.460 And we stake their confidence for competency.
00:36:44.520 Again, probably true.
00:36:45.960 Though, remember, this is also a combo deal, right?
00:36:49.760 This is kind of the great man is somebody who is both competent and able to rouse the crowd.
00:36:57.800 This is why people, they tend to fear people like Trump.
00:37:00.400 This is why history tends to fear leaders like this.
00:37:03.940 Understandably, it hasn't always gone so well, right?
00:37:06.460 But, you know, that is a combination of things that doesn't necessarily come along all the time.
00:37:12.920 So, yeah, there's plenty of people who are better at public speaking, a lot of people who are better at rousing a crowd who have no competency in actual governance.
00:37:21.700 Sadly, it starts early.
00:37:23.000 Even kids who display narcissistic personality traits get more leadership nominations and claim to be better leaders.
00:37:29.980 In some ways, honestly, this feels like revenge of the nerd stuff, you know, and I'm obviously a nerd.
00:37:36.140 I spend a lot of time talking about political theory.
00:37:38.000 I don't think anyone's confused about that.
00:37:39.400 But this feels like some revenge of the nerd stuff where it's like, oh, well, everybody who's popular and good at social situations, they're bad.
00:37:48.360 And they shouldn't get the advantages that they can.
00:37:51.040 But it's like, okay, you know, I get you.
00:37:53.400 But, you know, I don't feel like this is motivated entirely out of, you know, the well-being of people.
00:37:59.560 And there's there's a little more than a little bit of schoolyard resentment going on here.
00:38:04.260 And the dark triad, if the dark triad wins elections, we all lose. 0.91
00:38:08.800 Again, you know, the social scientists just love these labels, man.
00:38:12.840 They love to slap the stuff on people and then build entire theories about it and use it to push public policy.
00:38:19.540 When psychologists rated their first 42 American presidents, okay, I would like to be very clear here.
00:38:25.780 I would not want to be ruled by anybody who's voted competent by psychologists.
00:38:31.580 Like, I don't know how many psychologists you've talked to.
00:38:35.100 They're not always the best judge of either character or leadership ability or even competence.
00:38:41.280 So, yeah, I'm not sure why these experts would be any better at selecting, you know, or judging who's a good president as opposed to, you know, American people, again, at random.
00:38:54.600 So, also, this is a funny thing that happens throughout this article that you'll notice.
00:38:59.760 He's appealing to all kinds of, you know, studies and experts.
00:39:03.440 Experts say this.
00:39:04.320 Experts say that.
00:39:05.400 But at the same time, he's saying random people would be better than those with the expertise of governing.
00:39:11.280 So, it's this very strange signal where, like, he totally trusts in expertise and it's the only thing he really knows how to use to justify the arguments he's making.
00:39:21.860 But at the same time, he's basically getting rid of expertise in governance.
00:39:25.580 So, it's just expertise in his area that matters.
00:39:28.640 And, again, this is a very social science thing to do or really any kind of academic thing to do.
00:39:34.580 Expertise in my area matters and all other expertise are more or less irrelevant.
00:39:37.980 And so, expertise in governance, you know, demonstrating that, that's not useful.
00:39:42.700 That's not anything that's worth it.
00:39:44.000 But collecting data on spreadsheets, that's the real expertise.
00:39:47.280 That's what matters here.
00:39:48.180 Or in the case of psychologists, not even really that.
00:39:51.660 And so, very interesting that we're constantly calling back to experts.
00:39:55.280 We're constantly talking about how experts say this or they qualify that.
00:39:59.340 But then you're basically more or less attacking expertise in governance, saying that that's completely useless, basically.
00:40:04.760 But, anyway, they like their, they rank them to get rid of Machiavellianism or whatever.
00:40:11.940 Oh, here we go.
00:40:13.060 Yeah, I knew he was going to do this, right?
00:40:14.960 So, in Cyclops, I'll just read their first 42 American presidents.
00:40:17.940 The Narcissists were more likely to take reckless action or reckless risks.
00:40:22.700 By the way, sometimes you need reckless risks.
00:40:25.020 That's another problem, right?
00:40:26.520 That he's just assuming that level-headed, logical choices are always the best option.
00:40:32.640 Again, that's a very academic, that's a very safe fox versus lion type personality assumption.
00:40:41.160 Assuming that reckless risks are never what's needed, that you never need the man of action.
00:40:45.400 You always need the careful, measured, kind of professorial disposition.
00:40:51.340 That's not actually what you always want leadership.
00:40:53.480 But he assumes that's got to be the most important thing.
00:40:55.820 That's what his experts assume is the most important thing.
00:40:57.940 Because they all come from the same class.
00:40:59.580 They're all part of the managerial elite.
00:41:01.520 So, they all have the same opinion on what makes someone a qualified leader.
00:41:05.240 They make unethical decisions and get in peace.
00:41:08.780 At a dash of Machiavellianism, Machiavellianism, I only write a book on this.
00:41:17.380 So, you know, good thing I can't pronounce it in the moment here.
00:41:20.320 And in a pinch of psychopathy.
00:41:23.740 And you get autocrats like Putin, Erdogan, Orban.
00:41:29.280 And, you know, so obviously, he's picking out people from, you know, obviously, he doesn't like Putin.
00:41:35.440 But Erdogan and Orban, right?
00:41:37.460 Like, they're bad people, of course.
00:41:39.500 These are the wrong types of democratic leaders.
00:41:42.900 The elections that brought them into, you know, into power don't matter.
00:41:48.800 They don't count because we don't like them.
00:41:50.380 They might be too right wing or something like that.
00:41:53.740 Eliminating voting and candidates with dark triad traits would be less likely than they are now to rise to the top.
00:42:08.660 Of course, there's also a risk that a lottery would deprive us of a chance to select a leader with distinctive skills.
00:42:14.660 Again, yeah, that's true, though.
00:42:17.660 Democracy haven't necessarily proven particularly good at that.
00:42:21.020 And he'll go ahead and point out here.
00:42:23.340 At this point, that's a risk I'm willing to take.
00:42:26.320 As lucky as America was to have Lincoln at the helm,
00:42:31.720 it's more important to limit our exposure to bad character than to roll the dice on the hopes of finding the best.
00:42:38.080 Okay, but are you not then rolling the dice every time you take a random leader?
00:42:43.920 Again, I haven't seen anything about checks and balances or removal of this person.
00:42:48.120 I'm assuming he...
00:42:49.000 So I'm assuming, I should be clear,
00:42:51.100 even though the only thing he's talked about here is basically a randomly selected autocrat,
00:42:55.480 I'm assuming in his mind there's a bunch of...
00:42:58.240 There's a managerial elite behind this guy, right?
00:43:01.080 A bunch of experts, right?
00:43:02.360 Lots of experts here that would actually end up running things
00:43:07.400 because this one elected person or this one randomly selected person
00:43:11.100 is not actually going to probably do the ruling.
00:43:14.980 They're not actually going to have the expertise necessary.
00:43:17.260 They're going to have to farm all this stuff out.
00:43:19.240 And again, all that does is create the situation we have now
00:43:22.560 where the deep state, the bureaucracy, the cathedral,
00:43:25.580 whatever you like calling it, the regime,
00:43:27.320 that's what actually runs this whole thing.
00:43:30.500 And the guy who's selected is just kind of a figurehead
00:43:34.120 because he's not going to have the experience
00:43:35.620 and he's not going to have the expertise
00:43:36.820 and he's going to rely on all the institutional knowledge
00:43:39.620 and all this stuff and things that's going to sit behind him.
00:43:42.520 So again, like, yeah, you're not going to select
00:43:46.800 maybe a crazy person to be your head,
00:43:49.560 but you could, right?
00:43:50.580 At random, there's no reason that you couldn't
00:43:52.400 except that you're hoping that your competency test
00:43:54.920 is going to weed out all of the crazy people.
00:43:57.300 Sorry, but I've seen plenty of crazy liberals
00:43:59.440 who can pass a civics test.
00:44:03.280 So I don't think I'd put that as kind of the real,
00:44:06.720 you know, the thing that's actually going to stop
00:44:09.020 anyone crazy from coming into power.
00:44:12.260 Besides, if Lincoln were alive now,
00:44:13.940 it's hard to imagine that he'd even put his top hat
00:44:16.660 in the ring.
00:44:17.500 In a world filled with divisiveness and derision,
00:44:19.780 evidence shows that members of Congress
00:44:21.100 are increasingly rewarded for incivility
00:44:24.360 and they know it.
00:44:25.180 So this is a weird thing to say, right?
00:44:28.560 This is always a very strange thing for people to say
00:44:30.860 that people are now like more incentivized
00:44:33.980 than ever for incivility.
00:44:35.940 The beginning of the country kind of started
00:44:37.960 with the vice president shooting a cabinet member
00:44:40.460 on the White House lawn, right?
00:44:42.060 Like Aaron Burr just straight up shot Alexander Hamilton
00:44:45.620 on the White House lawn.
00:44:47.200 People dueled, people fist fought.
00:44:49.300 The idea of, you know, Thomas Jefferson
00:44:52.200 and John Adams called each other like hermaphrodite
00:44:56.300 and said all kinds of crazy things to each other
00:44:59.100 during their campaigns, accused each other
00:45:02.160 of like letting women get beat in the streets. 1.00
00:45:05.040 Like this isn't, you know, incivility is nothing new.
00:45:08.940 Now I'll admit that the degree of incivility
00:45:11.540 has become, I think, more obvious
00:45:13.280 than say 30 to 40 years ago,
00:45:16.800 kind of in the public eye.
00:45:18.420 But the idea that, you know, this time is unique
00:45:21.200 and that this hasn't existed in other situations,
00:45:24.680 I don't think that's exactly correct.
00:45:27.400 A lottery would give a fair shot to people
00:45:30.060 who aren't tall enough or male enough to win.
00:45:32.780 So, ah, there we go.
00:45:34.260 Get some social justice points in there, right?
00:45:36.280 So, you know, it's gonna remove the advantages of people.
00:45:41.060 But again, like I said, if it's based on a test,
00:45:43.520 what if those things manifest themselves in the test
00:45:45.860 instead of in the electoral process?
00:45:47.860 You're right back to where you started.
00:45:50.520 There isn't really a solution for this understanding.
00:45:54.920 It's the values themselves, you know,
00:45:57.580 and the way he understands human nature,
00:45:59.440 not the selection process that's the problem.
00:46:02.220 It would also open the door to people 0.99
00:46:03.760 who aren't connected or wealthy enough to run.
00:46:06.860 Our broken campaign finance system
00:46:08.140 lets the rich and powerful buy their way into races
00:46:10.120 while preventing people without money
00:46:11.540 or influence from getting on the ballot.
00:46:13.780 Now, obviously, there's some truth to this, right?
00:46:15.840 Like, money in politics is a huge problem.
00:46:19.020 People are bought and sold.
00:46:20.260 It's less about letting only the rich run,
00:46:22.900 though, I mean, to some extent that does happen.
00:46:25.000 It's more that those who aren't rich who want to run
00:46:27.500 have to sell themselves to something else.
00:46:30.260 That's why someone, again, like Trump,
00:46:31.980 was so dangerous because he had a certain amount
00:46:34.460 of money on his own.
00:46:35.040 That doesn't mean he didn't spend it,
00:46:36.620 or that he spent it all,
00:46:37.660 and that doesn't mean he didn't spend other people's money.
00:46:39.720 But when you have a certain amount of money yourself,
00:46:41.720 you don't have to worry about this to some extent.
00:46:43.980 You can kind of say the things you want to say.
00:46:46.040 So it's less a problem of, like,
00:46:48.240 people who are too rich boxing everybody else out,
00:46:51.380 but that the, you know,
00:46:52.720 the presence of so much money
00:46:53.960 and the expense of how much it costs to run a campaign
00:46:56.920 makes those who are not rich beholden
00:46:59.460 to someone who's not the one who's actually running,
00:47:02.480 not those who would actually support them.
00:47:05.280 Excuse me.
00:47:05.860 So a broken campaign finance system
00:47:08.140 lets the rich and powerful, by the way,
00:47:09.380 and I already said that one, sorry.
00:47:10.940 They're probably better candidates.
00:47:12.700 Research suggests that average people
00:47:14.960 who grow up in low-income families
00:47:16.800 tend to be more effective leaders
00:47:18.580 and less likely to cheat.
00:47:20.180 They're also less prone to narcissism and entitlement.
00:47:23.200 So again, this is somewhat dubious right now.
00:47:26.680 To be fair, there are plenty of rich people
00:47:29.140 who are born on third base
00:47:30.480 and act like they hit a home run.
00:47:31.920 Then, you know, they take daddy's money
00:47:34.200 and they start a corporation
00:47:35.760 and they act like,
00:47:37.280 or they just inherit the family corporation
00:47:39.600 and they act like that makes them a good person.
00:47:42.760 But at the same token,
00:47:44.240 a lot of people who are rich
00:47:46.300 are there because they worked hard
00:47:48.960 and they've shown leadership skills, right?
00:47:50.600 They've demonstrated the ability
00:47:51.740 to delay gratification,
00:47:54.120 have a low time preference,
00:47:56.160 work with others, lead others,
00:47:57.940 take risks, make good decisions.
00:48:00.140 So basically what you're talking about here
00:48:02.220 is like, let's just get rid of meritocracy.
00:48:04.500 Now, I'm not 100% the person that says
00:48:06.220 meritocracy alone is a good indicator
00:48:09.480 of certain things.
00:48:10.940 Again, you're just kind of assuming
00:48:12.380 that some people who had certain advantages
00:48:15.060 and ended up where they were
00:48:17.320 are good leaders just because of that.
00:48:20.020 But at the same time,
00:48:21.060 a large amount of, you know,
00:48:23.040 the ability to achieve certain things
00:48:24.660 is proving your leadership ability.
00:48:26.780 So I don't think saying,
00:48:27.720 well, giving everybody a good shake
00:48:29.080 who hasn't proven that
00:48:30.180 is necessarily an advantage of the system.
00:48:33.560 Switching to sortition
00:48:35.480 would save a lot of money too.
00:48:38.160 The 2020 elections alone
00:48:39.460 cost upward of 14 billion
00:48:40.840 and there's no campaign,
00:48:43.600 and there's no campaign,
00:48:45.400 there's no special interest offering
00:48:46.760 to help pay for it.
00:48:48.000 Again, good point,
00:48:49.200 but this is just a general
00:48:50.140 getting rid of the democratic process thing.
00:48:52.200 It's not really specific
00:48:53.320 to picking people at random.
00:48:54.640 Your random autocrat
00:48:56.780 would avoid this problem.
00:48:58.060 Yes, that's true.
00:48:59.240 Finally, there's no voting.
00:49:00.800 No voting also means no boundaries
00:49:02.520 to gerrymander
00:49:03.480 and no electoral college dispute.
00:49:06.500 So he's saying basically,
00:49:08.140 we don't have to worry about
00:49:09.580 certain controversial parts
00:49:12.600 of the electoral process.
00:49:13.600 But you notice,
00:49:14.440 he only cites the things
00:49:15.760 that the left complain about.
00:49:17.680 The gerrymandering,
00:49:19.160 they love this idea
00:49:20.020 that the Republicans
00:49:20.700 gerrymander everything,
00:49:21.820 and the electoral college,
00:49:24.380 which is just
00:49:25.720 that large populous states
00:49:27.900 shouldn't rule the entire country,
00:49:29.060 that California and New York
00:49:30.140 should not control
00:49:31.160 the destiny
00:49:32.080 of the entire 50 states.
00:49:33.880 But of course,
00:49:34.500 they would eliminate that stuff, right?
00:49:36.100 So that's the stuff he talks about.
00:49:37.280 He doesn't talk about mail-in ballots
00:49:38.800 or any of the other fortifications
00:49:42.880 that have entered
00:49:43.980 our electoral system.
00:49:45.000 He stays with very safe,
00:49:46.940 very non-controversial,
00:49:48.500 very leftist kind of questions
00:49:51.880 about democracy.
00:49:52.920 Instead of questioning
00:49:53.620 whether billions of ballots
00:49:55.620 were counted accurately,
00:49:56.640 we could just watch the lottery live
00:49:59.080 like we do with teams
00:50:00.500 getting their lottery picks
00:50:01.680 in the NBA draft,
00:50:03.920 which is, of course, yeah.
00:50:05.820 Anyway, so I'm not going to read
00:50:07.740 the last two one here,
00:50:09.140 the last two paragraphs,
00:50:10.100 because it doesn't really say anything
00:50:11.160 of real importance here after that.
00:50:14.560 But I just wanted to take you through this.
00:50:16.060 It's very revealing
00:50:16.940 about kind of his attitudes
00:50:18.680 about democracy.
00:50:20.100 Very interesting the way
00:50:21.120 that language is switched around
00:50:22.480 to avoid more dangerous,
00:50:24.940 more controversial things.
00:50:26.940 He's not really talking about democracy
00:50:28.860 in the way that anyone understands it,
00:50:30.840 but he is talking about removing it
00:50:33.100 in the safest way possible
00:50:34.600 to kind of get the applause of leftists.
00:50:37.840 Though I have to say overall,
00:50:39.640 you know,
00:50:40.120 the article does point out
00:50:42.080 some real problems
00:50:43.540 with the electoral process,
00:50:44.980 the democratic process.
00:50:46.060 incentives that are bad.
00:50:48.100 And, you know,
00:50:48.720 so to his credit,
00:50:50.860 while there is a overabundance
00:50:53.800 of questionable expertise
00:50:56.820 citing here
00:50:57.840 and questionable language reconstruction,
00:51:01.160 there were some good points made.
00:51:03.260 All right, guys.
00:51:03.760 So it looks like there are
00:51:04.620 a number of super chats here.
00:51:06.840 So I'll switch over to those real quick.
00:51:09.320 Colin for $5.
00:51:11.240 Look into how the FBI
00:51:12.520 infiltrated the Joe Miller campaign
00:51:14.100 and also how they screwed up,
00:51:16.260 screwed over to Senator Ted Stevens.
00:51:19.340 Yeah, again,
00:51:20.340 lots of lots of things
00:51:22.100 that have been revealed,
00:51:23.000 even again,
00:51:24.520 just through the Twitter files,
00:51:25.720 that kind of thing
00:51:27.160 about the FBI
00:51:28.380 and, you know,
00:51:29.440 our intelligence agencies,
00:51:31.220 the way that they
00:51:31.840 insert themselves.
00:51:32.840 Again, you don't really have to get
00:51:34.240 into any conspiracy theories, folks.
00:51:36.300 Everything is documented.
00:51:38.140 It's out there.
00:51:39.280 Oftentimes, it's admitted
00:51:40.560 in the pages of publications
00:51:42.300 like the Times,
00:51:43.720 or sorry,
00:51:44.240 Time magazine.
00:51:45.720 And so you don't have
00:51:47.500 to reach very far
00:51:48.340 to kind of look,
00:51:49.120 and then obviously,
00:51:49.860 the fact that they're trying
00:51:50.740 to imprison
00:51:52.140 their main political opposition,
00:51:54.180 that's all happening.
00:51:55.500 They're actually going to be
00:51:56.060 live streaming that.
00:51:57.280 They announced here Georgia is,
00:51:59.560 which could be interesting.
00:52:00.580 That could very easily
00:52:01.380 backfire on them.
00:52:02.300 Trump could make quite
00:52:03.280 the idiot of them in court, 0.82
00:52:04.900 but we'll have to see,
00:52:05.780 obviously.
00:52:07.260 Creeper Weirdo for $5.
00:52:08.960 Thank you very much, sir.
00:52:10.240 Why don't you vote
00:52:10.980 for the Republican
00:52:11.580 who will just sit there
00:52:12.640 and be rotund?
00:52:14.100 The left likes the round one,
00:52:15.680 whatever his name is,
00:52:17.100 is Orange Man bad?
00:52:18.620 Yeah, they really love
00:52:19.720 Chris Christie, don't they?
00:52:20.660 The left can't stop
00:52:22.960 putting Chris Christie
00:52:23.640 in front of crowds,
00:52:24.800 no matter how ridiculous he is.
00:52:27.040 Conor O'Hare here for $5.
00:52:29.000 If monarchy is the way,
00:52:30.220 why not do it right?
00:52:31.280 Yeah, again,
00:52:32.440 it really feels like
00:52:34.060 he's just creating
00:52:35.320 monarch for a year,
00:52:37.220 or again,
00:52:37.760 he doesn't give any specifics.
00:52:40.060 There's no specifics
00:52:40.720 on how long this person
00:52:41.900 would serve,
00:52:42.760 if there's a mechanism
00:52:43.460 for their removal,
00:52:44.380 if they're doing a bad job,
00:52:45.640 if there is that mechanism,
00:52:46.800 who would decide
00:52:47.400 that they get removed, right?
00:52:49.060 And then how would
00:52:50.840 this administration
00:52:51.560 actually be run?
00:52:53.040 Would the person
00:52:54.080 who's selected
00:52:54.760 actually be in charge?
00:52:56.020 Would it all just be
00:52:56.660 handed off to
00:52:57.360 basically this oligarchy
00:52:58.940 behind the scenes,
00:52:59.680 this bureaucracy,
00:53:00.440 this managerial class?
00:53:01.720 None of that is specified here.
00:53:03.700 If he's going straight up,
00:53:04.940 this person's just dictator,
00:53:06.600 then yeah,
00:53:07.080 basically you've just created
00:53:08.200 a really bad monarchy.
00:53:09.940 If he's going
00:53:10.440 the other direction,
00:53:11.240 well, then he's basically
00:53:12.240 just reinstated
00:53:13.740 all the problems
00:53:14.580 in our current system.
00:53:15.760 He's just removed
00:53:16.460 the only outlet
00:53:17.560 that people had
00:53:18.420 to give any kind
00:53:19.140 of input
00:53:19.640 in the first place.
00:53:22.680 So,
00:53:24.320 RefRef here
00:53:24.920 for $5,
00:53:26.300 just a donation there.
00:53:27.880 Thank you very much.
00:53:28.500 I very much appreciate it.
00:53:30.140 Let's see.
00:53:31.620 Arthur T here
00:53:32.280 for $25.
00:53:33.340 Thank you very much.
00:53:34.600 Does it appear
00:53:35.800 that the main purpose
00:53:36.760 of legacy media
00:53:37.700 is to keep up
00:53:38.620 the charade
00:53:39.120 of legitimacy
00:53:39.920 for the democratic process
00:53:41.160 and the bicameral
00:53:42.160 political system
00:53:42.980 in general?
00:53:43.700 Yes,
00:53:44.160 that is
00:53:44.900 one of their main purposes.
00:53:46.960 It's not the main purpose.
00:53:48.440 Their main purpose
00:53:49.020 is to disseminate
00:53:51.180 regime propaganda
00:53:51.900 and make sure
00:53:53.100 that they have control
00:53:54.660 over this democratic process,
00:53:56.900 but then they also
00:53:57.760 prop it up
00:53:58.240 because that's
00:53:59.240 a key part of this.
00:54:01.080 A veneer of normalcy
00:54:01.880 pretending
00:54:02.260 that we're still
00:54:03.040 in 2004.
00:54:04.220 Yeah,
00:54:04.520 that's right,
00:54:05.220 Arthur.
00:54:05.540 You've hit the nail
00:54:06.400 exactly on the head.
00:54:08.120 They're going to continue
00:54:08.960 to do that.
00:54:09.620 That is their job.
00:54:10.500 the key
00:54:12.580 when legitimacy
00:54:14.160 in your country
00:54:15.720 is given out
00:54:17.040 through public opinion
00:54:19.120 when you believe
00:54:20.560 in a popular sovereignty,
00:54:22.020 then the key
00:54:23.060 to staying in power
00:54:23.960 for a ruling class
00:54:24.900 is to control
00:54:25.480 popular opinion
00:54:26.120 and the best way
00:54:27.000 to do that
00:54:27.340 is control of mass media.
00:54:29.400 Let's see here.
00:54:30.700 Tiny Rick
00:54:31.140 for $4.99.
00:54:32.760 Let them put this
00:54:33.580 into practice
00:54:34.340 within the New York Times
00:54:35.360 leadership structure
00:54:36.180 for a year or two.
00:54:37.220 Then we can talk.
00:54:38.480 I love what you do.
00:54:39.120 Keep up the good work.
00:54:39.920 No, thanks, man.
00:54:40.920 And yeah,
00:54:41.240 that's a really good
00:54:42.500 suggestion.
00:54:45.680 Yeah, guys,
00:54:46.080 let's just go ahead
00:54:46.840 and since this is
00:54:49.100 such a great system,
00:54:49.980 we want to avoid
00:54:51.480 any of your dark triad
00:54:53.380 traits over
00:54:53.880 at the New York Times.
00:54:54.980 So we're going to
00:54:55.500 reinstate this system
00:54:56.640 first in the New York Times
00:54:58.280 for 10 years
00:54:59.000 and then we'll go ahead
00:55:00.460 and try it out
00:55:01.520 in America.
00:55:02.220 We'll see how we go
00:55:03.100 from there.
00:55:05.160 Kate J here
00:55:05.960 for $4.99.
00:55:07.220 Do you think
00:55:07.660 the author is just
00:55:08.240 trying to justify
00:55:08.920 a house plant
00:55:09.760 Fetterman
00:55:10.760 bite them 0.72
00:55:11.220 like vessel
00:55:12.160 that the regime
00:55:13.180 can easily control
00:55:14.100 to do their bidding?
00:55:15.080 Yeah, I mean,
00:55:15.400 that's a good point too, right?
00:55:17.280 We're in a situation
00:55:18.140 where you'll notice
00:55:19.360 that even though
00:55:20.040 it's probably very obvious
00:55:21.200 to people
00:55:21.760 that we are selecting
00:55:23.440 very inept people
00:55:25.200 who people are too old
00:55:26.560 or have brain damage
00:55:27.660 as our representatives
00:55:29.580 so they can just be
00:55:30.240 easily manipulated
00:55:31.080 by the bureaucracy
00:55:32.020 and the money men
00:55:32.700 behind them.
00:55:34.100 That's a little too obvious
00:55:35.380 and so that's an obvious
00:55:37.480 problem with democracy
00:55:38.200 but he doesn't bring
00:55:38.860 it up at all
00:55:39.720 even though that should
00:55:40.760 have been like
00:55:41.140 an easy slam dunk
00:55:42.160 so that's very obvious
00:55:44.140 in its absence
00:55:45.100 and it's a pretty fair point
00:55:47.400 to say that this
00:55:48.200 might be setting up
00:55:49.200 that kind of understanding
00:55:50.620 that, hey,
00:55:51.240 anyone can do this job
00:55:52.440 so why not somebody
00:55:53.920 who's been selected
00:55:55.120 even though they can't
00:55:56.060 string together sentences?
00:55:57.420 I think that's
00:55:57.980 an entirely fair point.
00:55:59.440 All right,
00:55:59.700 and we've got one more here.
00:56:01.080 Thogo for $5.
00:56:03.740 Are they talking about Biden?
00:56:05.860 Sorry,
00:56:06.340 I didn't notice
00:56:07.340 exactly in there
00:56:08.840 when you posted that
00:56:10.160 so I'm not sure
00:56:10.840 when you're referencing it.
00:56:12.460 I think that they kind of,
00:56:15.100 oh,
00:56:15.360 maybe you're making a joke.
00:56:16.540 Are they,
00:56:16.820 you know,
00:56:16.980 all these problems
00:56:17.980 could apply to Biden.
00:56:19.300 Yeah,
00:56:19.420 that's fair,
00:56:20.080 right?
00:56:20.320 He would,
00:56:21.120 if Hunter Biden
00:56:23.200 doesn't fall into
00:56:23.880 the dark triad,
00:56:25.060 who does,
00:56:25.580 right?
00:56:25.780 Like,
00:56:26.500 that would be somebody
00:56:28.280 who would most
00:56:28.740 definitely qualify
00:56:29.640 so,
00:56:30.580 yeah,
00:56:31.080 I think,
00:56:31.640 I think the Bidens 0.64
00:56:32.480 would most definitely
00:56:33.320 be qualified
00:56:34.500 under,
00:56:36.760 is the dangerous people
00:56:37.880 they're talking about here
00:56:38.700 but of course,
00:56:39.500 he would never draw attention
00:56:40.340 to that.
00:56:41.260 All right,
00:56:41.600 guys,
00:56:42.000 well,
00:56:42.200 we're going to go ahead
00:56:42.840 and wrap this up
00:56:44.020 but thank you,
00:56:44.660 thank you everybody
00:56:45.520 for coming by.
00:56:46.860 I appreciate everybody
00:56:47.700 with the super chats,
00:56:48.700 a lot of good questions there.
00:56:50.560 Thank you for joining us.
00:56:52.520 Of course,
00:56:52.780 if it's your first time
00:56:53.940 stopping by the channel,
00:56:55.240 please make sure
00:56:55.680 to go ahead
00:56:56.020 and subscribe
00:56:56.400 to the Oren McIntyre
00:56:57.640 show on YouTube.
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00:57:00.540 and get the notifications
00:57:01.360 and stuff,
00:57:01.800 guys.
00:57:02.100 I hear a lot of people say,
00:57:03.040 hey,
00:57:03.540 I thought you went live
00:57:04.780 but I didn't get the notification.
00:57:05.920 I didn't know it was going on.
00:57:07.620 Make sure that you go ahead
00:57:08.680 and click that button
00:57:09.720 so you know
00:57:10.980 when we're going live.
00:57:12.560 And then,
00:57:12.940 of course,
00:57:13.220 if you want to get these broadcasts
00:57:14.400 as podcasts,
00:57:15.500 make sure that you're subscribing
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00:57:17.600 on your favorite podcast platform.
00:57:19.460 The podcast has just been exploding,
00:57:21.140 guys.
00:57:21.380 It's been wild
00:57:22.200 to see the number of downloads.
00:57:23.480 I very much appreciate
00:57:24.920 you joining me there.
00:57:26.160 It's great to see
00:57:26.700 that we've got the crowd
00:57:27.540 with the live stream
00:57:28.560 but then so many people
00:57:29.400 are also watching it
00:57:30.720 and I get you.
00:57:31.260 I'm somebody
00:57:31.600 who's constantly driving.
00:57:33.680 I'm mowing the lawn.
00:57:34.600 I'm working out.
00:57:35.220 I'm doing things
00:57:35.940 where I can't always be live
00:57:39.140 at the broadcast.
00:57:40.000 So it's definitely great
00:57:41.420 to have that podcast version.
00:57:43.460 I appreciate so many of you
00:57:44.620 joining me that way.
00:57:46.100 All right, guys.
00:57:46.640 Well, we're going to go ahead
00:57:47.480 and wrap everything else up
00:57:49.380 but I hope you have
00:57:50.140 a great extended weekend
00:57:51.940 and as always,
00:57:53.020 I will talk to you next time.