And please try to do it with the less bias possible, left and right wing are meaningless terms for me, I only believe in 🐔 wings.
I think the reason we are seeing two candidates who are unpopular for reasons of mental fitness has to do with several forces at play, and it comes down to how power is gained and distributed in our system.
First, I am defining power as the ability to make people do things they would not do on their own volition.
In any system, the longer you stay there, the more opportunities there are to amass power. This power comes from connections you make. In my teenage years, I didn’t have much power for many reasons, but one was that I didn’t have powerful connections. All my friends were working retail or fast food or other summer jobs. With age, my connections are more powerful. My best friend works at Oracle and another at Microsoft. As a musician, I’ve been around the block a bit and now know folks who are producers and have some notariety. This is a big reason we are seeing more and more elderly folks in powerful positions. Not only do they have power, they have connections.
The classic cases of corruption we see from the outside, are people returning favors when viewed from the inside. To them it’s common decency. Imagine you were passionate about food and feeding people, and you started a restaurant or maybe a non-profit to feed the homeless. If someone you knew saw your work and believed in what you do, and they could give you a hefty low rate loan or been a donation, the decent thing to do would be to thank them, and if they asked for a favor down the line, you would feel terrible to not return the support they gave you when you were small and starting out.
Throw that in with a first past the post voting system that allows power to consolidate around two parties, and you’ll see the natural trend is for those with the most experience and connections to find their way to the top while closing more and more opportunities for younger folks to make their way in. The connections of the youth simply can’t compete with the connections of the elderly.
One part of your post that struck me was the “why do we allow”. Personally my take is that we shouldn’t make strict requirements of who someone is in order to run for office. There are other ways we can vet those unfit to serve. My concern with something like an iQ test or upper age limit is that we will be disenfranchising marginalized groups from taking power. I don’t mean to go full slippery slope, but I do think this is a dangerous precedent to set. Should an elderly person be barred from running for president? Should someone who has a mental illness like depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, or schizophrenia be barred from holding office? If project 2025 takes place we may ask the question should trans or homosexual people be allowed to hold office? For the last one, the argument from conservatives would be that they are too “morally deficient” to hold office. Personally I find that repulsive.
By limiting demographics of who can and cannot run for office, we would also allow the possiblity of a rogue president to disqualify opponents if they can manipulate a test required to be eligible to run for president.
I think these are reasonable considerations when trying to answer your question. I hope this was helpful.
If you’d like to learn more on power structures, CGP grey made a great video that is a great tl;Dr to my first year of my polisci undergrad.
To give a simple and unbiased answer to your question: Any natural-born US-citizen who has lived in the US for at least 14 years and is at least 35 years old is allowed to run for president of the United States.
Allowed to run, yes. But to be able to win requires a lot more, mainly money, and the ability to raise money. They raise money by making promises to wealthy corporations…
and is at least 35 years old
Has nobody ever tried to change that because of age discrimination?
To change it would require a constitutional convention. Changing the constitution is intentionally very difficult (but not impossible).
I do not want someone in their 20s running the country personally
They are allowed to run, because there’s no law stopping them.
As for why they have a chance at winning, I don’t think I can answer that without significant bias.
Well for one, there are no laws to prevent them from running. But as for why it’s them, as opposed to other candidates, the parties have elections (called primaries) to decide which candidate they will put forward in the general election. These two candidates got more votes in the primaries than any of their opponents. In the case of Biden, he was an incumbent, and no one generally runs against the incumbent of their own party, so he wasn’t really competing with anyone.
You’re glossing over how some of the more progressive dem voters were purged from the Democratic party voter rolls ahead of the primary 4 years ago, thus preventing Bernie’s fans from voting for him as the nominee.
Because people who do not have the approval of party power brokers and wealthy donors are effectively locked out, leaving only people of which the power brokers and donors approve.
The primary requirements of the power brokers and donors are that the would-be candidate has no principles that might interfere with them getting whatever it is that they want but have enough skill and/or charisma to project the illusion of principles to the voters. They want someone they can count on to exclusively serve their interests while maintaining enough of an appearance that they serve the interests of the people to win an election, then maintain at least enough support to function in office.
And since they control, as the case might be, the nomination process and the funding of campaigns, they get what they want.
We need a cabal to kill these super-rich.
I mean if you want to know the requirements for running for president, they’re listed in the constitution, so reading that would be a good start.
Older generations have entrenched themselves in institutional power, they cling to it to their very last breath. Whether it’s democratic power, corporate power, media etc.
Having two old fucks like Trump and Biden slap-fighting for the throne is the ultimate manifestation of that effort.
There’s also an incredibly powerful cloak of bystander effect happening in America.
There are literally hundreds of thousands if not tens of millions of people better fundamentally equipped to be the president of the United States than either Biden or Trump or any of the people working inside of the DNC or RNC.
But, thanks to the bystander effect, which is where people will stand idly by and watch another person being murdered in broad daylight and not do anything to help them, all of America is standing in public watching our future being murdered in broad daylight and nobody is doing anything about it because we keep thinking someone else will do something.
Add another layer to that, I don’t know what any one person could do to change this current path that we are on. If I could figure it out I would do it myself.
Yup. And a career in politics sucks way more than most people realize. It’s almost all fund raising all the time. On the phone begging for money. And when you’re not doing that, you’re dealing with belligerent morons like MTG.
“To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.”#ImWithBender #KillAllHumans
You could run for office, but you don’t, and it’s probably not because of the bystander effect.
People who take that stance are worse than the bystanders.
They are also bystanders but then after everyone finally reacts to the dead body they run around screaming, “Why didn’t YOU do anything?”
I’m just saying it’s not all bystander effect. The vast majority of us don’t have the time, energy, temperament, or most importantly the money to run for office. Or to do much beyond vote for our candidates and try to convince others to do so.
The framers of the Constitution tried to make the limitations on who could run be as minimal as possible since they didn’t want any institutional bad actors messing with the process. This includes being a felon of a state as it was thought a state could convict a candidate without due process for political reasons. If there was something to disqualify a candidate from office, it should be handled through the political process.
Also, it was never really intended for Presidents to be elected. Only two states put the election for President on the ballot initially and South Carolina only let people vote for President after the Civil War.
From that, even when Presidents were directly elected, they were initially nominated by their parties through a closed process. As this was found to be deeply undemocratic, states changed their laws to regulate how candidates were nominated, creating the primary process. Since this was done at the state level, every state did it differently.
So why Trump and Biden? Trump is extremely popular within the Republican Party; he won the majority of primaries and no other Republican candidate could compete with Trump’s popularity. Biden is the sitting President. Traditionally, sitting Presidents only get challenged when they are seen as weak politically. Until the first debate, Biden was seen as strong enough politically that no one wanted to challenge him.
Because there’s nothing that says they can’t. The highest position in the land also has one of the lowest requirements to run for, which is being a citizen and being over a minimum age.
Natural born citizen, and you have to have been a us resident for 14 years
Well, the 14th Amendment says insurrectionists can’t run but we arguably have the worst Supreme Court since before the Civil War. And conservatives have always hated the 14th Amendment since all the other clauses stop them from being local fascist dictators.
Essentially , the DNC and RNC have at this point successfully executed regulatory capture of the US political system. That is, it’s incredibly difficult to run for anything and win at a state level or higher unless you’re affiliated with one of those two, and the parties are able to exert a substantial degree of control over any and all candidates affiliated with them simply by giving or not giving them financial and political support. And the FEC has rules that effectively entrench both parties - the barrier to entry for 3rd parties is obnoxiously high, and the vagaries of our FPTP system (and for president, the electoral college too) mean that we’re effectively forced to vote tactically if we want our vote to mean anything in general elections.
There’s a whole class of “consultants” who work in Washington who are some of the most deluded, corrupt, and dishonest people you could ever want to meet. It is almost impossible to succeed in politics without making a Faustian bargain with them, even if you started out good (which, mostly, you didn’t), and once you do, forever will they control your destiny. They will decide that particular people are allowed to run. They will swing massive amounts of money and (more crucially) media attention in favor of the corporate candidates and away from the popular candidates.
They are some of the most dislikable people you can imagine. They’re all fake, like a Ken doll or a church mom, and they don’t care if you know it. And their priorities are wildly out of step with anything that will produce progress for America. They run the RNC and the DNC, and by the time decisions make it down to the level of the American people getting to pick one of the options, it’s mostly a disheartening array of bullshit that no one really has any stomach for selecting any one of, which is only further depressive of any interest by any large segment of the population in making any of that better.
Sometimes fuckups happen. Bernie was almost a massive fuckup, but they were able to kneecap him in time. Biden was actually pretty good for the working class, within the parameters of what they find to be acceptable, but I think he is 100% unable to, for example, take meaningful action against Israel, or they would throttle him in the night (figuratively speaking), and he would never recover, and Trump would win.
None of this is to say that voting doesn’t matter. Voting for Biden in this particular election will be necessary if you don’t want the world to end, chiefly because of how horrifyingly worse than even the uninspiring norm Trump is. (Trump was a fuckup, too, by the way; they didn’t want him but they were faced with a fairly authentic popular movement that just hates all politicians with a fiery passion and wants to throw them all in the river and was able to identify that he wasn’t one, and that was enough.)
But the overall system is so inbred and corrupt that people with genuinely new ideas are commonly ejected from the system, as a matter of course, before they can gain traction that might threaten anybody’s paycheck. And so, you get two old, old men who both have significant drawbacks (though not of the same kind or degree), competing to see which one can run the most powerful country in the world. It’s like if 1960s NASA had all the same engineering, all the same genius and money and manpower, except, the president’s idiot nephew was in charge of picking astronauts, and there were only like 10 random people in the world that were willing to play baseball with him that he liked, so they had to just go with a couple guys out of that lot that were acceptable to that guy for some fuckin reason and hope it went okay.
Ask me if I am bitter about it
As the most powerful nation, literally nobody can stop us from being this stupid.
But in the event of a fascist takeover, please do try.
lol the only way us can be taken down is if the MW2 scenario is plausible. Hacking that satellite thing that controls the air traffic or whatever it’s called.
Under a good electoral system a party that fails to choose good candidates would lose votes to other parties competing for those same voters. The system in America largely prevents this from occuring because both parties have large bases of voters who would effectively never consider voting for the other side.
The short version is that the Constitution says the President is the one who gets the most votes. The Electoral college says there are only 548 votes, and they are mostly all awarded by each of the states to one victor (first-past-the-post).
The practical result is that if a person-or-party can only win 36% of the vote in a state, they get 0 electoral votes. Because of *that*, a two-party system has more or less been the norm.
On what basis do you believe they should not be allowed to run? It’s a democracy, outside of a small handful of qualifiers, anybody can run.
If your actual question is “why have the major parties chosen these two individuals?” then that’s much more complicated.
