How do we Upgrade Politicians to the 21st Century?
By its very nature, politics is always changing. Indeed, we don’t need any kind of new movement in order to encourage politicians to address issues of the modern world (they love to grandstand on popular issues). The problem is that most politicians are completely unfit for the job.
Okay, yeah, that’s a bit broad. Let me specify: Most politicians are completely unfit for the job of dealing with modern issues. Oh, they’ll talk about them at length, undoubtedly. However, when it comes to actually solving these issues, they know next to nothing about how to go about it.
This is why we need to upgrade politics, and most importantly, politicians, to the 21st Century. We need 21st-century politicians who are to current politicians, what Intertops Red Casino bonus codes are to regular ol’ bonus codes.
Oligarchies
Call it whatever you like- an oligarchy, nepotism, cronyism, it all comes down to the same idea. A small group of people with a large amount of power form their own elite circle that never seems to leave. Either their constituencies keep voting them in, or the circle of elites appoints their friends to unelected positions, such as cabinet appointments, civil servants, or members of staff.
In some cases, due to the connections people in positions of power often get, even when not a member of the current administration, these cronies end up in important positions, regardless of qualifications. Joe Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, in one such person. She began her political career in 2001, was a member of Obama’s campaign, and then his administration, and when Trump won in 2016, she became a political commentator on CNN- right up until Biden stepped into office, and she once again started working for the government.
In other words, she has never had a real job in her entire life.
She’s not even the worst of them. Joe Biden himself has been in government for nearly fifty years at this point! Half a century! Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been in office since 1987- or thirty-four years. The ironically named Don Young, the oldest member of congress at the moment at a whopping eighty-six years old has been in office on and off since 1967. The average age of a member of congress is fifty-nine years old.
This is not about being ageist or whatever newfangled term that might be thrown around these days. I am concerned (in fact, I’m certain) that our representatives are unqualified in tackling modern issues- for instance, the internet. Just look up awkward compilations of senators attempting to ask Mark Zuckerberg or Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai about their platforms’ illicit behavior. It’s hilariously uncomfortable because it’s clear that the internet is basically magic in their eyes.
Big Tech is one of the largest issues facing the world today. Companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Amazon have enormous control over the spread of information and have been provably doing so. They routinely engage in censorship by enforcing vague guidelines unevenly on its users- at the behest of the government, no less (you can look up the clip of Jen Psaki admitting that the Biden administration talked to Twitter about reducing “hate speech”- a term that has no legal definition whatsoever).
These platforms are so powerful, they can ban presidents, political dissenters, and basically anyone who doesn’t support their agenda, all while suppressing links, shadow banning accounts, and flagging posts as “true” or “false” as deemed by third-party fact-checkers, who themselves have blatant biases and agendas. They work in tandem with vile governments, like China, to adhere to their censorship laws, in order to gain access to their markets. They ban President Trump for “hate speech”, but the Shah of Iran (the number one sponsor of global terror), Kim Jong Un (dictator of North Korea), and Xi Jinping (dictator of China, responsible for the ongoing Uighyer genocide) are all free to peruse Twitter to their leisure.
They do all this too while enjoying the privileges of being labeled an “open platform” under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives them immunity to being sued over what’s posted (as opposed to being labeled a publisher, which is liable).
In other words, they’re having their cake and eating it, and our oligarchical political elites are completely unequipped to handle it.
Environment
This isn’t even a one-sided political issue. This can be bipartisan if both sides of the political spectrum (forget the politicians) could actually listen to each other. For instance, the topic of the environment is a heavily politicized topic.
The main problems are that a) the biggest political environmentalists are complete hypocrites, b) the environmentalist community has been signaling the doomsday flag for over sixty years at this point, and c) politicians are so ignorant of science and technology, the only solutions they can ever seem to present involve wastefully spending your tax-dollars on “carbon taxes”, which fine you for simply existing.
Now, I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of whether or not “global warming” is a conspiracy or not, or whether or not burning carbon is actually a problem. The whole field of science behind the studies has been completely politicized, and it’s hard to find any non-biased facts, other than the fact that the earth is warming about one centigrade every year.
However, working on the presumption that Global Warming as it’s commonly understood is real, what are the solutions being proposed? Either, extreme taxation without much purpose, such as the Paris Climate Accords. Or solar panels and wind farms. Also, electric cars, because why not?
Each of these things, when thought through for five minutes, completely fails at the goals environmentalists are striving for. The Paris Accords doesn’t bind China or India (#1 Global Pollutors) to do anything about their emissions until 2030.
Solar panels and wind turbines have the teeny, tiny problem of being completely inefficient, unreliable, and lacking in grid stability (the ability to have a consistent generation of energy). Electric cars sound great until you realize that they require more carbon to make, and the electricity required to power them (generated by coal) produces more carbon than buying a used gasoline car. Basically, electric cars simply move the point of carbon emission from the car to the powerplant, which has to generate more power to supply the increasing demand.
If these politicians knew anything about the subject, they might be able to design around it. For instance, instead of investing in Solar, they could invest in Nuclear – the cleanest form of energy on planet Earth, that politicians don’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole because the word “radiation” makes the environmentalists, the same environmentalists who want to ban coal, airplanes, and steak, cry.
New Blood
The solution, in my opinion, is to get some new blood in our government. We need to get rid of the old crowd, the elites, and the swamp and get some fresh faces in who are better equipped for the job. There are two angles that this problem needs to be attacked from, too.
First, we need term limits. People shouldn’t be able to make a career out of suckling on the government’s teat. If it takes you fifty years to serve the needs of your constituents, then you have failed miserably at your job. There are problems a representative’s constituency faces that he’s supposed to go to congress and solve. A politician’s job, in theory, is to make his job obsolete.
The second angle that this problem needs to be approached from is educating voters. This is perhaps far harder than the first. Why do people keep voting for bad actors who seem to continually prove over and over again their own corruption and hypocrisy? It’s because all they know how to do is check the box with an R or a D next to it, and nothing else matters.
On top of that, social media platforms hide vital information from the majority of their userbases. More than ten percent of Biden voters would have switched their vote if they had known about all the scandals with Hunter Biden (the drugs, the Ukraine Gas job, the 10% to “the big man”).
On top of that, the education system, the mainstream media, and Hollywood are all extremely politically biased in one direction. When children are raised in a political bubble- which school is, then they never learn to think critically about the authorities in their lives nor, more importantly, about their own beliefs.
The school system has been like this for decades too. I remember back in middle school, we had a debate, where each student researched a topic, and everyone debated. I remember absolutely owning that debate because every student had picked the easy, feel-good solution whatever issue they had researched. For instance, one student had researched isolation in prisons and talked about the negative mental effects isolation has on prisoners. Everyone was nodding along except (not to toot my own horn or anything) me. I asked, “Okay – what do you do with prisoners that stab other prisoners then? What’s your alternative?”
There was no answer because he, like most of my classmates, had never had their positions on such issues challenged by someone who didn’t share their ideology. The internet is only helping exacerbate such political bubbles by allowing people to sink into communities of like-minded people and exclude everyone and everything else from their feed.
In the real world, you can’t hide from ideas you don’t like. In the office, at the store, wherever – there are going to be people who disagree with you, and encouraging people to exile dissidents for differing beliefs from their lives is only going to make the world worse for everyone.
And very few modern politicians are willing to say so – much less actually do anything about it.
