@Wes Mantooth You’re not wrong here.
The founding fathers limiting voting to not just males but to white land owning males. True, sexism and racism played a major part in this decision. But another part came from the genuine fear that the uneducated masses were incapable of being well enough informed to be able to vote and elect representative government. I think their fears were actually well founded.
In the book, “How Did We Get There” it describes President Harding using new technology, like the radio, to give “ra ra ra” speeches that really didn’t point to any specific agenda but stirred up emotions and sounded nice (sound familiar?). I can’t remember the exact quote so I’m going to paraphrase here, but a reporter speculated that if we continued along this path of letting leaders exploit new technology to communicate nothingness, that the country would soon begin electing any uneducated dumbass off the street. When I read this, I honestly thought back to Bush II and Trump. How often did we hear in the early 2000s something like “he’s a guy I could have a beer with?” Now we hear the same thing about Trump, “he speaks how we speak!” Even Biden’s charm to a certain extent is his way of speaking.
Yet, in reality, shouldn’t our leaders be too damn smart for us to have a beer with? Shouldn’t they be busy reading reports and visiting world leaders? I don’t think a president should be as vulgar as Bubba Dumbass eating at a Truck driver diner in East Jesus, Missouri (oh no I’m probably going to be labeled an elitist for saying such).
I remember President Obama received a lot of criticism for being “too stuffy” and “acting like a college professor.” Which is funny, that’s what I usually want. But even he I think “cheapened” the presidency in some ways by appearing on late night tv shows and singing with comedians like Jimmy Fallon. “OMG obama is soooo cool!” But presidents have been “cheapening” the presidency with tv since kennedy appeared in a debate against Nixon and “omg Kennedy was so hot ahhhhhhh omg!” Fortunately, Kennedy also had a good temperament to be president. But he won in no small part due to his looks and how he used tv.
The president should be damn smart and we shouldn’t base our decisions to how good he looks likeor sounds. If that were the case, our top 3 presidents would’ve never been elected, Washington had rotten teeth, Lincoln was ugly as sin, and FDR didn’t have use of his lower half. I think there probably is a strong case that the more people vote the dumber a leader we’ll elect. Mostly because we have a complex and don’t want our leaders to be too much smarter than us. We what our leaders to be relatable and people “we can have a beer with.”
The problem lies with qualifications for the electorate. If you want to set high standards for the electorate, what are they going to be? Who writes them? How can you ensure that the standards aren’t based on racism and sexism? This is where things get really uncomfortable.
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