Howard Dean: 'My Generation Needs to Get the Hell Out of Politics'

[delisen]

19. We have lots of examples of presidents in their

50s and 40s. Have they done exceptional jobs? Are there things they missed? Did they sometimes cede too much power to anti-democrats forces ?

I think the younger presidents often might have achieved more for the people if they had been older at the time they served.

Were younger people any better at recognizing the Russian threat, or at defending against propaganda, and non-violent attacks on democracy by another country.

I think we need to get used to people having longer political careers. It is the result of successful policies we have put in place-such as medicare, public health, anti-discrimination. Up to now people in general have had longer life spans and are healthier at older ages.

What we need is to begin the task of creating more power centers and figure out how they must be coordinated. If we don't make this change we are going to become increasingly authoritarian and conformist society. Power must be closer to the people.

I think we should be on watch for creeping authoritarianism that has arisen-it is going to have some effect on democrats too. This new concern about the age of candidates seems authoritarian. If we have primaries only by election- one person, one vote-why why try to artificially discourage individuals from running by creating out-groups. (Don't run if you are x, y, or z).

The country has partly shifted to the left on healthcare because the Democrats passed the ACA in 2009.

We have a representative democracy and it has many problems. some are systemic. One of these is that our population has massively increased but we have the same number of representatives we had when population was small.

We only still have 100 senators and due to the population differences in states-citizens in large population states are underrepresented.

Our political attention is divided-federal, state, local. Democracy requires an engagement that is time-consuming.

We don't seem to have enough room at the top to accomodate everyone's ambitions.