General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Should the United States have a standard Psychological Test [View all]0rganism
(24,410 posts)a handful of elite billionaire owners paying a staff of mini-elite "experts" to select the most promising candidates for a violent-yet-slow-paced competition among behemoths as millions of rabid proletarian fans cheer from their couches... well congrats, maybe it is a working analogy after all, but i don't think it leans toward protecting us from having a psychopath as president.
here's the problem again. you want a panel of non-partisan experts putting together a screen to prevent nutjobs from running for president without the people knowing they are nutjobs. who selects the panel? what are their respective qualities? and who selects the selectors?
let's say we have the deans of widely respected university psychology departments pick the panelists who will construct the screen, who in turn represent the nominal best our medical field has to offer. this is immediately susceptible to attack from both the top and the bottom. at the bottom, Fox news tells its millions of true-believers that their preferred candidates are being attacked by liberal intellectual elites, with all that implies, and the utility of the test itself as electoral deterrent becomes compromised. at the top, you have the problem of grants and endowments influencing staff selection in universities -- the "trustees" do have a say in how things run, who gets tenure, etc., so that's a direct invitation for the billionaires to buy their way in more than they already are to shift the members of the panel-selection committee. both tactics are indirect and would take a while to impact events, but eventually it would happen.
ultimately we face an unholy alliance of faux-populism/traditionalism with moneyed interests wealthy beyond imagination. this is our true nemesis, and it is formidable indeed. as Plato notes, democracies are inherently unstable and prone to decay into tyranny, as democracies count on the majority to "choose wisely" for their survival.
as we have recently rererediscovered good decisions are difficult to sustain for hundreds of years.
i'm going to make my objection even simpler: look, have we ever had an election where the contrast between relative sanity of the candidates was more stark and obvious than the 2016 presidential election? and not only sanity, but also competence, literacy, even basic social hygiene, all these differences were quite obvious to anyone who cared to look for them. we still had 62 MILLION citizens choose poorly, and look where we are now. do you really think the results of a psychological screen would have shifted the balance? i mean, the candidate was videotaped bragging about his predilection for sexual assault. you honestly can't get more obvious than that. a very large segment of the electorate either ignored such information, regarded it as secondary in importance to other core issues or actually approved of it. i don't see how the test you propose, the results of which will necessarily be complex and probably difficult to communicate, addresses any of those 3 categories -- the results will still have to be conveyed to a subset of the population who
(a) doesn't care for such information, at least when applied to politics
(b) has other overriding priorities anyway
(c) desires, for whatever reason, an unstable leader
so long-term dangers aside, i think the idea fails prima facie for purely utilitarian reasons