Pro Commerce

Stop Calling Political People ‘Dimwits'

That is what friends and family keep telling me. 

However, the new California political party Common Sense supports my position. The founders of Common Sense are known by me to be the anti-dimwit politicians of the last 50 years.

There are two reasons I call the political world ‘dimwit.’  First is my personal experience over a lifetime. The second is my own sense of hypocrisy.

Those who know me and those who are familiar with my blog know that I believe humans and other simians stop learning when they reach adulthood.  For humans that is roughly age 23. Only one out of 300 persons I have met in my lifetime were able to develop new ideas and new worldviews after age 23.  The rest of the people I know and knew were only able to use the worldviews they had at that age to respond to the world.  That is my core definition of ‘dimwit.’ Viewing the world based on early life experience without the additional input of adulthood generally makes one 'dimwitted.’

The single most important experience that has colored my worldview in adulthood came when I was in my mid 20s, just at the beginning of adulthood.  I was a campaign manager for a San Francisco Republican assemblyman.  My technical position, for payroll purposes, was as a legislative assistant.  That meant I spent time in Sacramento dealing with legislators and their staff.  In the entire Assembly and Senate of 120 elected officials in 1964 there were only about 4 or 5 that I considered as intellectually above average. The rest were ‘dimwits.’ The 97% became elected officials because they were egocentric, arrogant, weird people.  

Over the next decades I worked in politics on a regular basis and I knew hundreds more elected politicians.  The ratio of 2-3% who were not dimwitted and self-serving never changed.  

Now a small group of the people I knew and observed close-up, who are not ‘dimwits,’  have joined together to form a new party, the California Common Sense Party.  They have been moved to form a new party based on their own experiences that resemble mine.

This is all by way of saying that a few of these hundreds of politicians are nice people and some are decent human beings.  I even dated a few elected women. The two qualities of being nice and being politicians are not totally incompatible.  

People like former governor Jerry Brown are the exceptions.  Jerry is smart, the son of a standard politician, and he has learned to camouflage himself and pass for an ordinary politician.

Seeing this tragic fact of American democracy led me to propose that elected legislators be replaced by a random selection of ordinary people, the Greek style of selection called ‘sortition.’  I wrote a book called A Citizen Legislature at the end of the 1970’s.  (My co-author was Chick Callenbach.)

One great mind on the political scene, William F. Buckley Jr, once said that the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book could do a better job of governing than any group of Harvard officials. Concurring with this, decades later, was Norman Podhoretz.

My second reason for this view of pervasive politician dimwittedness is my sense of hypocrisy.  How can we see the Congress of 2018 spend two years impeaching President Trump on the claim that his election in 2016 was based on fraud brought on by Russian election interference, then denying any possibility of Biden election corruption by a new Congress in 2021 and 2022?  That is hypocrisy.  I see the same hypocrisy daily on the political scene.  Gross hypocrisy equals dimwittedness.

Should my readers wonder how ‘dimwitted’ people can raise money and perennially get reelected? The answer is that political people operate in a separate tribal system.  Most of America is based on a merit system of independent ordinary people. The political system is not; it is tribal.  

The Kennedy family seems to thrive over generations, as does the Bush family.  Political machines are tribal in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and most other cities.  Nancy Pelosi’s power comes from the money connections created by her father, Thomas D’Alessandro, a powerful politician and former mayor of Baltimore.

I do not apologize for calling politicians ‘dimwits.’ To fix the problem we need to randomly select our governing class from among ordinary citizens.

Merit vs Woke

In the first battle of merit vs woke, merit won. That was the real battle described in the last blog, the recall of the San Francisco School Board members.  

The School Board was 100% woke; changing the names of 44 schools such as Lincoln and Washington because the historic figures were not woke.  The Board wanted to paint over an historic mural of George Washington’s life.  The school finances were a total mess because of anti-merit incompetence of the board members. Lastly, the Board wanted to turn the century-old college prep school into an ordinary high school because the proportion of Asians was too high. 

The electorate of San Francisco voted unambiguously to recall the Board.  San Francisco is a heavily Democrat city with a union-run Party machine.  But Asian Americans are a meritocratic citizenry and they made their voices heard clearly with 3/4ths of the voters rejecting the wokie School Board.

This may be the beginning of the end for the woke media and the Democrat establishment.  America is one of the unique nations on the earth that is meritocratic.  In a direct confrontation between the wokies who are tribal, racist, elitist with union values on the School Board versus the American values shown in the recall, American values won.

San Francisco School Board Recall

I did nothing in the School Board recall election in San Francisco last week.  But I dealt with the same issue in 1961.

The two most powerful political groups in San Francisco, today, are the Chinese Americans who were organized in the 1980s by the late Rose Pak; they elected the mayor before the current mayor. And the Lowell High School Alumni.

Lowell was an issue for both groups in this election. The recalled School Board members destroyed Lowell as a college prep school which had existed for over a century. 

I helped organize the Lowell Alumni in 1961 when a new Lowell building was constructed and the appointed school board chose to eliminate it as a college prep school.  I say “I;” my role was to help Ruth Kadish, the most powerful person in the public school system(photo on the right).  Two years later she made me president of her powerful SCOPE, Service Committee on Public Education. 

We had no trouble in 1961, getting the alumni to write tens of thousands of letters to the School Board and the mayor, George Christopher.  The alumni are both powerful and made up of dozens of prominent citizens.  Today the alumni are heavily Asian Americans.  The school is over 50% Asian and has been for half a century.

One addendum; the Lefty press mentions the $2 million raised for the recall as 'shocking.'  That is a trivial number for people who are not innumerate.  For a billionaire, of which there are many in San Francisco, a $1 million political donation is the same as a $1.00 donation to a person with $1,000 in his pocket.