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.