“On Tyranny” - Chapter 3: “Beware the one-party state”
A long while ago, I posited the thought-game of what would a no-party electorate and government look like? How would it work? What if, instead of loyalty to party, people were actually encouraged to have to study a situation and determine who was right for the position by a series of rounds. Out of a pack of a couple of dozen people, all vetted based on background and what they had actually done in life and emphatically not on what they say they will do, the field gets winnowed down to a few and so on, until there is one person left who the majority has found to be best suited for the office. It would be time-consuming and people would have to do their homework. Other rules would require that any campaigning would be done live and the same budget would be allotted to each prospective candidate; and it would not be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course, this is my little Platonic ideal, maybe right behind Plato’s itself of a society run by philosopher-kings. The antithesis ...