High turnout brings out the low-information voters and changes the composition of the viable coalition for both parties. If we restricted the franchise, we might be able to sustain something closer to the Romney GOP versus the Mayor Pete Democratic Party. And that would make the government a lot more orderly and competent.

I doubt the top 10-20% of either side wants a democracy. The difference is in where we want the filtering to happen. I want it to happen up front at the voting stage, but have the government be highly responsive to the people that do vote. The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats favor mass voting, but that the actual governance is done by highly credentialed career bureaucrats that aren’t directly answerable to voters.

I’d argue the Mayor Pete model is even less democratic than mine. Because although everyone votes, the effect of that vote is filtered through a fairly narrow class of credentialed bureaucrats, entry into which is gatekept by elite universities and professional organizations.

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fragmede 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know who the

> The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats

are, but yes, you want career bureaucrats running the show that follow the rules as set forth by Congress, with appointed officials that pass vetting at the top. Otherwise every position becomes political and the laws themselves go further out the window.

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rayiner 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Your model doesn’t eliminate politics, it just entrenches the particular politics of the kind of people who go to T10 schools then get jobs as division heads at federal agencies.[1]

There is no such thing as “following the rules” in an apolitical way. Congress writes very broad laws, and the executive branch exercises a tremendous amount of discretion in enforcing and executing those laws. The founders understood that, and their solution to the problem was frequent elections, not the fiction of neutral, apolitical credentialed bureaucrats.

[1] A good example of this is the bank bailouts in the first Obama administration. Even though the voters were outraged at Wall Street, Obama followed the bailout strategy developed by Wall Street. He replaced Hank Paulson (Goldman Sachs) with Tim Geithner (NY Fed then private equity), but everyone underneath stayed the same and the bailout strategy stayed the same.

	▲	fragmede an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's not a fiction. People do their jobs even if they don't like the current or past President. I'm sure you can pull out a long list of people who didn't, but unless you name everybody, it simply isn't a fiction. My claim isn't bureaucrats are always apolitical, it's that they mostly are. Showing that some aren't doesn't show that they mostly are. Take the executive assistant to the American diplomat to, say, Sweden. They file paperwork and schedule appointments for the diplomat. Their role is operational. Logistics stuff. Coordinating what goes where. Setup a meeting between three very important busy people and juggle their calendars. Does that position really need to be someone we vote for? They do operations, not make policy.