alt Hacker NewsI have trouble predicting how public sentiment will evolve over time.
I'm not that young, and still and the last 10 years have left me with an absolutely blistering distrust of the 70+ crowd on any matter pertaining to positions of authority. I'd like to see ~67 and ~72 become the other 18 and 21: hard lines beyond which the law progressively rescinds the presumption of total competence.
It's not a pretty solution. There are certainly some 14 year olds who are more deserving of a drivers license than many of legal age. I would welcome a world where we can actually establish and enforce criteria that allow us to move beyond such crude numeric thresholds. But in the meantime, the bulk of us need protection from statistics. Desperately.
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Testing is expensive, subjective and favors people with resources to game the test. When thinking about stuff like this, we should aim for something more universal, with the understanding that this is not a moral judgement on a person.
In the context of the article and of controls, I think we should worry more about controls on those in power (i.e., politicians) than others (i.e., voters).
I completely agree. With so many high profile cases of people suffering from some form of dementia being elected to important offices (McConnell and Feinstein; Biden and Trump), it's clear that the intended electoral mechanism isn't working to replace people who are not fit to serve. Name recognition & incumbency advantage are just too strong to allow the right thing to happen.
The version of the fix that I like is, if you would be 65 or older on the day you would begin holding the office, you are ineligible to be in the election or the appointment process. This gives some room for acknowledging that there isn't a clear cut-off where one immediately becomes unfit to serve. If you're a healthy 64, you can serve all the way to 70 for an office with a lengthy term; but if you're going soft at 65, then you don't need to make the difficult decision of whether or not to run. The decision has been made for you, way ahead of time, and you can make plans to retire and support a successor, avoiding a really nasty, personal primary process.
This would have nicely avoided Biden's awkward "will he, won't he" decision that led to the 2024 disaster we're still suffering from. Feinstein & McConnell would have retired well before their brains transformed into cottage cheese, turning them into jokes and destroying whatever legacies they worked to build. It's better for everyone.
Go look at the demographics of the last election and then tell me which groups shouldn't be allowed to vote.