In a functioning democracy, the president is not so important.

Someone on Quora asked me:

Who is the best option for president?

I’m Brazilian and I’ve been studying Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton avidly. Many of my friends and relatives consider me one the most judicious person. I don’t think either of them would be appropriate for the presidency… so, who would?

 

Many think America needs a good president to save us

Why does the presidency seem so important? Because American politics is so dysfunctional and things have gotten so bad for so many people that people. Only 30% think America’s heading in the right direction. We want someone to save us. This is a basic emotional response in humans, for a mommy or daddy figure to save us. So we look to a leader.

I’m not saying “they’re childish” – we all are. Psychologists say we’ve learned most of our social behaviors by an early age. Kids on a playground know how to follow rules, cajole each other to follow them, dominate others and avoid domination. They know how to call each other names and be right and make each other wrong. Our whole foundation of how to be social is childish. That’s just part of being a human, part of being a mature adult even, having this childish base at our core.

Part of our childish learning is that when we need help, we find an adult, someone bigger and more powerful. A president is different from a parent, but the seeds a sameness are inside us.

And fixing our country is important. About 75% of Americans think climate change is a serious problem. 58% believe it’ll harm them, personally. In most European countries, the numbers are higher. Some great solutions have been proposed in Congress, but they’ve been unable to act on this. Many other problems plague us as well.

Or, we can save ourselves.

I’m not going to answer your question about who’d make the best president. People with different views have different opinions. While I have mine, I’m committed to being non-partisan as much as I can, and that means recognizing that my view is just another view. It makes little or no difference. What matters is how we cure the dysfunction. And the cure is not going to come from a president.

The president is not so important. We, the American people, need to act like adults. That includes instruct our members of Congress to act like adults and work with President Obama instead of demonizing him. If we hold them accountable for that, President Obama can still preside over us adopting wonderful solutions, including a host of political reform issues for which there is near unanimous support.

To improve our democracy, be an adult. PeopleCount can help.

There are ways of curing this dysfunction. The only doable one I’ve found is PeopleCount.org’s proposal of making our members of Congress accountable to citizens. Since no one else was committed to creating this, I have been. Now, finally I have a small team. Please add your name to our announcement list so we can notify you when it’s ready.

There are many ways of curing this dysfunction, but most of them require acting like adults in concert. Unfortunately people find it easy to act emotionally in concert, and that throws us into patterns we learned as kids- being stubborn, being loud, name-calling, threatening.

PeopleCount.org will be a way for us to act in concert as adults, on issues we care about.