All us WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic) countries seem to spend a really embarrassing amount of time talking about the pointless minutiae surrounding our candidates for office and their personal lives.
We are also prone to backing very crap candidates based on personality, rhetoric, appearance ie: things that have nothing to do with being a good executive or legislator.
I think we should ban names from the election process and just have each party submit their ideas in writing and let people vote based on those submissions.
You’re not wrong. We have a representative democracy because the Founders thought the same way. I guess I prefer not to believe that it’s impossible for people to be well-informed enough to make a good decision on these things. I’ve certainly seen some new lows in the past 10 years.
Since the pandemic I’ve lost a lot of faith in humanity. Way too many people not giving a shit about others and now actively supporting hate. I’d like to think the problem is education, that by being informed on politics and having a real and strong epistemology we’d be shedding ourselves of all this garbage. Now, I just think a lot of people will always be horrible human beings.