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Comment by SQueeeeeL | Hacker News Reader

It simply shows growing political instability of the US. We see this all over the place: the inability to successfully tackle major issues (shown by yearly fights over debts), bizarre socio-political ideas on the rise, and the last two holders of highest political office being a former gameshow host and an 80 year old who's main qualification was being second in command to a former leader. If you're a major CEO of a French finical firm, all these factors will start to influence your internal model of how stable the nation state will be in the coming decades

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the inability to successfully tackle major issues (shown by yearly fights over debts)

I’d argue that it shows the opposite. That when it matters most, the US Congress can muster up a compromise and do so year after year.

> matters most

This is like the least significant thing they could work together on. There are SO many more issues they could tackle together but won't.

Biden had been a U.S. Senator for decades and chaired powerful committees.

Age may be an issue but I don’t think his experience should be in question.

I actually agree, but it seemed extremely obvious that he had no real desire to run and really wanted to step away from politics. But the current political system has become such that the only way one can become the top official is via "celebrity" status (i.e. we treat politicians as an entertainment commodity in the US); it's very arguable this became an issue with televised debates and the Reagan presidency (he was a very popular actor).

Basically we're past the point of finding extremely qualified individuals as leaders, now it's much more of a popularity contest

Isn’t Biden a counterexample to this point?

Also, I’m not sure that this country has ever really selected leaders based on innate leadership potential (whatever that may be). Sometimes it selects for celebrity (I think GWB and Obama were arguably both in this bucket, despite traditional-ish political backgrounds), sometimes generals, sometimes Republican senators from Ohio.

But even for the presidents who turned out to be tremendously powerful leaders (Lincoln, FDR, LBJ), I’m not sure that was a deliberate choice by the voters ex ante (and obviously not in the case of LBJ).

Yeah, democracy is a fundamentally flawed system in that way, the Greeks were heavily aware of the popularity contest potential of it as a governing system. It's essentially the job of the "political elites" who heavily manipulate the system (through mechanisms like primaries and candidacy criteria) to not let too many elderly plutocrats get into office; because that signals instability to the rest of the geopolitical players. The fact that our political elites can no longer maintain the steady state of "respectable" leadership in America, and are being forced to compromise for goofy polarizing candidates is actually very concerning for long term view of the nation

> Yeah, democracy is a fundamentally flawed system in that way

As long as the elections keep on happening in a timely manner it's a "flaw" that can fix itself.

That's mostly assuming that "decorum" is kept, which is essentially the hallmark bellwether for geopolitical stability. A populis leader could hypothetically take and maintain power outside of established rules and laws (i.e. imposed term limits, respecting results of elections, being physically and mentally fit to serve). Every nation state is basically constantly on the knife's edge of falling into political disarray; decorum/external optics is basically the temperature you can use to measure stability

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