I’ve read Lees' book, he’s one of my favorite misanthropes.

His ideas are preposterous though somewhat interesting at surface level. They’ll never work because the idea of expertise to vote can easily be manipulated into who’s allowed to get expertise in the first place. The ones now marginalized will be further excluded and marginalized. That is not democracy of any kind, or a workable republic. It will lead to nothing but insurrection and ongoing revolutions. Death and decay.

Further, even if you could guarantee equality of process, the idea of governance by experts is too limited. An expert in finance, for example, will not have the expertise to see how a finance policy may negatively affect the environment, for example, or maternal mortality rates, or social cohesion. But by his model the 15% of experts allowed to vote have that say, that vote at the expense of any other expert in any other field who would rightfully put the brakes on it. They would never even know about it? It’s unclear in his book. You can easily see what kind of mayhem this political structure would lead to.

Anyway, at surface level it seems like a good idea that people earn the right to vote in order to do away with populist voting, but our society and our problems are too intertwined for his idea to work. Trump actually has a good byline here, “the cure cannot be worse than the disease”.

I don’t like this idea of right to vote anyway. It’s elitism of the intellectual. One does not to be a mental superstar to be competent enough to vote well. One does not even need average intelligence, frankly. This past election one did well voting if they:

• knew right from wrong and adamantly rejected the wrongs of evil and corruption
• voted in line with the Constitution, the American Creed as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• could tell truth from lies
• had not allowed yourself to be radicalized or propagandized by media, the internet, or the church
• voted for the future, not the past; voted for the world your children and their children will inhabit because that work is today as the world we inhabit was laid by our parents' and grandparents' choices.
• voted from a heart of brotherly love and affection for your fellow citizens rather than nihilism, greed, or short term gain
• did not let fear rule your conscience and be your “mind-killer”