If we want a different future, what responsibility do we have to help create it?
We complain about politicians, political parties, broken promises, and the direction our society is taking.
But perhaps we should also ask a more difficult question:
If we are unhappy with the people governing us, should we also examine how we select them?
This concern is reflected in public opinion. In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 72% of Americans rated the quality of recent political candidates as bad, with similar views among Republicans and Democrats.
That brings the question back to us—the people.
How Do We Select Those We Trust?
Consider engineering.
Before engineers are entrusted with work affecting public safety, they typically must meet professional requirements involving education, experience, examinations, and licensure. These safeguards cannot eliminate every mistake, but they establish a baseline of competence before engineers are given significant professional responsibility.
Similar safeguards exist in medicine, aviation, and other professions where professional decisions can seriously affect people’s lives.
Political decisions can also have profound consequences—affecting economies, infrastructure, education, healthcare, public safety, and even war and peace.
Yet political leadership works differently.
For example, the constitutional qualifications for a U.S. senator are age, citizenship duration, and state residency. There is no constitutional requirement for education, professional experience, or demonstrated competency in government or public policy.
There is an important democratic principle behind this difference: political leadership cannot simply be determined by a professional board deciding whom citizens are permitted to elect.
The people decide.
But that makes another question especially important:
If voters are democracy’s ultimate quality-control mechanism, how much are we investing in the quality of our own information, reasoning, and judgment?
Are We Selecting Good Governors—or Good Campaigners?
Winning an election and governing effectively require different, though sometimes overlapping, skills.
Campaigning requires communication, persuasion, organization, coalition building, and an understanding of what voters care about.
Governing requires some different abilities: evaluating complex information, understanding consequences, choosing capable advisers, balancing competing interests, recognizing uncertainty, making difficult decisions, and accepting responsibility for the results.
That raises an important question:
Does our political system reward the people best prepared to govern—or those best able to persuade us to elect them?
The distinction matters because persuasion plays an important role in winning elections.
Political messages can appeal to hope, fear, loyalty, anger, economic concerns, or promises of a better future. None of these appeals necessarily makes a message wrong.
The problem begins when who said something becomes more important than whether it is true, workable, or supported by evidence.
The same standard should apply to politicians we support and those we oppose. If a leader substantially changes an important position, that change is not necessarily a weakness. Evidence and circumstances can change. But citizens should reasonably ask: what changed, and why?
If we excuse from our own side what we condemn from the other, accountability loses much of its meaning.
A democracy cannot depend only on the quality of its politicians. It also depends on the quality of judgment used to elect them.
Preparing Citizens to Decide
Equal voting rights are fundamental to democracy, but so is preparing citizens to make informed decisions.
We spend years preparing people for employment and professional life. Perhaps we should place greater emphasis on preparing people for another consequential responsibility: helping decide who governs society.
Preparing citizens does not mean teaching them which political ideas to support.
It means strengthening their ability to decide for themselves: understanding how government works and the basics of economics and public finance, evaluating evidence, interpreting statistics, distinguishing facts from predictions and opinions, comparing competing arguments, recognizing misleading information, and questioning their own assumptions.
Artificial intelligence may create new opportunities for this kind of civic preparation.
As AI changes some of the skills people need for work, perhaps education can devote greater attention to what people need to understand as citizens—reasoning, judgment, consequences, and informed decision-making.
AI itself could help citizens examine political claims, compare public records and positions, locate evidence, and understand competing arguments.
But it should not tell people whom to support.
Technology should help people become better informed—not decide what they should believe.
We the People
Imagine boarding an airplane.
You expect qualified people to have designed it, inspected it, maintained it, and operated it under rigorous standards.
We expect these safeguards because the consequences of failure can be serious or even fatal.
Political decisions can also carry profound consequences. But democracy cannot simply hand political authority to a licensed professional class. Decisions about society’s values, rights, priorities, and direction ultimately belong to the people.
So perhaps democracy needs a different kind of quality control:
Not fewer voters. Better-prepared voters.
Not telling citizens what to believe. Better preparing them to decide for themselves.
Not accountability only for the other side. The same standards applied to everyone—including those we support.
We should not assume, without evidence, that democracy was intentionally designed to keep citizens poorly informed or to favor unqualified political leaders. But neither should we ignore an important question:
Can people and institutions within the political system benefit when citizens are poorly informed, divided, or persuaded more by narrative than evidence?
So how do we preserve equal rights while building a society capable of making better decisions?
If we the people ultimately decide who receives political authority, we should examine not only how we select our leaders and how prepared we are to make that choice, but also how we hold them accountable for their decisions and results.
The future of democracy may depend not only on the leaders we choose, but on how well we prepare ourselves to choose them—and how consistently we hold them accountable afterward.