The reason populism is destroying politics and democracy is because it makes people believe there are no…

The reason populism is destroying politics and democracy is because it makes people believe there are no objective criteria for good government. If you’re popular you win votes, and you’re then by definition the best people for the job. Rubbish. Short 🧵/1

It’s absurd that we recognise competence in every other profession with objective criteria, except politics. If an electrician sucks and your house burns down, there are all sorts of standards and regulations that will hold them to account. Not for politicians. /2

So long as they can keep finding ways to drum up popularity, their job is safe. That popularity can have no connection at all to their knowledge and skills in their portfolio areas. Imagine doing performance assessments at work, using popularity as the only metric. /3

This IS what populism does with democracy. Take the current federal government, which on so many objective measures of good governance has not only failed, but wilfully failed and deliberately undermined good governance processes. Why they resist an integrity commission,…/4

…it would apply objective criteria to political performance. And the stunned disbelief many feel every day with Covid, where governments around the world deliberately ignore basic public health practice going back 150 years. That’s objectively, criminally, incompetent. /5

But it can all be ignored, provided they can find a way to maintain popularity. We desperately need democracy to have much more rigorous criteria to qualify people for office than just how popular a person can be. That’s a recipe for living permanently in high school, with…/6

…jocks running the whole school. In fact we had many checks and balances and criteria to do this, it’s just that in the past 30 years in particular libertarian politicians have done everything to undermine and remove them. We went from ministers having to immediately resign…/7

…for gross incompetence in their departments, to them flicking responsibility to officials, to replacing officials with hand-picked advisers, to openly saying that any sort of checks and balances are ‘public autocracy’. These people are pirates, hijacking democracy. /end