I think that's particularly flimsy evidence that's not backed up by anything. In particular. President Jaresh-Inyo in DS9 clearly wasn't wearing any medals, even if President Hiram Roth in ST4 was. So we can't conclude anything about those medals.
If you're referring to the UFP medallions that most people in the TVH Council Chamber scenes were wearing, those were explained in some behind-the-scenes material as being visitors' badges, essentially -- they were worn to show you were authorized to be there.
Could, maybe, possibly, sure. Could.
But you've also got to ask yourself:
Why?
Why would the peoples of Earth, Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, and Alpha Centauri create and consent to a system that limits their democratic input into the selection of the President? Why wouldn't you want a direct, popular election?
I know this isn't what you're asking, but
direct election undermines democracy by giving all the power to the majority. It ensures that minority voices will never have a say. That's why we have an electoral college in the US. If you break it down into a lot of
little elections by state, by region, by neighborhood, then it balances things out. A group that's a minority in one region may be a majority in another. And just by general statistical principles, the smaller the number of voters in a given election, the higher the probability that a single individual's vote will be decisive. The goal of democracy is not to give all the power to the biggest majority and leave everyone else powerless, but to give as much possible power to
each individual. And for that, you need a lot of little elections rather than a single big one.
And, further, it's not like there's a single set of Jurors that determine the guilt or not-guilt of every single person on trial in the United States; each Juror is charged with determining the guilt or not-guilt of the accused, based upon evidence admitted to the Court by the Judge, under the Judge's instructions of how to proceed, and then goes back to his or her life. It's a very different, much more limited, much more supervised, situation.
Well, who's to say this legislature wouldn't be supervised? How about a bicameral system with one house chosen as discussed from among the general population and the other consisting of more experienced professional legislators? (Which I believe is pretty much the form the Martian government took in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, which I strongly recommend. He explains the principles a lot better than I can here.)
The first problem with that idea, as I said before, is that legislating effectively requires a set of skills not equally distributed amongst the population; the people should be the judges of who is qualified, not random chance.
Jury service isn't random chance either. Jury candidates are summoned from the general public, but there are a lot of factors that go into determining whether they're eligible to sit on a given jury. In this proposed citizen legislature, there might be a similar vetting process.
The second problem with that idea is that when you have a large population, it effectively becomes impossible for every citizen to serve a term as a legislator; there are just too many people and not enough time for everyone to serve before they die.
So? It's not like everyone's
required to serve, just that everyone's potentially in the pool and the selection is unbiased. It's like that with jury service too. I don't know if you've been called for jury service yet, but it's not about being summoned to sit on a particular jury; it's about being part of a pool of jurors who
might be called to sit on a jury if they're needed.
People treat jury service as something to resent or fear, but I enjoyed it. I'd come in, spend a few hours reading or working on my novel, then get sent home once they decided they wouldn't be needing any more juries that day, and I got a check sent to me at the end of each of the two weeks. I
literally got paid just for showing up. There was one time when I was part of a group called for a jury just before lunch, but as is so often the case, the prospect of facing a jury convinced the involved parties to settle or take a deal or whatever, and we were let go before I ever stepped into a courtroom.
The third, and most fundamental, problem with that idea, however, is this:
No one elected them.
You're arguing that someone should be able to hold office and make law without the consent of the governed. That he or she should be able to hold office and make law with no democratic mandate.
But they
are the governed. They're chosen by lot from the general population, they serve for a year or two, then they're replaced by another batch chosen by lot from the general population. Collectively, over time, it's the people themselves who are making the laws that affect their own lives. That strikes me as being a lot more representative of the people's will overall than just electing the richest and most photogenic people with the best fundraising skills.
Democracy isn't magic. It's got as many flaws and potentials for abuse as any other system of government. It's better than most of the known alternatives, but that doesn't mean it's smart to cling to it as a religious dogma and refuse to consider whether blending it with other approaches might produce a more functional and fair system.
Expanding that set of eligible office-holders to the entire population rather than just a plutocratic elite doesn't actually make it democratic, since you still have people holding office without that individual's holding office being the clear will of the people.
That's really dangerous, really scary. What if someone like Jared Laughtner had been randomly selected to serve in Congress, for instance? Or David Duke? Or someone with severe mental retardation? Or just someone with a really poor grasp of economics, or foreign policy?
Then they'd be outweighed by the dozens or hundreds of other people sharing the legislature with them (as well as the other, more conventional chamber of the legislature, in the Robinsonian model), and they'd be sent back home when their term ended. They'd only be in service for a single legislative session, and then they'd be done with government.
And dude, we
have had plenty of racists in the US Congress. And plenty of idiots who got there with family money or connections. And
lots and lots of people with absurdly bad ideas about economics and foreign policy. Our democratic system produced Joe McCarthy, and kept him in power for a long, long time. At least in this proposed model, nobody is kept in office long enough to do any lasting harm.
So, in other words, unelected advisers would have actual power and setting policy, with the randomly chosen citizen as a figurehead?
How is that democratic?
You're making a caricature of this, and that's beneath you. "Citizen?" Singular? What the hell? I'm not talking about picking one person to be king, I'm talking about one house of the legislature consisting of a large number of individuals selected by lot from the general population, for a single term at a time.
Look, just read the Mars trilogy.
Fascinating! Can you give us a hint as to who some of those Members were in 2270?
I don't remember that much of the list offhand, and I'm too tired to go to the trouble of opening it, but I included several of the "Journey to Babel" background species and associated a couple of them with pre-existing names of Federation member worlds.
True. Though, to be fair, that does present a reasonable question about the nature of Federation democracy. If we assume that most Federation Members have more or less an equal population, it's all good -- but if you have a situation where the typical Federation Member has, say, 6 billion citizens, but Members like Deneva suddenly have maybe 1 million or fewer, you basically have a situation where a Denevan Federate's vote is much more influential, much more determinative, than, say, a United Earth Federate's.
That's why, like I discussed before, you don't have a single planetwide election, but a bunch of local elections whose cumulative results determine the winner. That way everyone's more fairly represented.
(A similar situation exists with the United States Senate today, where the vote of, say, a citizen of Wyoming is much more influential than the vote of someone from California, because there are so many more Californians than Wyomingites.)
Which is why we have both a Senate elected by state and a House elected by population -- as a compromise between the Founders who wanted the states to be equally represented and those who wanted the individuals to be equally represented. Checks and balances -- that, far more than democracy alone, is the key to fairness.
In the canon? It hasn't. I'm making that assertion, right now, because if the Federation does not make liberal democracy a requirement for Membership, then it's a worthless union. Liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government.
I think that's a very narrow-minded attitude. It may be one of the most effective ones we've managed to cobble together to date, but it's got a lot of flaws, and we shouldn't rule out the possibility that someone could invent a better one in the future. Things like this shouldn't be treated as matters of ideology and dogma. We should be open to finding whatever system works best based on evidence, not on rigid ideology.
Like I said, checks and balances are the key. Democracies without adequate checks and balances can easily become unjust and tyrannical -- a democratically elected president may be free to dissolve the legislature and suspend due process at a whim. Whereas a monarchy with strong checks on the monarch's power can be quite fair, at least in comparison to the aforementioned democracy. Heck, the whole reason democracy is a relatively good system overall is because it theoretically keeps too much power from getting into the hands of any one person or group. That's what checks and balances do as well. And democracy can be subverted so that it does give power in an unbalanced way, and that's when you need to bring in the checks and balances.
There is absolutely no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship. The entire concept is self-contradictory and absurd.
Well, that depends. Do you mean a dictator in the modern sense, or in the original Roman sense of a magistrate given absolute power in an emergency, like Cincinnatus?
The second thing I'd ask is: On what basis would such candidates be chosen? By whom? Who gives those people the authority to determine who may stand for election? I haven't read Imperial Earth, but that sounds very ominous to me.
I think in the novel the candidates were chosen by a computer based on an unbiased assessment of their qualifications. But it's been a very long time since I read the book.
I don't think that's a reasonable argument at all. Plenty of people want power for specific purposes, not just for the sake of having power.
But personal political ambition does blind a lot of people from serving the good of the public. Just look at members of Congress who deliberately scuttle valuable reforms or deliberately force the government to shut down just so they can make the party in power look bad and improve their chances of gaining power in the next election. Our current system is terribly corrupt and dysfunctional, and it's largely because of ambition and self-interest trumping responsibility.
Of course I'm not saying we should adopt the
Imperial Earth system immediately. But it's worth acknowledging that there are serious flaws with the system we have now. There's always room for improvement, so it's important to keep an open mind.
Actually, his exact line was, "I never sought this job. I was content to simply represent my people on the Federation Council. When they asked me to submit my name for election, I almost said no. Today I wish I had."
So we don't know who asked him to run -- only that "they" did.
Given the sentence structure, the intended antecedent is clearly either "my people" or "the Federation Council." Proximity suggests the latter. In general, if you follow a proper noun with a pronoun, and are skilled in speaking clearly as a politician presumably would be, then it's a safe assumption that the proper noun is the antecedent of the succeeding pronoun. If Jaresh-Inyo did intend some other, unspecified "they," if he was suddenly changing the subject without letting his listeners know, then his communication skills are sorely lacking for a president. True, we've had presidents who abused the English language horribly, but nothing else in Jaresh-Inyo's dialogue suggests a Bush-like ineptitude.
