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I think we have to be very careful who we vote for these days. All candidates and parties are leaning into dishonesty and misdirection even more than usual, as they can see it being so very successful in the recent past, and they will continue to use it and push the boundaries on how much and how blatant manipulations they can get away with. What they say and what they actually do are trending in very divergent directions.

On the other hand, when we start looking for non-establishment candidates who haven't been vetted and groomed for most of their professional lives, we need to understand that many of them, being actual humans, are going to have been wrong and stupid in the past, as we all are sometimes, and some of those things may be forgivable and some may not. In the age of social media, this is almost guaranteed to happen. The internet always remembers, and oppo research is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

One of the things I think we need to remember in this case is that some humans are still genuine creatures of thoughts and feelings and emotions that don't always immediately lead us to a good place, and that people can and should improve and change and grow throughout their lives as their experiences do. If I was going to be judged on the political ideology I supported when I was an idiotic 15 year old no one would ever take me seriously ever again. But that might be a mistake. Because I like to think that I've grown quite a bit since then. I've read Plato's Republic, understood most of it, and agreed with some of it. I consume a lot of information from a wide variety of sources, some of that information is not so good and sometimes it leads me astray. I'll take responsibility for those mistakes, and I'll genuinely try to do better. And I think other people should be given at least the opportunity to own their mistakes too. Instead of immediately dismissing somebody that said some bad shit once upon a time, go to the next step and ask them what they think about it now. Then ask them why they changed their mind, which is the much more important part I think.

Granted, some people are just predators and opportunists, and will say whatever they think their current audience wants to hear, including what you want to hear. Distinguishing these types of the people from the people who have genuinely changed is not easy and I don't have an easy answer for how to do it. I'm wrong most of the time when I try too. I don't pretend to be a good judge of character.

I'm preaching this point of view in the hopes that other people, who are perhaps better judges of character than I am, can find some way to identify the difference themselves. Because we desperately need to find a way to put some genuine people in leadership roles. Our current system of democracy clearly isn't doing it. For this moment in history, I think we need a philosopher-king.