I appreciate Ken Block’s intellect and civic engagement, but his political commentary leaves much to be desired.  Consider this, from the end of a long recent tweet:

I cannot imagine either of these candidates effectively dealing with a crisis, commanding the situation room, keeping the complexities of a crisis fully in their heads, ready to interact with other world leaders who have far better mental capabilities than our candidates do at this point.

What the heck are we doing? Partisan nonsense has left us with no candidate for those who want to elect a leader in this next election.

Note the implicit progressive, technocratic belief that there exist people who can keep all the complexities that go into presidential decision-making fully in their heads, and that international relations is a battle of intellect.  It is a common (and dangerous) trap for smart people to think that reason rules reality.

We’d do better to think of elected representatives as avatars of the people.  We don’t want a benevolent dictator who can absorb and process every detail as in the classic Saturday Night Live skit of President Reagan as a mastermind.  We want people who will react as we would in a given situation, preferably more often than not as we would on our best days.

We’re in our current predicament because the expert class increasingly refuses to accept the desires and interests of the rest of us.