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I understand your objection, but you have to realize that in the real world, this is a near guaranteed way to ensure you never end up anywhere near power.
America in particular is run by giant popularity contests; moral judgments on effective governance are not needed or useful. If America wants to stab itself to death, that's what they'll get if there's more of them that want to stab themselves to death than otherwise. Whether they want to stab themselves to death to spite the other side or because they think it's a better course of action doesn't matter.
Of course at the end of the day if a democracy wants to commit suicide they're gonna do it regardless. Even most authoritarian nations are still under some sorts of political pressure, you can't upset the people too much or else they risk higher chance of revolt so even they often are receptive to bad populist policy demands (assuming that the authoritarian leader isn't themselves a believer in bad policy, as they often are like we see with most/all communist states).
But that doesn't mean you should want to do a national suicide! If the argument is "we need to do a little so we can avoid a lot" that's at least understandable, but the goal should still be to reduce the amount of national suicide we do. I'd rather a Deng Xiaopeng over a Mao, and a Xi Jingping over a Kim Jong Ung. But if we can have a Reagan instead, then we should have a Reagan.
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