The principles of representative democracy are both the ideals that this nation was founded on and are deeply ingrained into its culture. “By the People, for the People” is what we are supposed to be striving towards in our government. Yet the system by which that we elect our most important national leader is broken.

We force candidates for the Presidency to move farther into the extremes of both Parties to capture the voter base and then back to center to capture the country during the Presidential election. This encourages flakiness in the candidates from both sides.

We don’t need leaders who pander to their audience for votes. We need people who earnestly believe in what they–and this great nation–stand for.

Thus, in our political climate, we encourage slimy politicians instead of steadfast leadership. How can Ben Carson and Donald Trump be the lead Republican candidates? Carson is a neurosurgeon who doesn’t believe in evolution-or gravity! Trump is no better. At his recent Columbus rally, he claimed that to acquire the funds to treat veterans better, we should invade ISIS and take all of the oil from the area. After all, “in the olden days, to the victor went the spoils.” Not only is that plan ridiculous, but the justification—that we ‘did it in the olden days’—is completely incorrect. We also had slaves in the olden days, Mr. Trump. Not everything we did in the olden days was good.

How can we entrust people like this with pressing international policy? How could they deal with world issues, which even our brightest minds find themselves struggling to solve? Leaders who are used to insincerely pandering to the electorate will be unable to make the tough decisions when they count, because they’ve never truly stood for anything before.

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.” We need a system of Primaries where we encourage this idea in our politicians, not a system where we encourage career politicians to pander for votes to appease their hunger for power.