On Democracy

Regarding the future of democracy, I have to go back to Jefferson's advice that better education is the answer.  I don't see how anyone can look at the 2016 election and be enthused about democracy, as we had the two worst major party candidates in our history.

To take a step back, let's look at the nomination process. It can be shown rather easily that the problem with the nomination process for both major parties can be attributed to too much democracy. Since 1968, when Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination without winning a single primary, and riots then broke out in Chicago, both parties have undertaken to democratize the process, with increasingly disastrous results. The broken nomination process is good evidence for the idea that there can be too much democracy.

The proverbial "smoke-filled room" has been bashed ever since it was supposedly used to nominate Warren Harding in 1920, but I think we have discovered that party bosses really need to have more say in who the party nominates. If this had been the case, we certainly wouldn't have had the nomination of Trump, and perhaps not Clinton either (though the latter is unclear).

When Jack Kennedy's brother Ted ran for the Senate in 1962, a journalist asked a Massachusetts voter who she was going to vote for. She said Kennedy, because "if he's good enough to be president, he's good enough to be a senator".  We don't like to admit it, but this sort of ignorance is quite common among the electorate. And it predates the internet. People have always been ignorant and gullible; it is not a recent product of this fake news era.