We're very close to pure democracy. It is kind of a disaster
Democracy gave us Donald Trump and George W Bush. TWICE. EACH.
Dem
ocracy has a fatal flaw: The lower IQ hoards are much more likely to be unified, to have more in common, than the intellectual minority.
Very intelligent people will be educated in different fields, hold disparate views(including conservatism), have differing interests, personalities and opinions. There really isn't much to unite them.
The simplest folks have much to unite them: Fear of minorities, fear of foreigners, fear of LGBTQ people, sports, pop culture. They are similarly embittered by the economic situation. They are also united by a complete lack of comprehension of policy, and therefor an easily-manipulated mistrust of government.
We see this dynamic playing out in real time in American politics.
In the Democratic primary debate, high ideas vie for dominance. The party flails and disunites, while the common people look on, baffled by all the policy talk.
But those common people are themselves united ... against minorities, foreigners, LGBTQ people, and anyone speaking the incomprehesible language of policy. And the Republican Party is happy to reflect all that back to them, and scoop them up as voters.
I have spent much time with this under-educated, struggling class of Americans. They have little chance of sorting out the messages delivered to them through the high-tech systems of social media, messages designed and funded by sophisticated New York, Washington D.C., and St. Petersburg (Russia) think tanks.
The modern age, with the advent of the internet, is probably as close as we've come to pure democracy.
It is a disaster.
As Jefferson wrote, "The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive."
The vast majority of Americans could not even decipher that sentence.
They're supposed to correctly decipher the internet?