Comment by faeriechangling

That bug has always been "fatally" easy to exploit.

Stupids having a vote isn't as misguided as it seems, as if we imagine instead the smarts simply stopped the stupids from having the vote, the smarts would neglect the needs of the stupids. The Trump election resulted on a bipartisan realignment on trade which was arguably tilted towards elite interest (access to markets, maximising GDP) over popular interest (Maximising domestic jobs and wages) before that realignment. The whole democratic vision from that time to ignore domestic low skill job losses and focus on retraining people to do new high skill jobs was something that sounded sensible to a smart person as it’s how smart people would personally react to such circumstances - but it lacked common sense and an understanding of the impact of such a plan on the common person.

Democracy almost intrinsically is going to give you middle-of-the-road quality leadership. You can do better and worse than a New York con man who at least had the marketing genius required to get so famous in the first place - many dictators are nothing more than thug lords or spoilt failsons. The promise of democracy is in setting good incentives and mitigating extreme worst case scenarios through elections and means to obstruct bad leaders.