The problem will persist unless the American people require more active governance from Congress.

One of the sad ironies of our democracy is that expansion of the franchise has correlated with the deterioration of the governance. The more people can vote, the more people can be fooled. When only male property holders could vote, they could allocate enough resources to educating male property owners on how to vote. But we now have more voters than we can educate to be voters.

The sports writer Red Smith famously wrote that ninety feet between home plate and first base may be the closest man has ever come to perfection. The point is that baseball did not have to work. It wouldn’t work on the moon. The distances weights, and speeds wouldn’t allow it. The same problem may be true of democracy, the central problem of which is to protect the interests of the masses without letting the uneducated call the shots. Maybe that is no longer possible.

In the old days, we restricted the vote. Later, technological limitation allowed a few men in smoke-filled rooms to be the only ones who actually knew what was going on. Now, social media, am radio, and the lot have made everyone think they actually know how to vote. But they don’t. And yet vote they do.

For anyone considering getting all huffy about one-man one vote, a simple curative is to watch an episode of Judge Judy. Ask yourself whether you really think you are better off because anyone appearing on that show, including the eponymous hag who runs the thing, has the right to vote. (Well, maybe the bailiff is ok…) Those are the people legislators must keep the other guy from fooling. Good luck with that. No wonder we elect cowards to Congress and incompetents to the Presidency.

Obviously, we cannot put the universal suffrage genie back in the bottle, nor we would that make things better, as the limited franchise has its own intolerable consequences. But we must find a way to keep the inmates from running the asylum. I would like to see a president make Congress’s approval rating his highest priority. But I’d like to see a cure for cancer and an end to world hunger. And at least those things will win a girl a tiara.