Of course my mind flashed to the election of popes. “Look, white smoke from the White House–yay, we have a new President!”

And after a while in office, if that new President turns out to be Frankenstein’s monster, the villagers can storm the castle…metaphorically speaking, of course.

I like it–though I may have to buy a new pitchfork.

The democratic input of the people would be after a politician had served part of his term. If the people din’t like him, they could vote him OUT of office, and the next man in line would replace him automatically.

It could be argued that the average voter is poorly qualified to evaluate who is suited for political office, but he is perfectly well qualified to identify someone who isn’t.

Now, businessmen may have skills which are useful for politicians, like being able to manage large organizations. For that matter, so do military men, they also lead hierarchical organizations with complex chains of command. But these are necessary conditions, not sufficient ones. Good soldiers can make lousy leaders too. Washington and Eisenhower were exceptions, think of U.S. Grant.

Trump was elected because enough people were convinced that businessmen were naturally competent and virtuous, while politicians were necessarily clueless and corrupt. Both of these conditions may indeed hold occasionally, but NOT NECESSARILY, and certainly not all the time. And the fact that these views of business and government became established enough to sway an national election is not the result of a profound insight suddenly dawning on the American people, it is the result of a long and clever campaign to convince them of that and indoctrinate them into a specific political philosophy; one whose essential core message is “We know what we’re doing, leave us alone and everything will turn out out just dandy.” That’s a message Americans have rightly been suspicious of when it came from their elected leaders, but which they fail to exercise sufficient caution to when its spoken by their bosses. I guess its because we’ve all been indoctrinated into thinking someday we can all be bosses too, if we just work hard, keep our nose clean, wait our turn and vote Conservative.

“Government is too big” is just another way of saying “Business isn’t big enough”. Remember, there are ways you can get rid of a government you don’t like; you can vote them out of office, you can protest and demonstrate peacefully, you can vote in new laws or amend the Constitution, you can vote for politicians who feel like you do or you can start a general strike or an armed rebellion if all else fails. You can’t do that with business. The only way you can fight them is by not buying their products or quitting your job.

That system needs to re-jiggered, because the design is flawed. For a while, I thought perhaps the onus should be placed on the electorate. If a potential voter couldn’t pass a simple test–politics, history and current events, maybe 10 questions–then they don’t vote. But as ER pointed out, this could put us at the top of a rather slippery slope. Telling citizens they can’t vote is, perhaps, not the ideal answer.

So let’s consider the other side of the coin. Maybe what we need is a way to better vet candidates. Perhaps a term in elected office should become a requirement for presidential candidates. It would by no means offer any sort of guarantee of intellect, character or judgement, but it would provide a political track record.

Could Trump have had success as a mayor, senator or governor? Not without learning a good deal about what it means to hold public office, and demonstrating for the record how he would handle public sector authority.

And perhaps he’d have become a president more determined to make government work for the sake of the people, rather than one determined to destroy government for the sake of destroying it.

America finally got the government it deserved. OK, maybe we don’t all deserve this, but this situation has developed perfectly legally and constitutionally. There was no coup or revolution; the system worked precisely they way it was supposed to. So maybe we don’t all deserve it, but we are all responsible.

But Trump distrusts the entire American national security apparatus. He knows more than the generals. He distrusts the media. He doesn’t read books.

He trusts “Fox and Friends” and Bill O’Reilly, and Breitbart. And he absolutely trusts Jared.

Yep, RL, fucked so very are we.