We don't really care about democracy,

"You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime you'll find
You get what you need."

          Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. "You Can't Always Get What You Want," 1968

I have my doubts about the "wisdom of crowds."

And I think as far as democracy is concerned, the song has it backwards. It gives us what we want. Not what we need.

To get wisdom from a crowd one needs certain conditions. American voters are diverse, which is one of the conditions to get good results from decisions by crowds. We also have a second condition for good decisions, a way to aggregate and count those opinions, although the electoral college and partisan gerrymandering skew the results.

Democracy fails the requirement of independent decision-making by independent actors. Voters are subject to groupthink and persuasion. Hearts and minds are steered by charismatic orators, preachers, traveling hucksters, entertainers, and more recently, TV ads and viral videos. Rich men have a long history of owning and operating powerful organs of mass persuasion. They have wanted influence.

I suspect historians will look back at this moment and decide we are living in a hinge moment of history. I have some experience with living in such a moment, the year 1968. There was so much going on in 1968: the war in Vietnam; colleges erupting in protest; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy; the Democratic Convention; the space program, the election, hippies, and of course the greatest music of all time. I was living amid it doing college student things, but aware that the world was in transition.

But my best guess is that historians will define this moment as a profound failure of democracy, coming in the form of consent to Trump's project to remake the Constitution. Our democracy, in its wisdom, chose Trump and we are living with the consequences. There was no secret that he planned to take charge and not wait for Congress to legislate changes. We knew he had immunity from prosecution for any official acts. We knew he planned to pardon the January 6 rioters. He would act. He didn't need permission or a coalition. We chose Trump with our eyes open.

Republican apologists for Trump and the public's decision to elect him observe that Democrats gave the country no good alternative. You forced our hand, they tell me, because Biden was even more unfit for office than Trump. Trump is crazy, sure, but sometimes he made sense, and the Democratic Big Lie was that Biden was competent. And Kamala Harris said she would keep doing the same things American didn't like about Biden.   

Trump was put into office by Constitutional mechanisms, but he has no respect for the Constitution, and we knew that. The Constitution establishes a framework of shared power -- checks and balances, three branches, etc. -- and Trump doesn't want to share power. He insists on exercising it, on his own, his way. Congress has been unable to confront the big issues facing the country -- an immigration program, a health care program, a tax policy that matches revenue with expenses. Somebody needs to lead, and that is Trump. Moreover, Trump has a majority of the Supreme Court that is OK with a unitary executive with strongman power to execute, plus the power to legislate.

Trump has linked the power of government to the power of stupendous wealth. Voters notice, but they don't seem to mind, not yet. 

This is an era when democracy decided that it didn't think it needed democracy. Trump's project of consolidating power is still underway. He has been successful enlisting the power of the money elites, who are also the elites managing the sources of information. The public is getting a taste of elected strongman government, and concluding that the form of government isn't the issue one way or the other. The issue is whether it solves problems or not, whether gasoline and groceries are expensive. Trump is not getting pushback because he is changing our Constitution. He is getting resistance because he is making poor decisions and getting poor results.

Doesn't that mean that the people still rule, that we have a form of republican government? We do. But we are ending the era of a republic. We are becoming an empire, run by serial strongmen. We will have a referendum on the leader every four years. It isn't the Constitution as it used to be, but it may be what the wisdom of the democratic crowd chooses. 

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