[CamperBob2]

Democracy. Real democracy....dies.

I disagree -- I think what we saw in 2016 was democracy. We saw the effect of giving stupid people the same amount of political power as everyone else.

It's indisputable that some people are more easily gathered and led than others. We can borrow the term "network effect" to describe how these people come to wield excessive power in a democracy. But these voters don't serve their own interests. They are the players in a competition among billionaires, religious leaders, and state-level actors to see who can raise the biggest army of intellectual zombies and herd them to the polls.

At some point there will have to be a conversation about how sustainable this practice is.