[sandworm101]

>> well-informed public has always been the foundation of our democracy

I'd say maybe a well-informed electorate. Until very recently, the majority of "the public" wasn't allowed to vote and so had very limited input into "our democracy".

[dragontamer]

Can you elaborate?

The two major extensions of our electorate were (former) slaves and then women. Do you believe that these groups are more easily manipulated?

Or are you talking about some other group that I forgot about?

[Jetrel]

So - AFAIK, originally most white men weren't allowed to vote, in the US; I can't remember when this got changed, but in the very earliest formulation, there was a strong limitation where only certain kinds of landed property owners were allowed to vote.

I believe this had several intents behind it; one of them was of course just plain-old elitism/cronyism, but I think there were also some elements of using it as a proxy for education, shared-culture, and (presumed) fiscal responsibility.

There also was probably a surprisingly pragmatic problem of logistics; a small register of settled-down property owners was probably far easier to collect votes from that a wild array of migrant laborers, whalers, fur-trappers, and frontiersmen.

(Yeah, I just checked up on this, and it looks like this was gradually abolished, over the course of the century before the civil war, on a state-by-state basis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St... )