Here's my read of the Brexit mess. Peter can correct me where I've misinterpreted.

It looks to me like the "England First!" crowd voted to secede from the EU without fully comprehending what they were asking for in a fit of nationalist hysteria. For an as yet unidentified minority, it would also appear that folks with an anti-Brown people disposition also voted leave.

Many of the cowards who ran the leave campaign left office near or immediately following their unexpected victory. The idiot who called for the referendum in the first place also resigned, with no plan at all for handling a win for leave.

Aside: Having a referendum was, imNSho, a remarkably inane thing to do. It is akin to asking the majority of Hoosiers in this state how to effect international diplomacy.

So the new PM has an impossible task. The country's people were sold a bill of goods (literally, that "We can take all the good parts of being an EU member without having to accept any of the less desirable bits *and* we'll get over 300K/week in savings to shore up NHS). The EU was disinclined to allow England to have their cake and eat it, so May was forced to compromise.

In the end, what the Sheeple of the UK (England and Wales really, Scotland and Ireland voted remain) got was Non-Voting EU membership status initially with a little more say over immigration and a promise of more independence later. In short, the UK is worse off than it was as a full member of the EU.

Given this result and the result of OUR most recent Presidential election, can anyone argue that democracy is a good idea?

For myself, I'm increasingly of the view that Hamilton was right.

Edit: Tpyo.

The old tv series "Kung Fu" stole a lot of their material from various Taoist texts. Surprisingly, they often did not completely misrepresent the original meaning. With the recent failures (imo) of Western Democracies of late, I'm reminded of one such story. A blind priest is about to be executed along with another prisoner. The priest is nonplussed by his impending doom and this causes the prisoner to ask, "Has your lack of sight made you so weary of this life?" The priest chuckles and replies, "It is not my lack of vision that causes me to grow weary of this life, but the presence of my hearing." Each and every year since 1980 I have moved closer to that position.

It may well be that we cannot find our benevolent dictator because we, on the whole, do not deserve one. As constituted, mankind may be incapable of building a just system of governance. It may be the case that democracy would work, if only the populace on the whole was well-informed and interested in something more than the accumulation of stuff and procreation. I don't see our species evolving past that and every society we've built in the past 2,000 years has ultimately succumbed to the greed of a tiny minority. Yet, we learn nothing. And so it goes.

I'm not fan of May, but she was handed a turd topped with whipped cream and told to put a cherry on top of it and turn it into a sundae.

Unless she's leaving that for a successor, of course.

I hear what you're saying, but a second referendum is despised by the Brexiteers who make the somewhat not unreasonable point, "Why should we vote again? They didn't listen to us last time?"