We have to acknowledge the structural weaknesses in our ancient Constitutional system that have permitted a mad king to assume and abuse the office referred to by the Founders as “Chief Magistrate,” because while Trump is erratic and barely sane, there are surely other, colder, more rational, more calculating authoritarians-in-embryo watching his regime, mapping the rot running through the norms, institutions, barriers, recording what works and what does not.

I do not think this mess is due to "structural weaknesses in our ancient Constitutional system" but in democracy itself. It is not mere coincidence that the fascist sympathizing members of the Republican Party (who, btw, constitute the majority of that party and always have done) have a long history of gutting education and Saint Ronald the Reagan himself appointed a Secretary of Education who can fairly be described as someone who didn't believe the department should exist. Leading up to today where our current Secretary of Education may be facing a court's contempt for continuing to victimize the victims of America's for-profit university diploma scams.

This was and is all by design. Socrates instructed that allowing the uneducated to vote in a democracy would insure the rise of a demagogue. Republicans have long understood that and in their effort to convert the government of the United States into a fascist dictatorship they have laid the groundwork by insuring that the majority of Americans are an uneducated, xenophobic lot. They've won or as an old U.S. History professor I had used to say, "The problem with American politics is not that too few people vote but that too many are allowed to vote."

What's next? More of the same because We, the People will be the same.

But I do not believe it is impossible to develop an objective standard test that confirms that a member of society is sufficiently informed to be entrusted with a vote. I recognize that such a system would not be a purely democratic system but I am happy to debate the relative merits of "more democracy" with anyone.

Recently I was again in my cups at the local pub and a RW zealot with whom I am familiar sat down beside me. Despite having an MSEE, he is a strong Trump supporter. So, mere education is not a solution. A lot of what he believes about the world is simply wrong and in my estimation has a great deal to do with the fact that he has never been abroad, nor traveled much outside of his home state. I've always found it stunning that so many Americans who have spent their entire lives within the four or five counties surrounding the county of their birth have established immutable opinions on the rest of the world. Whatever voting right test was designed in my Utopian Socialist Democratic States of America of the future, it would surely be a requirement that the candidate voter possessed a passport which had been stamped by no less than two different nations outside the Western Hemisphere in the previous two years.

For all of my adult life it has always grated upon my soul to hear someone say, "Well, everyone is entitled to their own opinion." I, unfailingly, become unhinged when hearing that and demand, "No! Everyone is entitled to their own well reasoned opinion and some are better reasoned than others." I'll no doubt repeat myself here, but the fundamental problem in the US is that most of its inhabitants cannot follow a modus ponens argument.

It's not distance travelled that matters, it is difference in culture that matters.