Choosing Bad Leaders

THOUGHTFUL PEOPLE have always understood that in a representative form of government, bad people could and likely would rise to positions of leadership and authority.  It happened in ancient Greece and Rome, whose histories remain available for study. James Madison studied these histories intently, then, taking their counsel, designed a system of government for the U.S. in which the people, whom he considered stupid and incapable of self governing, generally had very little actual political power, and whose interests were supposedly represented, in theory, by an elite class of superior rulers Madison called "the better sort." The constitution therefore does not provide for the election of the president by popular vote. It deliberately leaves this paramount decision in the hands of the better sort. State by state, the lesser sort gained the right to elect the presidential electors, who then elect the president.The whole system, today as always, depends on an educated, informed electorate of good character, and our lack of that today appears to be our primary problem. We seem to be proving James Madison right. The country survived James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, and Richard Nixon, and it seems well positioned to survive Donald Trump, assuming he eventually relinquishes power, although one week after the election there remains some doubt. The list of bad, corrupt, or incompetent presidents could easily include Millard Fillmore, William Harrison, John Tyler, Calvin Coolidge, and Jimmy Carter. Certainly, the United States has had its fair share of what in today's jargon might be called "losers". I will always find it chocking and inexplicable that I never heard a Trump supporter make any references to Trump's obvious character deficiencies, policy deficiencies, or outright criminality.  I have heard them say things like "he stretches the truth sometimes", and "he is sometimes a bit rough around the edges", but comments like this are so dishonestly understated that they are in fact denials of reality. Hittory will probably come to regard Donald Trump as the worst president in American history.. And yet, somehow, we seem to have survived. Madison and the other framers knew that , despite their protections against it, poor leaders would emerge. they therefore designed a system of government in which power was sufficiently diffuse to encourage government to grind to a halt instead of accruing in the hands of tyrants  or criminals. Our current gridlocked and ineffective government would probably seem preferable to tyranny to the founders, and it should seem so to us. Thoughtful people have always known that bad people would gain power in a democracy. We are fortunate, considering the number of bad people who have gained power in our, that we have a system built to survive them.