Through a comical series of half-hearted rejoinders and seemingly endless scandals, Donald J. Trump has emerged as the 45th president of the United States of America. The methodology he applied to ascend to this position had been completely unprecedented up until this point however, this innovative approach of unapologetic behavior and “anti-PC” rhetoric has paid dividends. But, there is a clear uproar against this result – an outcry far more pronounced than against any previous president-elects. Would there be an outcry just as loud had Hillary Clinton won? While it is difficult to say, it does bring up a bigger question – is democracy the best way of going about picking a leader?

It is no surprise that the outcome of this election has been met with vitriol; after all, Donald Trump is most definitely a hypocrite and a liar, and almost certainly a buffoon when it comes to climate change (claiming it is a Chinese hoax). He seemingly has very little respect for women (as evidenced by the way he feels about them in the plethora of tapes that had come out through this election cycle) and has an almost laughable “I’m just going to wing it” attitude about nearly everything he does (consider his Matt Lauer interview). So then, what is it about Mr. Trump that has mesmerized over 50 million people to come out and vote for him?

Well, maybe it isn’t about trying to find reason in the decisions of these people – or even trying to find reason in the thought-process of Hillary supporters. Maybe, it is a matter of the way our system is set up. Consider the following question:

“Do you think that everyone should have the right to vote and that equality must be exercised when weighing each of these votes?”

I assume that the answer for most people to this question is, without much hesitation, a “yes”. Consider then, a person who is completely deplorable. Someone who has a minimal capacity for tolerance and does not care about the destruction he/she causes (in whatever manner) to the people around him/her. This is someone who is, without question, a bigot and an individual that you are superior to when it comes to morality, ethics, and common decency. Let us also tack on the fact that this person has an unrelenting passion for stupidity and constantly fails to be reasonable. In this scenario, let’s assume you despise this person (why wouldn’t you?). Then, let me pose this question:

“Do you think that this person’s vote should be equal to yours?”

It is much easier to make a blanket statement about something like democracy without considering what that implies. Right now, the scenario described above exists for every single individual who votes (because it is a matter of perception). Let’s take this experiment a step further and, to make it concrete, we will use some basic logic.

First, we define the following parameters:

At this point, we have a well-defined way of looking at every single existing individual in this context. Now, in the scenario outlined initially, we considered the isolated case of . If you concede that this person’s vote should not hold the same weight as yours (do you think a KKK member should have an equal say in who runs the country?), then what about the next deplorable person, i.e: ? At this point, it becomes important to consider where the threshold lies such that equality in vote is restored. And, it is important to consider people who, objectively (if such an approach to this measure was possible), are better than you (or I) in this domain. The answer to the latter AND former lies in the difficulty of what is occurring. That is, we look at how difficult it is to understand what we are voting on. Politics obviously does not require a degree in some obscure field of physics to understand – I mean everyone seemingly feels entitled to an opinion on it (that they think is correct). What this allows us to do is create an upper and lower bound on who should be allowed to vote (or what weight their vote carries). This means that:

The beauty of this arrangement is that we have a nicely defined system based on a real measure of human moral and intellectual currency that allows for a voting system that is much more geared towards prosperous results than the one we have currently. In fact, this way effectively exercises out stupidity from the equation or, at the very least, requires a larger sample size from that part of the population for it to truly have an impact. In fact, in that case, we would have a situation that would probably imply there is some shortcomings on everyone in the equal-vote set. Luckily, the equal-vote set would not be as inefficient and heartless in fixing such a problem.

The obvious problem with such a system is “how do we measure ‘human decency’?”. I will address this in a later post, and in fact, going into the details of exploring such a virtue is not important for the central message of this reading. The takeaway should be that we have somehow deluded ourselves to think that democracy, as it is structured now, is the best way of going about our political process. However, the GROUNDLESS rationality behind this current structure gets at the problems with political bedrock. It is because of such a broken system that we allow to power complete imbeciles. It is not that Donald Trump is a weak and repugnant individual, it’s that behind him is some large number of people that believe he isn’t. It is utterly disrespectful to people who understand and know more that they have to live with the choices of this horrifyingly tragic army of deplorables. Until we stop being pigeonholed into this false sense of righteousness and equality, we will not be able to stop stifling our progress. As an aside, it is not a shameful thing to fall in the lower end of this scale. This is just a reflection of nature and there is nothing we can do (right now, anyway), to change that. However, maybe if we let this current incarnation of democracy become a patriotic shibboleth, we can get closer, at a much more rapid pace, to an innovative, positively dynamic, and inclusive world in the most fair and redeemable sense possible.