The esteemed liberal Brookings Institute just published a - well I'm not sure what to call it - white paper or hit job. Two of its senior fellows, Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes, make the argument that more democracy is bad because regular people are stupid and ignorant, and they should just let their betters the elite professional political class handle things. In other words, people like the two of them.

It seems they don't much like rubes and grassroots reformers like you and I being too involved in the political system by which we choose our representatives and political leaders. In their own words:

Unfortunately, the country and the political-reform community have come to expect far too much from increased political participation. Participation is effective only when supplemented by intermediation, the work done by institutions (such as political parties) and substantive professionals (such as career politicians and experts) to organize, interpret, and buffer popular sentiment. In this essay, we argue that restoring and strengthening political institutions and intermediation belong at the center of a modern political-reform agenda.

To cut through their excessive use of jargon, the essential claim they are making is that the majority of Americans need to be spoonfed by political professionals what we should believe and the policies and issues we should care about. They are the experts after all. We are just dumb, ignorant hicks that don't know what is good for us. But even assuming voters could become better informed about what is truly necessary to make our political system function, they still don't think increased participation at the grassroots level is a viable option for our society.

Even implausibly well-informed and rational voters could not approach the level of knowledge and sophistication needed to make the kinds of decisions that routinely confront the government today. Professional and specialist decisionmaking is essential, and those who demonize it as elitist or anti-democratic can offer no plausible alternative to it.

The world is just too complicated, you see, for our little tiny minds to understand it all. We need the elite professional political class to guide us by the hand to a better world. Or so they argue interminably and to my mind quite condescendingly. The principle assumption they make is that only people like the two of them and the political parties and institutions who employ them, are up to the challenge of fashioning a truly good society. We proles should learn our proper place - under their boot heels.

[T]he predominant ethos of the political-reform community remains committed to enhancing individual political participation. This is a costly oversight. Some populist reform ideas are better than others, but, as a class, they have eclipsed a more promising reform target: strengthening intermediating actors such as political professionals and party organizations.

Quoting James Madison out of context, they argue that direct democracy can only lead to mob rule, the tyranny of the majority. What they seem to have disregarded is that Madison was concerned for protecting the rights of minorities. That's the sole function of the Bill of Rights after all, to provide a check on legislative majorities running roughshod over the individual liberties and rights of the people. It's ironic that the publication of this manifesto comes shortly after the leader of Britain's Tories has called for a massive crackdown on individual liberty in the interest of protecting the "homeland" from terrorism. Human rights are merely a hindrance to effective governance, it seems.

Indeed, this is precisely the problem we face in America. We have a system that supports the interests of a very few at the expense of the many and look where that has landed us. An out of control military industrial complex spreading destructive and illegal wars around the world, mass incarceration, enhanced government surveillance at a level unthinkable only a few decades ago, a declining mortality rate and an economy that is stagnant, at best, and devastating at worst, for the majority of Americans who struggle to make ends meet. Meanwhile, wealthy investors, hedge fund owners and CEO's of large corporations use the government as their private playground to feather their own nests, through legalized bribery that allows them to control the political process of the two major parties and select the candidates we are allowed once every two years to vote for or against. Yet in the authors' humble opinion, voter participation is vastly overrated and the job political specialists and professionals perform is vastly underrated and unappreciated.

That is why they claim we need a small number of elite politicians, establishment journalists and pundits, think tanks and political parties beholden to their wealthiest donors to control our political process and discourse. The sheer audacity of their argument is astonishingly narcissistic and insulting. How anyone can propose not only letting our country's current state of affairs continue, but also the strengthening of the very institutions and individuals used by the plutocrats to marginalize us and diminish our economic and political power is beyond me. But, then again, my yearly income and career does not depend on mouthing such hypocrisy and passing it off as a valid intellectual argument for maintaining the status quo.

If you want to raise your blood pressure significantly, please, read the entire piece of horse manure they wasted so much time and effort writing. But, more significantly remember that these people, when they publish such screeds, are doing the bidding of politicians like the Clintons, the Obamas, and all the other grasping, greedy and corrupt leaders of the Democratic party. They wouldn't have dared to unmask their naked ambition so clearly a year ago. However, the rise of Bernie Sanders and grassroots activism from the left, along with the election of the faux populist Trump over their beloved status quo selection, Hillary Clinton, has finally led them to reveal themselves as the ugly and monstrous creatures they truly are, and how little they think of those of us who oppose the disastrous rule of these elite puppets of the Oligarchy.