Against too much democracy

Trump perfectly illustrates the wisdom of the old system that allowed more power to office holders and other party officials in the selection of the parties' candidates, and less - even none, ideally - to voters.

The current primary system of the United States, a brain-child of Progressive Era goo-goos almost unique among democracies in all the world, is dangerously democratic, leaving the nominations of our major parties fatally subject to capture by even the most threatening demagogues.

The awful truth is that if the parties don't filter them out the Electoral College cannot be counted on to safely save us, though that is exactly its constitutional function, if indeed it ever could have.

By the point at which the Electors step into our long, expensive, and arduous process of selecting a president, it's far too late to brush aside the resulting winner and name someone else to the presidency.

Hence the necessity of keeping out the riffraff from the start.

But this is a lesson no one will learn, despite the sporadic claims by some - who obviously don't mean what they say - that Trump is a real threat to the Republic.

Even now, pundits and officials of both major parties deny the right of conventions to overrule primary voters, despite what the law and party rules may say.

And all known proposals to reform the primary process at this time go altogether in the oppositie direction, aiming to take more power from the parties and give a greater role to voters, in one way or another making the selection of nominees more democratic.

Even in the face of Trump, whose success so resoundingly defeats a key advantage of limited and representative government over absolute and direct democracy, that it reposes power in the hands of professional politicians trained in, habituated to, and supportive of the detailed dispersal and circumscription of power, the checks and balances built into the structure of organized government.

The contrast with Trump, the megalomaniacal demagogue, could not be greater.

Trump may be illuminatingly compared with the main characters in so many films and TV shows about a small child with horrific super powers who becomes murderously destructive when his slightest whim is crossed by other children, by adults, by animals, or even by uncooperative inanimate objects.

And he is very close to finding his way through the door to the Oval Office.