It’s ok to depend on people being generally competent most of the time. It’s not ok to depend on people never making mistakes, not is it ok to depend on people acting in ways that real human beings don’t act. I’m politics, one if there critical failures was depending on politicians to act in good faith, and another was depending on the voters to stay informed and use critical thinking enough to avoid voting for an obvious conman.

Maybe there’s just no truly good system for politics, and the best we can hope for is the least bad option. But we won’t even achieve that much if we pretend the US system is was created by enlightened demigods. It’s a deeply flawed system created by men who had no experience with democracy and who clearly saw themselves as the leaders of a new kind of aristocracy.

I will give them unqualified credit for one thing, though. The Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution are some of the most effective works of propaganda ever created. Saying that all people are fundamentally equal while simultaneously excluding most people from the levers of power was perhaps the greatest con of all time.