Because I don't think that's actually the #1 problem with democracy. I think its the most evident symptom of a deeper conflict that would require someone A) smarter than me, and B) actually studying such topics to really delve into.

My thinking goes more like this: #1 problem with democracy is that everyone thinks they have a particularly intelligent viewpoint on a topic, and is given an equal viewpoint on said topic, despite the idiocy of their views. We're going to ignore for a moment here the role education plays in this entire debate, and we're going to ignore the philosophical arguments for whether or not it is better for a tribe to follow majority rule even if that means taking the wrong choices on occasion. And we're going to ignore all the different ways those arguments branch out and actually manifest in the real world.

So lets stick with "#1 problem..."

But is that really a problem? No matter what type of government you end up building, its always going to have people of various levels of intelligence, knowledge, and "smarts" operating within it. In a functioning democracy, the type our founding fathers first started practicing (after a few presidencies) was built around the idea that the ignorant, the dumb, and the uninformed would break evenly on any given issue. Right? If a person doesn't understand an issue, its more or less a crapshoot which way they will decide to vote, most of the time. So that means these votes should cancel out. So really, the most important people in the debate should be among the people who actually are most knowledgeable on a given issue. Because if you can convince the majority of these scholarly politically minded people that your political cause is correct, they're be able to convince the masses. They'll be the swing vote that doesn't cancel itself out.

Anyway, that's how some of the first political campaigns were run in this country, and there's certainly some validity to it. But since then we've gone through centuries of political theory and social theory development on understanding mass psychology and politics, so the equation gets more complicated. Can we really be upset with the people for not deeply understanding political issues, when its so hard to really understand the issues without a college education? When the average person works 10+ hours a day? When the average person has an 8th grade reading level? When the average person has given up on government being responsive to their personal needs, and the local news that could show said responsiveness only shows national media to keep the national corporate news' station's overall reporting costs down? Because local news is boring? What about the fact that its so hard to actually get unbiased information about any political issue, and that there are entire industries based around feeding false information into the public stream?

But is that even entirely bad? Because if individual groups of people are pouring enough money, time, and resources into moving public opinion, by any means whether moral or not, that is going to be proportionately related to the degree of importance said group attaches to the issue. And that means that the democracy will actually still be responding relatively adequately to its citizens' most pressing concerns, no matter how corrupt, or clean, the system operates. so then does it matter what the individual people say at all, or is it more important to look at the actual processes within the government, to ensure that no one particular demographic or type of organization can game governmental response in their favor?

etc, etc, etc. Someone smarter than me.