I have been trying to put this into words that don’t sound too anti-democratic, but I fail. It simply is the case that, on occasion, a country has a majority of people with poor judgement. Athens collapsed not due to the superiority of Sparta, but via the arrogant populism of actors such as Cleon, the Thirty Tyrants, and other small demagogues in ancient Athens. The parallels to present-day politics in the U.S. are startling.