It's alarming, frightening, and discouraging that a meaningful portion of our electorate is comprised of kooks, morons and cultists (regardless of ideological persuasion). What is that portion? 40%? 50%?
On top of that, though, is a further troubling reality (in my view). It's another large portion of our electorate that doesn't fit neatly in that kook/moron/cultist bucket. They're probably educated and gainfully employed and think they know stuff and are swinging the decisions that matter in harmful and ignorant ways. They're full of all the standard biases (e.g., recency bias, confirmation bias, etc.) They refuse to acknowledge any of that, though, and weigh in with their "serious" contributions when they have no expertise whatsoever. I think the most galling bias might be the "it needs to sound reasonable from my lazy-boy" bias. I think there's a fair amount of Dunning-Kruger going on with this group and maybe we all fall into it to some degree. But fundamental goals, principles and outcome achievement don't anchor their thought processes in any meaningful way. It's all so sloppy, undisciplined, and lazy. Worse, it's really harmful. It's playing out on the school issues, but it's true of pretty much everything. If the kook/moron/cultist group comprises 40%, I'm wondering if this more politically-palatable group comprises something like another 40%. That doesn't leave many folks capable of making decisions or able to get things done.