I used to think we as a society had surmounted the founding fathers seemingly excessive concern about “mob rule.” No more. Recent events have greatly clarified this matter for me.

Those old founders were an elite bunch. Almost to a man (there were no founding mothers among the all-male cast who created our Declaration and Constitution), they were successful business leaders who had proved their mettle at attaining wealth, keeping it, and using it to further advance themselves through politics. Freed at last from the English king’s arbitrary predations, they devoutly believed in self rule. As to the practical mechanics of self rule, however, they worried deeply over exactly who would represent the “self” part. They especially feared “mob rule.”

Those men knew well the concept of democracy, both from its half-hearted, overrated expression  in ancient Athens—which restricted voting to a select prominent few who were not altogether unlike the founding fathers—as well as contemporary examples of native American tribes governing themselves by consensus determined through some equivalent of universal voting by all tribesmen and, in several cases, tribeswomen.

The written records of their extensive arguments, in rich detail all may read and ponder still yet today, leave no doubt that the founders considered citizens who had not proved their mettle as business leaders to be lesser citizens, meaning of lesser merit than themselves. Deeply ingrained with the values carried by wealth and privilege, they felt—and felt strongly—that a right to vote, therefore, should be extended only to the relative few who were pretty much like themselves.

Of their own recent experiences, they knew how seriously voting was an exercise in deep responsibility. Such vital responsibility, they often said on the record, should not be permitted to lesser citizens, any of them, much less any indentured servants, any slaves, nor preferably any freed slaves, and most certainly not any women. These lesser citizens obviously had not proved their mettle, which they amply demonstrated by being poor, indentured, enslaved, or a mere woman. How could such lesser, self-evidently limited, people be thought to have any capacity to cast intelligent, informed votes in the—to them incomprehensible—business of an entire nation? Most decidedly, the founding fathers did not trust the masses to steer the ship of state.

That was in 1787. Here 238 years later we know why they felt that way. How does one respond when a true majority have used their democratic privilege to elect a court of clowns who seek nothing less than restoration of medieval values and social inequalities throughout the USA?

Personal freedom is our highest American value, we’ve said for 238 years and more, and democracy is a close second right behind it. But how many people do you suppose know that the word democracy is not just a synonym also meaning “freedom?” The term democracy derives from the Greek dēmokratia, where dēmos is ‘the people’ and kratia is ‘the power to rule.’ Thus the word democracy means “a method of governing” where “the people wield the power” by voting. Traditionally, that has meant a plurality of not less than one-half of the voters plus one.

In a democracy one always hopes, of course, for a plurality strong enough to suggest a consensus —even a mandate—something hopefully between sixty and ninety percent of the votes cast, though not a few American presidencies have been resolved by win-lose margins in the range of forty-five to fifty-five percent. In 2024 it was 49.8 percent to 48.3 percent—a spread so trivial it more indicates civil division than consensus. It also means the body of voters on the losing side is for all practical purposes essentially as strong as the side that carried the Electoral College—which the Founders created expressly as a device to avoid an electoral outcome like this one.

If you believe in democracy’s true meaning—governance desired and elected by a majority of the people—but you dislike the outcome of this particular election, then there is no alternative but to hunker down and live it out. The courts will be overburdened by hundreds of new lawsuits attempting to minimize the predictable damage this ship of malcontents most certainly will strive to inflict. For the other half who now count as the loyal opposition, life will simply endure through four long years until the next election offers opportunity to right the wrong and do better.

In the longer view, we Americans are way overdue to resolve the problem the Founders failed to deal with. They merely established the Electoral College, presuming it would be sufficient to prevent a disastrous election brought on by an equivalent of mob rule. Such presumption having lately proven a dismal failure, we as a society really need to look, and act, more deeply. We need to prevent the possibility of a mob arising in the first place.

And so I propose adoption of measures to preclude mob formation, and thereby mob voting.

One way is to teach values and civic responsibility beginning in first grade, and then to maintain increasingly sophisticated versions of both matters in every grade through high school and on through four years of college for those who attend college. The problem revealed by the 2024 election is not that the voters were uneducated, though indeed many of them were:  one red-capped interviewee, asked why he had voted against the candidate who helped pass the Inflation Reduction Act which held so many benefits for him, replied that he had never heard of it. No doubt he did not follow mainline news, much less its nuances. But many of the winner’s most bizarre lieutenants have excellent educations—their values are the problem.

Under current custom, a child’s most formative years are already over by the time serious learning in civics occurs—if indeed it occurs at all, given that many states and school systems have dropped civics from school curricula over recent decades. Worse yet, the teaching of values as such has never been a priority for public school curricula. Aside from random patriotism, values teaching has always been defaulted to parents and religion. Well designed curricula should teach the values of cooperation and responsibility in context of one’s civic citizenship.

The other measure is simpler still:  require all candidates for public office to pass an exam demonstrating that they are actually qualified to perform the public office to which they seek election. Such exams are routinely required for applicants to federal and state bureaucracies as well as many jobs in the private sector. You can be a candidate only if you pass the test. If this simple requirement had long ago been enacted into law we would not now have to endure four years of an utterly unqualified mercurial autocrat in the world’s most powerful office and in charge of the world’s biggest atomic button. If we had been teaching responsible citizenship values to schoolchildren for the past two generations, they would not have elected a convicted felon in the first place.

There’s one certainty about democracy:  your only confidence that it won’t degenerate into majority mob rule is to head off that possibility with long-term educational investments in civics and civic values, accompanied by qualification exams that keep immature spirits out of public offices that require extraordinary maturity and commitment to democratic values—and a deep personal commitment to what’s best for all the people. All.