Americans are reverential about the country’s founders – Washington and Jefferson both enjoy approval in the 80s -- and rightly so, given the lasting form of government they created. That government is a limited democracy: the public elects representatives, and those representatives, not the public, make laws, wage wars, levy taxes, and administer justice.

But today, we are pushing the power of the public past the bounds the founders envisioned, and beyond what is sustainable in a self-governing state.

Gerald Seib, writing in the Wall Street Journal, notes that the high point of establishment power in the major political parties was 1968, when Democrats nominated Humbert Humphrey, who hadn’t entered a single primary. After that result, the public demanded more say, and leadership ceded it by allowing primary voting to determine party nominees. This and other devolutions have resulted in historically unpopular nominees, a cratering of faith in political institutions, and 58% of Americans saying our democracy is not working.

The collapse of faith in political institutions has been mirrored in another institution upon which a self-governing state relies, the media. The advent of the Internet democratized the news by ushering in citizen journalism, comments sections, and a majority of us getting our news from social media. This coincided with trust in newspapers dropping from 50% to 16%, and TV news from 46% to 11%. The knee capping of media elite, aka editors, has resulted in a public 10-30% less likely to know of news unfavorable for their preferred political party than news favorable to it.

Modern science confirms what the founders knew — people are wired to seek and respond to the emotional, sensational, and rage producing. The founders also knew that gatekeepers such as representatives and editors were needed as an antidote.

It will be hard to put the cat back in the bag. Over the past fifty years, elites have given us plenty of reason to distrust them, from Vietnam to the great financial crisis, such that today a plurality prefer a world without gatekeepers.

So it won't be easy, and ceding power back to the establishment may not fix what ails us, but better to try to put in place worthy gatekeepers than going down the route the founders expressly tried to avoid.