… In the United States, for example, people have blamed Harry Truman for ordering U.S. military forces into the Korean War, Herbert Hoover for worsening the economic bust of 1929-33, and George W. Bush for presiding over the FEMA fiasco associated with Hurricane Katrina....

However, a critic invariably intervenes to ... propose a seemingly more discerning, if disquieting, alternative: Don’t blame leader X; blame the people who elected him.... The critic maintains that the devastating government blunder ... represents nothing but the blessings of democracy as H. L. Mencken described them: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”...

The critics’ mistake is to trace responsibility back only one step, when several more steps must be taken to expose where the ultimate responsibility for “choosing” leader X lies. Yes, the people had a choice between Democrat X and Republican Y. ... But who did what to make X and Y the major-party candidates in the first place?...

If the people at large are to be blamed, they must be blamed not for the way they cast their ballots, but for their toleration of the whole [party] political setup that shamelessly passes itself off as a regime “of the people, by the people, for the people” — surely one of the most successful Big Lies of all time....

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