SDCT0019: “In a democracy,” it is said, “people get the government they deserve.” The strength or the weakness of a democracy lies in its voters — the quality of the government reflects that of the voters.

But government doesn’t reflect the quality of ALL voters — only those that win. The winning voters get the government they deserve. When the best, most competent voters win, we get the best government. When the worst voters win, when the dark underbelly of a nation comes out on top, then democracy yields a terrible result: a delusional, irrational, antisocial, incompetent government. Our government is only as good as the voters that win.

So what kind of government do America’s enemies want us to have? The worst, probably. Our adversaries want democracy to misfire — they want the side of the most incompetent to win. They would assist the party of incompetence by tampering with elections, hacking into computer systems, offering-up dirt on opponents, and fabricating fake news stories for social media.

If democracy’s strength is in its voters, then its greatest weakness is in its weakest voters. That’s exactly where America’s enemies have aimed their attack, at the minds of the Most Gullible Third, because predators always go after the slowest gazelles in the herd. If our enemies, foreign and domestic, strike hard with weapons of information warfare — with propaganda and disinformation — they can turn around this third of the voting public to attack the very country that they claim to love.

Not everyone is equally gullible for social media containing fake news posed as real, or for dishonest memes designed to inflame needless social discord. Information warfare only work well on, I’d estimate, about a third of the population (anywhere between 25 and 45 percent judging by public opinion polls). As a matter of national security, we must know which Americans most easily fall victim to malign influence campaigns.

Here are a few identifiers of our enemy’s softest target of attack:

• The Most Gullible Third enjoy being lied to multiple times per day — they take lies “seriously, but not literally,” largely for the sake of entertainment. They sense no danger in being deceived. Life is just a dream to them, a reality television show where nothing matters other than to be amused.
• They are less educated, they place less value on education, and they believe that education sucks the common sense right out of people’s minds.
• They mock the smartest, most educated citizens as “elite” and out of touch.
• They believe the worst students in class are actually the smartest.
• They believe “conservative” means TO NOT CONSERVE ANYTHING — other than racism and bigotry; that to “conserve” is to send in a human hand grenade, to blow up the establishment, to demolish norms and traditions, flaunt legal, ethical, and moral standards, trash our international alliances, and unravel institutions that have long given stability to our republic.
• They are easily manipulated by cynical and selfish autocrats and oligarchs to kill democracy and to serve only the interests of the most powerful few.
• Technically, the Most Gullible Third possess a mental posture of excess cognitive accommodation toward a very small subset of the total Reality-Logic-Social environment, leaving them unable to perform either focal (in-and-out) or peripheral (side-to-side) comparisons of information. About a third of any human population has this combination, which causes them to be particularly susceptible to the effects of political propaganda and disinformation.

We need to accept the Most Gullible Third of voters as a permanent part of our nation, and also as a permanent risk to our national security. For as long as our nation has predators, the most gullible will be their prey. Today they’re known as “the Trump base,” but eventually Trump will be gone, yet the Trumpsters will remain. They’re a permanent part of America. We should protect them from being exploited by unscrupulous political operatives, as we would protect an elderly grandparent from a Nigerian prince email scam. Our anger shouldn’t be directed at them, but at the cynical and selfish people who take advantage of them.

Even so, the Most Gullible Third is only a third, and a third is not enough to win elections. That’s the beautiful thing about democracy: one third can be wrong, yet those who are right will still prevail. As long as a little more than 50 percent of citizens honor a commitment to never vote on the same side as the Most Gullible Third, democracy will give us a government and a nation that we can always be proud of.

We need to keep the Most Gullible Third of voters away from the levers of power. As much as we love our toddlers and our nonagenarian grandparents, it is generally unwise to let them drive the minivan. The Most Gullible Third of our citizens should be loved and represented in government. To that end, they should even win some elections. Their voices should be heard. But they should never again control the entire federal government and two-thirds of the states.

The United States is not a rational or good-faith actor, either domestically or on the world stage, as long as its Most Gullible Third is on the side that wins. Trump has made this point to the world: the U.S. is an erratic and unreliable negotiation partner when the most incompetent Americans get the government that THEY ALONE deserve. For the good of our country, for the good of the world, and for the good of future humanity, America’s most uneducated, information-illiterate third of voters need to be forever on the losing side of most (but not necessarily all) elections.