"Myth of the Rational Voter" as applied to the current situation

It might not seem likely from the title, but Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies is an effective defense of democracy (previously reviewed by me here).  It's easy to come up with cases where most voters naturally favor policy proposals that experts in the matter think are crazy.  The author of the book is an economist and it's easy to come up with lists of things economists agree on but which voters are skeptical of.  But you can find examples from plenty of other disciplines, for instance in toxicology where you would find that a large majority of voters would agree that our tap water should not contain any arsenic at all, but experts typically think our current limit of 10 parts per billion is fine.  Even in cutting edge semiconductor manufacturing where a stray atom of arsenic in the wrong place can ruin a chip they're only able to reduce contamination to 1 part per billion or so.

In ancient Athens they didn't just have everybody vote on everything, what they did was more the equivalent of forcing everybody to spend their Saturday afternoons listening to debates on all sides of an issue before conducting a vote on it.  I do think that after 4 hours of debates modern voters would also vote the right way about things like water purity standards.  However, with the wide scope of issues our much larger modern governments are responsible for I don't think we'd be able to handle them all at one issue per weekend.  And I don't think voters are eager to spend their weekend afternoons on that either.

In modern society we elect representatives who have to make all these decisions for us and who will hopefully listen to experts.  And also they should ideally compensate for experts' focusing illusion problems.  But then an election comes along and the voters have to decide between two politicians again.  Mostly they vote based on affiliations but those are basically stable and equal amounts so they don't really decide who wins.  Then you have some combination of voters listening to different candidates' plans and deciding whether they make sense, on the one hand, and voters looking at how their lives have changed recently and voting for or against the incumbent on the other.  Because voters are too busy to research everything there's a strong incentive for politicians to propose good sounding but unworkable plans like banning arsenic in drinking water.  But to get reelected they need to abandon those unworkable plans once elected and so confirm to voters that all politicians are liars.  But even so not wanting to lie and reverse themselves to obviously constrains how badly politicians can mislead on the campaign trail.

That's how things should work in a stable situation.  But of course there's the danger that you might have some outsider come in who refuses to listen to experts, says all the good sounding things we'd like to believe instead, and wins on the force of an appealing message given with sincerity.  We don't just let any random person become a candidate for major office, though.  Usually you have to win lower office before becoming a serious candidate for higher office.  Also, in most countries and in the US before 1972 you have parties looking out for their long term brand by keeping out cranks who may win election but who will torpedo the party's standing in the long run.

A third party candidate with a lot of money behind them can break into politics and have some success on the basis of sincerely held appealing but terrible ideas.  Ross Perot for instance.  But then they end up fighting against the identity issues that don't normally crop up in Democrat versus Republican contests.  But then you also have outsiders coming in to take over a political party.  That takes more than just money but fame, from say being a TV personality can make that possible.

Is this all there is to the rise of Trump?  No.  For starters it fails to explain how Trump could be elected a second time, which requires an explanation for why he didn't implement all his ideas in his first term but is implementing them now.  There are all sorts of angles to recent events but I think that this particular angle is an important bit in understanding how we came to the current moment, with Trump's disastrous but sincere views on tariffs finally given free reign and why we haven't seen large tariffs in a century despite their continued popularity with the public.