Intellectually and emotionally inadequate people have always existed and will always believe in mindless conspiracy theories. The problem is: we let these people vote. No matter how mad their ideas are, no matter how disconnected from objective reality they may be, no matter how despicable the candidate they vote for, the vote of a conspiracy theorist counts just as much as the vote of an intelligent well-informed person (of whom there are strikingly few). Hence representative democracy serves to amplify our worst characteristics; for this and many other reasons, it's long past time we began to build something far more fit for purpose.