Here’s an amazing piece from Ross Douthat of the NY Times for Sunday’s paper. He argues: it is good that the Republican and Democratic Parties have all these patently undemocratic gotchas and are run by the rich in secret, because that’s all that stops Yahoos like you and me from hijacking the nomination (read: winning primaries) to put someone like Trump (or Bernie) into contention. This muzzling of the electorate’s wilder whims is not only necessary, it is indeed a positive good, because only the rich can save us from ourselves.

Another way to look about this: Douthat  is expressing his gratitude that there’s a poll tax. Only the poll tax is billions of dollars and if you don’t have billions of dollars your vote doesn’t count, literally. And you should be happy there’s a poll tax because that’s all that keeps you from electing people that are bad for you.