The Democrats are a mess, with socialist and unelectable Bernie Sanders now the clear frontrunner among Democratic voters.  He can't win.  But enough Democrats are upset at the leveraged buyout of their party by billionaire Michael Bloomberg that they've moved to the old socialist as a defense mechanism of sorts. 

So what better than to have elites pick the presidential nominee instead?

The current process is clearly flawed, but what would be better? Finding an answer means thinking about the purpose of presidential nominations, and about how the existing system falls short. It will require swimming against the tide of how we've thought about nominations for decades — as a contest between everyday voters and elites, or as a smaller version of a general election. A better primary system would empower elites to bargain and make decisions, instructed by voters.

Kid you not, that's really what was written in today's Washington Post.  That's the solution being bruited about for the Democratic malaise by one Julia Azari, a leftist professor writing in the pages of the Washington Post.

Her logic goes that since lots of candidates enter the race, elites should choose who's electable, balancing interests, which we just know they'd be willing to do as sacred trustees of The People.  The problem is the voters, who just can't pick their candidates right.  They have too many to choose from, see, and in the end, they mess up the system.  Sure, the system's great as a starter thing, but...

What it's not great at is choosing among the many candidates who clear that bar, or bringing their different ideological factions together, or reconciling competing priorities. A process in which intermediate representatives — elected delegates who understand the priorities of their constituents — can bargain without being bound to specific candidates might actually produce nominees that better reflect what voters want.

Her proposal, she hastens to add, would just be for the party nomination, of course. Somehow, voters are still O.K. in her book for the big one, it seems, picking the president.

So much for that electoral college rage going on since President Trump got elected.  She doesn't say what she thinks about that.

But for picking Democratic candidates, nothing works better than having a nomenklatura elite to sort these things out for us, given that the voters can't be trusted.  It sounds like a bring-back of the superdelegate system that enraged Democratic voters last time — and is why Democrats in the end put out the very weak candidacy of Hillary Clinton.  Now, unhappy with Democratic voter choices in this latest round, she's proposing to bring it back in some new form, for the voters' own good.  That's how they Got Trump, and whether they know it or not, they're now saying, "Thank you, may I have another?"

It certainly is reflective of the Democrat distrust of letting voters decide.  As Marxist Bertholt Brecht used to say, "would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?"