Somebody has to say it: It’s time we rethink this whole universal suffrage thing.

As congressional Democrats run scared from the mob that frightened everyone from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers, health care for millions hangs in the balance.

Why? Because folks wearing tin-foil hats get to vote on the government that the rest of us have to live under. The result is members of Congress taking their cues from people who believe in “death panels” and think the president of the United States is a foreigner.

It’s too bad white Southerners gave literacy tests a bad name; we desperately need some way to keep these people from the polls.

My ruminations about the hazards of democracy were sparked by a recent Pew Research Center survey containing 12 multiple-choice questions about current events. It’s the kind of stuff you pick up through osmosis if you’re paying any attention at all.

Queries ranged from how many women sit on the Supreme Court to a ballpark estimate of the nation’s unemployment rate, to the number of Senate votes needed to break a filibuster.

Despite massive media coverage of such issues, the results make you fear for the republic.

Nearly two-thirds—64 percent—of the 1,003 adults got half or fewer right. The average was 5.3 out of 12. (For the record, I missed one, underestimating how much oil we import. You can take the quiz at

www.pewresearch.org/politicalquiz/

). A 5.3 out of 12 is an “F” on anybody’s test. Yet these are the folks Congress is catering to on health care and everything else. No wonder the Founders came up with artifices such as the Electoral College and having senators elected by state legislatures.

“Originally, there was a great deal of suspicion of the people,” said James A. Gardner, University at Buffalo vice dean of academic affairs and director of UB’s Jaeckle Center for Law and Democracy. “Democracy was associated with mob rule. . . . The Founding Fathers definitely had a negative view of direct popular involvement.”

They were hardly alone. The skepticism dates from the Greeks and Plato’s three classes: guardians, soldiers and workers. U. S. attitudes began to change during the Jacksonian era, Gardner said, with the notion that governing isn’t that difficult and that anybody with common sense could participate.

We can see what that has wrought, with Congress running scared from people who, as the Pew survey indicates, don’t have a clue about anything that’s not on reality TV or “SportsCenter.”

I like Plato’s idea, but my three classes would be different: Those allowed to vote on “American Idol,” those allowed to vote for all-star teams, and those allowed to vote in elections. There would be no overlap.

Alas, rights once granted never get taken away. Our idiotocracy is here to stay, and any politician eyeing re-election knows where the votes lie. The result is a political strategy designed not by Karl Rove, but by journalist H. L. Mencken, who recognized a century ago: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

That’s what Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter and other House leaders face trying to work around a populace that trusts the government less than the insurance companies that’ll yank their policies the minute they get seriously ill.

In fact, I’ll leave it to Mencken to sum up the health care future of Americans if a meaningful bill goes down because Congress proves so “responsive”:

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want— and deserve to get it good and hard.”