Everything Can Be Explained Very Simply If You Assume Substantial Background Knowledge
I've earned my living mostly by explaining stuff to people. I started out writing about woodworking and designing woodworking projects for magazines like Popular Mechanics and Family Handyman. I ended up helping people understand and use computers and application software. In between, I've written about all sorts of subjects.
The first step for anything I wrote was to determine what my target audience already knew. That would determine how much space would be needed for what I wrote. My editors understood the need for that information and were usually pretty good about giving me knowledge parameters for a particular magazine's readership.
I explained it to people who didn't write for a living this way: I can write an article on how to build a bridge in a few sentences or a book. It all depends on what the reader knows. If the readers are civil engineers, the instructions can be very general. If they have never thought about building a bridge, many, many words are going to be needed.
It's the same with politics and government. If the audience is intimately familiar with the Constitution of the United States, I can write about congressional matters very concisely. If they're not, it's bound to take a lot of words, since I first have to explain why the Senate is made up of two Senators from each state, while the number of House members is based on each state's population. There's a reason why the Senate was designed the way it was. Circumstances have changed since then.
If you already know a good deal about our system of government, that's about all I'd need to say. If you don't know US history and the Constitution intimately, it's a lot harder to explain. That's why I don't write much about those things. Nobody would read the long version and the short version is meaningless without that knowledge.
Everything is either simple or complicated, depending on what you already know.
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I don't want to drive over a bridge that can be described in a few sentences.
But I get your meaning. The problem we have is that the amount of background knowledge among the general public is sorely lacking.
We Engineers rarely get a shout out so I wanted to pipe in.
It is so true that there is a baseline knowledge gap. I like to believe that we are better than most but then again I've had a few too many arguments about some pretty stupid things.
We're good. Let me know if you have a bridge you want me to build 
Here is one I built last year.
Link to tweet
?lang=en
Maybe important information can be given in an injection? 
How do we go about getting important information to the increasingly dumbed down public?
We can watch videos, read e-books, listen to pod-casts, etc.
Once upon a time (and not so long ago) all we had was textbooks. Now, we can bring things to life or make learning about them much more interesting. Schools should be turning out the brightest young minds exponentially by now--we should have a nation full of properly educated people ready to make the world a better place to live for all life, and certainly a more functioning government here.
Every day things get worse. Kids are being taught to discount evolution and science, and not to use critical thinking skills. We are fighting against those who want power at any cost.
I don't know, either.
Response to MineralMan (Original post)
Response to MineralMan (Reply #5)
I'm painting with a very, very, very broad brush , not speaking of any particular person and I'm including myself in the paintjob.
I can be plenty condescending myself.
I do not find your posts to be condescending, however.