An Argument against Direct-Democracy-

      Our current political process is broken. Influenced by the barriers of ideology and corporate discontent, the way we have expected to exist as a democracy is over. The problem lies in the will of the American electorate. Citizens extend their conscious will to those they elect, who in turn act according to that will. But what has occurred is an evaporation of any sufficient reasoning belonging to the will of the popular electorate. Their desires and needs are never fulfilled by the government at hand. Instead it is dictated to them through rhetoric and the fear that develops from this. But this piece is not about the failures of a republic, it is about the dangers of what a direct democracy would produce. The obvious point being that a direct democracy would limit the idea of the individual and instead create a dictatorship of the majority.

    Democracy is not an actuality but an idea, an idea which will never be fully realized. With a direct democracy this idea will be farther away from its actualization, because at the center of the premise lies the concept of the citizen legislature. In a normal republic the legislature lies as an elected body compromised of various factions. These factions (liberal, conservative, moderate and so on) work out compromises to insure the best outcome of a particular measure. This enterprise in the end bares little result, but helps to keep a fairly representative interest at play. With a direct democracy, since there is no formal organization which allows for factions to come together and work out compromises, the majority can simply dictate to the minority what is correct and right. Even in an ideal circumstance this would not bare the most accurate telling of rights and ideas. Whites could dictate to blacks what is right, heterosexuals onto homosexuals and a state like California could dictate anything it wanted. The basic result is a nightmare of majority views being dictated to everyone else, influenced entirely by the media and advertisement buys, which explains how the lack of information directed to the citizenry would cause such a problem to grow worse.

    The average American can be swayed and influenced easily, a good example of this is the 2004 PIPA Report from the University of Maryland. This report indicated that most American voters believed that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. The failure this report indicated was that the populace at large was misinformed and believed the misinformation was due to the machinations of the Bush administration. This ignorance that a population of Americans live in expresses a scary abstraction opposed to their actual lives, ones in which they believe themselves to be informed and right in the choices they make. Instead, the horrible reality is that citizens’ choices are actually designed to serve others’ interest. Even with the possibility of a system free of this misinformation, the knowledge of the society as a whole would still be what dictates voting habits. If the wrong information got out about a certain subject and infected the populace at large, where would the implications end? Would Prop 8 (the California referendum banning homosexual marriage) not have passed, if various institutions not made an effort to misinform and direct the public to vote a certain way? There is no way of telling what an individual’s knowledge of a subject is or if their views are clouded and ruled by ignorance. Therefore, allowing a plurality of these individuals to decide public policy in a direct way is dangerous. Despite the failure of the current system, a direct system, even in its most ideal form, would be even more dangerous.

-Mark Brinton