Four Roads to Direct Democracy, and Why the Destination Is More Certain Than the Route

A fair objection to everything I have written about direct democracy is that I describe the destination and never the journey. A friend put it bluntly: a vision of a system of government with no account of how it comes about is not a political proposal, it is a wish, and the missing chapter makes the whole thing less real. He was right, and this is the missing chapter.

I do not know which road will be taken. I think I can name the roads, and I think the fact that there are several of them, running from different starting points, is itself the answer to the objection.

Road One: Crisis

Systems of government change when they fail visibly enough that the public demands something else. Representative democracy did not arrive because philosophers recommended it; it arrived when monarchies lost wars, bankrupted themselves, or starved their populations, and the people who had been told to trust the king stopped trusting him.

The equivalent failure for representative government is a crisis it plainly cannot handle: a financial collapse it caused and cannot correct, a war it started against the public's will, an environmental catastrophe it saw coming and did nothing about. At that point the demand is not for better representatives. It is for the public to take the decision itself, because the representatives have demonstrated that they will not.

This road is fast and ugly, and it is the one history suggests is most common.

Road Two: Technology

Call this the platform scenario. A company, or a consortium, or a state, builds a system through which a very large number of people can be consulted cheaply, securely, and often, and it works well enough that governments start using it for real questions because refusing to looks absurd.

Nothing in this requires anyone to believe in direct democracy. It requires only that the tool exist and that using it be cheaper and more legitimate than not using it. Once a government has consulted the public directly on ten questions and got away with it, the eleventh is a formality, and the question of why the consultation is advisory rather than binding starts to be asked out loud.

This road is slow and quiet, and it is already partly built.

Road Three: The Party That Is a Pipe

A party enters the legislature on the single promise that it has no platform and will vote as the public instructs it, question by question. I have described how such a party should cast its seats. With one seat it is a curiosity. With a blocking minority it is a fact that the other parties have to negotiate with. With a majority the country is a direct democracy without a single constitutional word having changed.

This road needs no crisis and no new technology. It needs a party willing to give up the thing parties exist for, and voters willing to trust it. Both are hard, and the road is open today.

Road Four: Legitimacy Drains Away

Turnout falls. Trust in the institutions falls. The proportion of the public that believes its representatives represent it falls. None of this produces a revolution; it produces a government that governs a population which has stopped granting it the right to, and that governs more and more by inertia and force.

At some point the gap between the formal authority of the system and its actual standing becomes wide enough that a modest proposal to close it, by letting the public decide directly on the large questions, looks less like radicalism and more like housekeeping. The system is not overthrown. It is bypassed, because nobody is defending it anymore.

This is the road we are visibly on now, and it is the one I would least like to arrive by, because it is the one in which the most damage is done on the way.

Why the Route Is Uncertain and the Destination Is Not

Most likely the change comes by some combination: a legitimacy drain that makes a crisis worse, a crisis that makes a platform acceptable, a platform that makes the pipe party's promise credible. The roads are not exclusive and they feed each other.

So I cannot say when, and I cannot say how, and I am not going to pretend to. What I will say is this. A change that can arrive by four independent routes, from four independent causes, each of which is already operating, is not a wish. It is a forecast. The uncertainty is about the path and the timing. It is not about whether.

The people who ran the last transition, from monarchy to representation, could not have said in advance which of their several routes would carry the change, either. It took over a century and it went differently in every country. But the direction was set by the fact that the old system had stopped being able to justify itself, and once that is true of a system, the only remaining question is which road.