A System of Government That Needs Mass Support to Exist Is More Likely to Last

There is a fact about direct democracy that is usually stated as a difficulty, and I want to restate it as an advantage. The difficulty is this: direct democracy cannot be installed by a small group. It requires mass popular support, not as a nicety but as a precondition, because a system in which the public decides cannot be set up against the public's will. Nobody can impose it on people who do not want it, since the first thing they would decide is to abolish it.

That is true. And it is the best predictor of success a new system of government has ever had.

How Systems of Government Usually Arrive

Look at how the changes of regime we know about actually happened.

Monarchies arrived by conquest or by a strongman consolidating what he had taken. Theocracies arrived when a priesthood captured a ruler or became one. Dictatorships arrive by coup, which is by definition the act of a small armed group. Even the representative republics, which we think of as the popular ones, mostly arrived through the work of a minority: a revolutionary faction, a set of landowners and lawyers drafting documents, an officer corps that decided to stop obeying. The population's role was often to be told afterwards what had been done in its name.

Almost every regime in history was installed by a minority and then had to manufacture the consent of the majority after the fact. This is why regimes spend so much on legitimacy: flags, anthems, founding myths, education, ceremonies. The consent was not there at the start, so it has to be built and maintained.

And regimes built this way are brittle in a specific place. The minority that installed the system is also the minority that benefits from it most, and the majority knows it, or comes to know it. Every such regime carries a permanent question underneath it: why should we, who did not choose this, keep supporting it? When the answer stops being convincing, the regime falls, and it usually falls to another minority.

The Thing That Is Different

Now consider a system that cannot come into being at all until a large majority actively wants it.

Direct democracy has this property by construction. There is no way to sneak it in. A coup cannot install it, because the plotters would be handing power to exactly the people they just seized it from. A party cannot legislate it quietly, because the legislation would be the end of the party's role. A foreign power cannot impose it, because an imposed direct democracy would vote itself out of existence at the first opportunity if the population did not want it.

The only path is that a great many people want it, say so, and keep saying so until the existing arrangement gives way.

This is usually filed as the reason direct democracy is unlikely. Fine. But look at what it means for the regime once it exists. It exists because a majority chose it, freely, against the preference of the minority that held power before. It does not need to manufacture consent afterwards, because the consent is what created it. It does not carry the founding question underneath it, because the answer is on record: we chose this, in the open, by demanding it.

Why This Predicts Survival

A regime's chance of lasting depends on how many people would defend it and how many would be relieved to see it go.

A regime installed by a minority starts with a small group of defenders and a large group of the indifferent, and it has to convert the indifferent one generation at a time. It is always one crisis away from discovering the conversion did not take.

A regime installed by mass demand starts with its defenders already in place. They are the people who demanded it. They know why they wanted it and what it replaced. And crucially, the system gives them something to lose: their own say. A citizen under direct democracy who is asked to give it up is being asked to hand his vote on every question back to a few hundred strangers. That is a much harder sell than asking a subject to accept a new king in place of the old.

The precondition that makes direct democracy hard to reach is the same feature that would make it hard to remove. The two are not separate facts. A system that can only be born from mass demand is a system whose supporters are, from the first day, a mass.

The Comparison That Makes It Concrete

Consider the transitions we regard as successes. The ones that held are the ones where the population had, in fact, come to want the new arrangement before it arrived, so that the formal change ratified something already true. The ones that failed are the ones imposed on a population that had not asked for them, however well designed they were on paper. Constitutions written for people who did not demand them have a poor record.

Direct democracy makes this correlation into a rule. It cannot arrive before it is wanted, so it can never fall into the failure mode of the well-designed system nobody asked for. Every previous revolution in government had to hope its population would come round. This one has the population's agreement as its entry ticket.

I do not know how long it takes to reach that entry ticket, and I have written elsewhere about the routes by which it might come and why institutions resist it. But once you notice that the barrier and the guarantee are the same thing, the barrier looks rather different. It is not an obstacle to be regretted. It is the reason to think that, when this arrives, it will stay.