The Republican Party experienced yet another defeat at the ballot box on Tuesday, November 7, as constituents in red state after red state voted to prevent their legislatures from abridging their right to reproductive choice. In Virginia, the voters also delivered firm legislative and administrative victories across both branches of government.
In response to this clear rejection of the Republican agenda, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decried the referendum processes that put the abortion issue on the ballots to begin with, and former Republican Senator and presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said, “Democracy is no way to run a country.”
In saying the quiet part out loud—that Republicans aren’t big fans of democracy—the party of Lincoln finally declared what many observers have thought for quite some time: Democracy threatens their despotic vision for America.
Because of this, I believe that it is time to consider eliminating our system of representative government and adopting a true, direct democracy in which we, the people, get to decide which laws are proposed and which laws are enacted.
Easier said than done, I know, since it would require an amendment to the Constitution. Such an amendment would require a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress, and one party—the Republicans—would sooner cut off their own heads than ratify an amendment that would make it exceedingly difficult for them to ever win a national election again. The Republican Party would have lost seven of the past eight presidential elections but for the Electoral College. If we did away with the gerrymander, they would probably have difficulty holding onto the House of Representatives as well. This is what happens when a political party cannot legitimately sell a divisive, anti-democratic platform to the general electorate: They maintain and manipulate existing obsolete constructs for their own political advantage.
The creation of the Electoral College during the writing of the Constitution was brought about as a compromise between political stakeholders in order to provide more power to citizens in determining who would occupy the presidency, and less authority to Congress. We should remember that constitutional democracies did not then exist in the way that they do today. Most leaders and rulers were appointed either by royal fiat or by those with existing political power, and not by the citizenry of those nations. The Electoral College was seen as expanding the voice and the will of the governed.
But democracies evolve. The United States is a republic, engaging in representative democracy—that is, we the people do not directly determine who is elected president or which laws are proposed and adopted: The Electoral College determines the presidency, and our elected representatives determine which laws are proposed and enacted.
This seems absurd when one considers that we have long had the technical capabilities to transition from being a representative democracy to a direct democracy. Votes cast on a particular day can be tallied and transmitted on that same day. In a direct democracy, the people would elect the commander-in-chief, and either enact or dismiss the laws that directly affect our lives, by means of a simple majority of the people who vote.
In a direct democracy, it would be the citizens who either approve or disapprove laws on abortion, education, civil rights, taxes, spending and budget priorities, national defense, and immigration. Right now, we must rely on a bunch of publicity-seeking grandstanders in Washington, D.C. who routinely abuse their positions of power to play fast and loose with issues that profoundly impact our lives. In my opinion, they are doing a lousy job, and have done a lousy job for quite some time.
Presidents should be elected by a direct majority of voters, and laws should be enacted by a direct majority of voters. Legislation should be proposed by direct referendum, and then adopted by direct referendum.
A side effect of direct democracy is that we would no longer have to underwrite the salaries of the bloated political class in Washington, D.C. Were we to establish a direct democracy, we could send those people back to wherever they came from, there to become ordinary citizens, just like the rest of us, who get up every morning and work bloody hard to make a living. No more weeks-long recesses, ridiculous salaries, endless opportunities for grifting, and lifetime health and pension benefits. Government service would no longer be a one-way ticket to personal enrichment and power at the expense of everything and everyone else.
The politicians would be replaced, perhaps, by interest groups that bring worthy ideas before the people, so that the people can decide which of those ideas might merit being encoded into law. Goodbye, senators and congressmen; hello, citizen decision-makers.
I don’t know about you, but I would rather participate in direct democracy. The problem, of course, is that the very representatives who hold outsized power over our lives are the least likely to approve the changes to the Constitution that would be required in order to provide direct power to citizens of this country. When foxes guard the henhouse, the chickens never win.
Time will tell what the results of the 2024 general election will be, but it seems almost impossible to believe that the governing class will ever cede power to the governed. Perhaps we should consider voting all of them out of office, and replacing them with candidates who vow to serve only one term, with the single goal of enacting changes to the Constitution that will provide, at last, real power to the people.
Until that time, be prepared to remain victims of the gerrymander; the Electoral College; super-PACs; and the cynical, self-serving autocrats who serve as our elected “representatives” in government.
