My most excellent assistant completing our ballot.Today marks the 60th quadrennial presidential election, and so I’m ceremoniously completing my ballot with my trusty sidekick (see below). Yet, as many Californians and San Francisqueños will tell you, you need to spend more time considering the propositions than the candidates. And that’s because of this crazy style of government we’ve got here: the direct democracy.
My most excellent assistant completing our ballot.
What could be so bad about “direct democracy,” you say. After all, America is a bastion of democracy, and going direct to the people suggests a purity, that nothing should be lost in translation.
But it turns out it’s a terrible idea. Not to deify them, but the Founding Fathers knew this: Madison in Federalist Paper №10 discusses protecting the individual from the will of the majority; and Hamilton at the New York Ratifying Convention just admits its impracticality and poor track record:
A pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is falser than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure, deformity.
But nevertheless, here in Calfornia this ill-conceived experiment has been run continuously since 1911. Exempli gratia from our ballot:
Proposition 2. Authorizes $10 billion in general obligation bonds for repair, upgrade, and construction of facilities at K–12 public schools (including charter schools), community colleges, and career technical education programs, including for improvement of health and safety conditions and classroom upgrades. Requires annual audits. Fiscal Impact: Increased state costs of about $500 million annually for 35 years to repay the bond. Supporters: California Teachers Association; California School Nurses Organization; Community College League of California Opponents: Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association
This is common—in fact at a local level we’ve got the same thing (Prop A): Do you want us to put a bunch of money into [insert noble enterprise like K-12 schools]? I mean, you don’t hate our school-aged children, do you? (Nevermind that school facility maintenance is among the very first line items the government is supposed to have on the budget, paid for with our existing taxes.)
But even if you thought it was a laudable proposal, a worthwhile investment; how would you evaluate it? First, is there truly a need? Perhaps. How did it get sized to a nice, round $10,000,000,000.00? What happens if we don’t do it? Does it get funded another way? Etc.
I have attempted to go deep on this or that proposition in the past: get both sides’ arguments and counterarguments, seek out as much analysis as possible, do my own due diligence with some source material, etc. I’m not gonna lie: it takes a fair amount of time if you’re committed to it. And we have no less than 25 propositions between state and local this time around.
And even once you’ve arrived at your well-informed answer and your confidence is brimming, you realize another problem: how does everything hang together in a fiscal budget? It’s hard to see it, and you’re typically not making tradeoffs on these props; rather they’re simply binary choices: do the thing or don’t. So it’s easy to say “yes” but not fully understand the ROI or how everything else in the budget might be adjusted to accommodate said proposition.
You know, it’s almost like you’d want a small group of people whom the demos trusts and feels would be competent and fair-minded to represent us in deciding such matters…
Admittedly, there are occasions when certain features of direct democracy are useful. Like when you have to recall a district attorney whose woke ideologies come to be at odds with the very duties he’s elected to carry out. And there are places in the world where it seems to work out: like Liechtenstein, for example…though they also have a total population similar to that of the Outer Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco, so go figure.
But for the most part, when we look at California and San Francisco, we should conclude that the democratic republic or some form of representative democracy—and not the direct democracy—is the way to go.
— ᴘ. ᴍ. ʙ.