DEMOCRACY DERAILED: The Initiative Movement and the Power of Money.

• Author: Weed, William Speed
• Position: Review

DEMOCRACY DERAILED: The Initiative Movement and the Power of Money by David Broder Harcourt, Inc., $23.00

IT'S SPRING OF AN EVEN-numbered year in California and the initiatives are blooming. In March, we chose to send more children to jail, to send more adults to jail, to allow American Indians to build Vegas-style casinos, and to reiterate that gay marriage is not legal in our state. Already, the signature gatherers are out qualifying initiatives for November.

Voters in California and the 23 other initiative states love this power-to-the-people tool that lets us exercise popular democracy and govern ourselves. We're hooked on the self-empowerment of walking into a booth to vote on public policy.

But as David Broder's new book Democracy Derailed reminds us, initiative voters are not the legislators-for-a-day they think they are--they do not decide what gets voted on, they do not research the reaches of the legislation, they cannot amend it, they cannot compromise on it, and they will not be held responsible for it. The initiative process is a breezy simulacrum of democracy that, along with its crew of voters, has been coopted by the moneyed few. According to Broder: "The experience with the initiative process at the state level in the last two decades is that wealthy individuals and special interests--the targets of the Populists and Progressives who brought us the initiative a century ago--have learned all too well how to subvert the process to their own purposes."

Broder has written a remarkable book. Almost every sentence in Democracy Derailed is a reported fact, crafted into a narrative that--if it occasionally reads like a very long Washington Post piece--is thoroughly convincing. For all their potential failings, allowing elected representatives to govern us is the only way for a democracy to work.

Initiatives were introduced in Oregon and California at the turn of the century as a way of bypassing legislatures overrun by corruption. But, as the state houses began to get cleaned up, initiatives fell out of favor--until 1978 when California's Proposition 13 swung them back into use. Spearheaded by anti-tax conservatives who tapped into a growing public distrust of how politicians were spending money, Prop 13 rewrote the state's property tax laws. Instead of assessing the worth of a property every year and charging the owner a tax based on that updated assessment, California tax law now reassesses property value only when a property is...