Instant Democracy for Everyone.

• Author: Weberg, Brian

There are groups out there that are trying to co-opt representative democracy.

Their plan is to use technology and the Internet to make legislatures a thing of the past.

Look out now. Here it comes. Its called direct democracy (DD), and it's coming soon to a city and a state near you. It's not just the popular initiative, like 24 states already have. DD, as envisioned by many who promote it, is the initiative on steroids. Move over, you old institutions of representative democracy (RD), there's a new game coming to town. Well, really, an old game with a shiny new look made possible by technology and the Internet.

Dick Morris, former sidekick of President Clinton, is so convinced about the coming age of direct democracy that he's written a book about it and opened a Web-based portal called vote.com (the name of his book, too). It's a sure sign that DD is coming into vogue when wily insiders like Morris line up to cash in on the trend. Just as the Web has opened up commerce in new and accelerated ways, so too, proponents say, will the Internet open up democracy. We will name our own price on priceline.com, then click our own public policy on vote.com.

A hundred years ago, the Populists and Progressives promoted pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State."

An equally spirited defense of representative democracy appeared recently on the bookshelves--Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and political reporter David Broder's Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money. Although primarily an expose on the initiative movement in America, Broder is clear with readers when he writes, "The argument of this book is that representative government is not something to be discarded quite so casually. We need to examine what really happens in direct legislation by initiative. And we must ask ourselves about the implications of a weakening of our republican form of government."

Broder minces no words in his concern about the popular initiative as it is used in contemporary politics. "No sooner had the concept of popular sovereignty been implanted in the political system than clever politicians realized that the key to power now lay in the manipulation of public opinion," he writes. Broder warns, "The initiative process ... threatens to challenge or even subvert the American system of government in the...