Every Issue of The Monthly to your door: Subscribe Online

Respond to this Book Review
Washington Monthly Home Page

May 2000

Democracy Derailed By David Broder Harcourt Brace Click on the title to buy the book

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 sold. The measure had great appeal---homeowners got to lock in their property tax rate. But, Broder notes, as with so many matters of governance, the measure had huge consequences that average voters failed to foresee. The state's budget bottomed out because of lost tax revenue. Education spending was severely cut back, and the once top-in-the-nation school system started a painful decline. The major beneficiaries of this loss of revenue to schools were corporations, which hold property longer than most homeowners.

At the time, though, the unintended consequences were not as apparent as the simple truth that the people had told the government what to do. Before long, initiatives were popping up again and the power-to-the-people tool was removed from its drawer and sharpened.

Unfortunately, it cuts most harshly into representative government. Originally meant as it was to bypass corrupt legislatures, it weakens the power of elected state government. Broder writes: "Admittedly, representative democracy has acquired a dubious reputation today. But as citizens, the remedy to ineffective representation is in our hands each Election Day. And whatever its flaws, this Republic has consistently provided a government of laws. To discard it for a system that promises laws without government would be a tragic mistake."

While Broder uses more than a dozen examples to expose the perils of the initiative process, the bulk of this book analyzes California's Prop 226, which was defeated in June, 1998. Prop 226 was a "paycheck protection" measure that would have required unions to get annual permission from members to use their dues for political purposes. The measure had no analogous provision for corporations and their stockholders.

Like most initiatives, 226 was an issue of vital importance to a small number of people and of little or no interest to the general public. The pro-226 forces wanted to weaken unions, which give overwhelmingly to Democrats, in order to bolster Republican candidates. Labor's opposition to 226 was ferocious---its political life was at stake. Broder quotes Harold Meyerson from the LA Weekly: "Proposition 226 neither arose from nor was rooted in a public clamor to do something about a social problem. To the contrary, it arose from a very select clamor Š nothing more than a strategic conceit."

But the initiative process allows select clamors to guide public issues as long as they're backed by a lot of money. Regardless of how little Californians might have cared about paycheck protection, upwards of $6 million was spent on 226 by the time both sides were done, and once it was on the ballot it was either going to pass or not.

One initiative-campaign consultant told Broder that when someone comes to him with an idea for the ballot, his first question is, "Do you have a million dollars?" State law requires hundreds of thousands of signatures to put a measure on the ballot and signature gathering, Broder reports, has become big business. There's no such thing as volunteers any more. Ballots are now qualified by professional groups that use networks of regional coordinators and paid signature gatherers. The signature gatherers in the field may or may not care about the particular initiative at hand---they care because they are paid anywhere from 25 cents to a dollar per signed name.

Once an initiative is on the ballot, the process veers even further from the ideals of democracy. Once the text of 226 was written, supporters threw in a clause about foreign contributions to sweeten the deal and employed all-out efforts to cast the measure as an issue of fairness, arguing that people should be able to decide what their dues are used for. Labor knew it couldn't win the fairness argument, so it tried cacophony and argued that multi-national corporations and out-of-state billionaires backed it and that it would weaken patient rights with HMOs, export American jobs, and privatize education.

This attack on 226 was ultimately successful largely because it followed the established wisdom of fighting initiatives: "Voters confused about an initiative either skip it or vote no."

When the complexities of governing become apparent through an initiative, we punt. Broder does not see this as a safety valve for the initiative process, but it may be one some of the time. We recognize that we cannot simply bring into law something that isn't simple, so "paycheck protection" is not law. If there is one moment of disappointment in Broder's book, this is it. His central example is a failed initiative, democracy almost-derailed.

But Broder's larger argument stands: Initiatives are faux plebiscites, engineered by moneyed agendas. Sometimes, the pro-initiative forces are crafty enough and wealthy enough to hide the complexities of governing and make their issue seem so simple and compelling that voters will pass it. Broder offers many examples, from medical marijuana to physician-assisted suicide to lucrative concessions to gambling interests.

Exposing the complexities of government is the job of journalists, of course, but we don't do it very well. In California, at least, we avoid investigating initiatives because of their status as plebiscites. We follow the horse-race, but don't want to come down on one side or the other. Editorials will appear just before election day, but by that time people have been so barraged with paid advertisements that the debate has been entirely framed by consultants. As Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber told Broder, the initiative process, "[r]educes complex issues to sound bites and the question of who has the most money." Broder points out that sometimes (not often) the side with more money loses, but on the whole, initiative democracy is democracy reduced to absurdity.

In conclusion, Broder touches on the various half-measures people have suggested that might improve the process: Require signature-gatherers to be volunteers, disallow out-of-state contributions, end term limits on legislators so that deliberative bodies have more relative power. But after all the evidence that initiatives can derail democracy, none of this is satisfactory. The unarticulated solution is clear: Abolish the system.