Author: John Haskell
Publisher: Westview Press
December 2000

Book Description:

In Direct Democracy or Representative Government? John Haskell deals with the relative merits of populist democracy and representative government. In this expansive, well-written, accessible, polemic account, Haskell traces the development of two dominant strains in American politics: the populist impulse that has fueled efforts to implement direct democracy for two centuries, and a representative political system as envisioned by James Madison in The Federal Papers.

According to Haskell, the possibilities for direct democracy's realization have increased dramatically in recent years, particularly with television,the internet, and the explosion of politics-by-plebiscite in states like California.

Haskell contends this is a bad thing because it augurs not simply tyranny by the majority, but incoherence, and he shows through his application of social choice theory how political majorities are unstable agglomerations of wildly conflicting opinions and motives. An elected body, however, is deliberative rather than impulsive, and can resort to all sorts of tactics to ameliorate and amend a bill so that it adresses the concerns of a much wider spectrum of interest groups. In this book Haskell presents both his application of social choice theory to the problem and a spirited defense of liberal, republican government.

DDC Review:

John Haskell is an associate professor at Drake University. His book is typical of the anti-democratic, elitist viewpoint firmly entrenched in the education establishment. Their shallow retreat behind Madison's Federalist Papers simply doesn't hold water in a republican bucket full of holes.

Those holes were created by the rise of personal power among elected officials, the deterioration of representative democracy and the destructive two-party system. The so-called deliberative elected body Haskell places his blind faith in have, in fact, turned into self-serving, compromised, unstable factions.

Haskell's defense of liberal government is the antithesis of reality. Indeed, the time-worn mantra of the tyranny of the majority is nonsense because it simply doesn't exist. Rather, is has been the tyranny of the extreme, unstable minority which have wildly conflicting opinions and motives. It is the extremists who work the representative system like clay modeled to their images in order to maintain personal power.

There has been no real majority rule in much of anything to do with government because the majority of eligible voters seldom, if ever, vote. Instead, as Haskell seems to forget, representatives are elected and voter initiatives are passed or defeated by small majorities of eligible voters who actually vote, 20 to 25 percent, in most elections. If there is any tyranny going on here, it is by the minority.

Clearly, the whole idea presented by liberals like Haskell, and extreme conservatives, is to foment fear, mistrust and insignificance among the American people, much like Plato's elitism did. He's the ancient Greek aristocrat they learned it from. Most of us, however, believe we're better than that, much like the 5th century BC Athenians where democracy was born, and direct democracy worked extremely well.