Inscription and modernity Book

I'm not sure if David Broder thought he was on to a compelling problem when he wrote this book, but fourteen years after its publication it just seems quaint. With authoritarian governments on the loose around the world, a post 9/11 security state at home, and Congress seemingly determined to seek out new lows of futility, ballot initiatives rank very low on the list of political problems to worry about.

Broder has also misdiagnosed the problem. There's nothing inherently wrong with the initiatives he describes. Some of them are good ideas, some of them seem pretty dumb, and many of them get promoted with a mix of truth and lies. That's par for the course in politics, and the ballot initiative system seems to be functional and useful as a whole.

The problem, as Broder points out, is that ballot initiatives are also expensive, so the system favors interests with deep pockets. Big Money is a problem, but it's a problem that affects all political systems, not ballot initiatives in particular. Broder seems to be looking for solutions to ballot initiatives, when he should be looking for ways to reduce the distortion of Big Money in politics. There may be some contrarian ways to do that: what if you lowered the signature threshold so that it didn't take so much money to get on the ballot? What if you created a crowdfunding system so that citizen groups could fund their causes without relying on businesses and multi-millionaire donors? There may be lots of ways to improve the ballot initiative process, but glaring at it and declaring your fealty to James Madison is unlikely to help.