Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted and updated from the book, “Renovating Democracy: Governance In The Age Of Globalization and Digital Capitalism.”

A quarter of a millennium after declaring independence would seem a good time to assess the thinking behind the governing design of the American Republic and the endeavor over the years to perfect it. How has it evolved, especially in the states that serve as the “laboratories of democracy” in a federal system, and where might it be headed?

The first turn of America’s self-governing institutions came in 1789 with the ratification of the U.S. Constitution following robust debate over the principles of governance and their practical application as experienced in the early post-colonial states after independence in 1776. The second turn during the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th century introduced direct democracy combined with smart government in the states. In today’s digital age, the third turn beginning to emerge would build on the experience of both to restore trust in the institutions of self-government through the concept of “participation without populism.”

First Turn: A Republic, Not A Democracy

Just as today we draw on the early reflections of James Madison or John Adams, these men turned in their day to the ancient histories of Greek democracy and the Roman republic for guidance. For the Founders, as the prominent Virginia revolutionary Patrick Henry wrote, the classical world was “the lamp of experience.”

What that lamp taught the Founders would surprise most Americans today. The word “democracy” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. Nor in the Bill of Rights or the Declaration of Independence. That is because America’s Founding Fathers not only distrusted democracy, but based on their close reading of Greek and Roman history, were actually hostile to the notion that it was the best system for governing society. 

James Madison, the fourth U.S. president and a key author of “The Federalist Papers,” famously declared: “Democracy is the most vile form of government … democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” John Adams, the second American president, wrote: “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

These early American leaders came to such harsh conclusions through their avid study of Polybius, who lived during the last days of the Roman Republic (200-118 B.C.), as well as a further recounting of Polybius and others by the Florentine Renaissance political theorist Machiavelli, who wrote his “Discourses on Livy” in 1517. 

Both concluded that the best form of governance had always been a balanced mix of monarchy, or executive power; aristocracy, the rule of the actively engaged and informed few; and democracy, the rule of the many. None of these forms in isolation, they argued, could produce long-lasting stability. Pure monarchy would inexorably degenerate into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy and democracy into demagoguery and mob rule. Only when each watched over the other with reciprocal accountability could an enduring equilibrium be established. 

A constitutional republic designed along these lines — albeit with a “natural aristoi” of talent, as Thomas Jefferson put it, instead of lineage or wealth — would be the only way to curb the predatory appetites whetted when too much power is concentrated in any one place. What history and their own experience taught the Founders is that circuit breakers are needed to cut off power when too much of it flows to one set of interests — including, and especially, the electoral majority.

Taking into account this central lesson of antiquity, the Founders designed a mixed constitutional republic that, while rooted in the consent of the governed, delegated authority to elites ― representative, indirectly elected and appointed bodies ― that could “refine and enlarge the public view” as a counterweight against the popular passions of prejudice and the narrow horizons of self-interested constituencies. (Originally, U.S. Senators were selected by state legislatures, not elected by a vote of the public.)

For the Founders, popular sovereignty unchecked by the cool and reasoned deliberation of the meritorious few would invite majoritarian intolerance of individual and minority rights and, as in antiquity, degenerate into mob chaos, thereby summoning tyranny to restore order. “No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value,” Madison wrote in “The Federalist Papers” No. 47.

For constitutional architects like John Adams, one way to achieve this check and balance was a bicameral legislature with two houses of a distinct nature, as he first outlined in the Spring of 1776 when he was asked by the North Carolina Provincial Congress to provide suggestions on a new government and constitution.

“What history and their own experience taught the Founders is that circuit breakers are needed to cut off power when too much of it flows to one set of interests — including, and especially, the electoral majority.”

One house, by Adams’s design, would be a directly elected representative assembly that “should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel and reason like them.” Yet, he feared, such an assembly alone would be “liable to all the vices, follies and frailties of an individual; subject to the fits of humor, starts of passion, flights of enthusiasm, partialities or prejudice, and consequently productive of hasty results and absurd judgments.” Thus, he added, “All these errors ought to be corrected and defects supplied by some controlling power,” by which he meant the executive, a deliberative upper house and an independent judiciary.

If the immediate and parochial interests and passions of the people were to be reflected in a house of assemblymen, Adams reasoned, then an upper house, or Senate, fashioned from the Roman experience, needed to be interposed. A people cannot be long free, nor ever happy, whose government is in one assembly,” he wrote.

As an upper house, Adams envisioned a “distinct assembly” of “say twenty or thirty men” who “should have a free and independent exercise of judgment.” Unlike the lower house, this upper house would not be directly accountable to the electorate but would be selected by the representative assembly; its mandate would be to look out for the long-term common good, providing dispassionate, sober deliberation on legislation proposed by the lower house. Above all, it would buffer public passions of the moment and protect the stability and continuity of a law-based state.

Such senators were to embody “the wisdom and foresight” of persons who were learned, well-informed and contemplative and who could draw on “a long acquaintance with the history and manners of mankind.” Or as Hamilton wrote in his notes on the Greek historian Plutarch’s “Lives,”“The Senate was to the commonwealth what ballast is to a ship.” Madison similarly called the Senate a necessary “anchor against popular fluctuations.”

In turn, checks would also have to be put in place to prevent a selected or indirectly elected Senate from becoming a privileged aristocracy, as it did in Roman times. It was out of this worry over incipient aristocracy that, by the 1840s, most states, and ultimately the federal government, succumbed to the siren call of the democratic temper and implemented direct popular election of the upper houses as well as the assemblies, thus erasing the essential difference in functions that Adams thought necessary. 

In the face of this tidal shift from a republican to a democratic sensibility decades after the drafting of the Constitution, South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun was compelled in the mid-19th century to reinforce the distinction between the two. 

He saw that the ongoing expansion of suffrage and the direct election of both the upper and lower houses of the legislature would grant decisive power to a numerical majority rather than a “constitutional majority.” A constitutional majority entailed concurrent agreement between the distinct qualities of a deliberative, indirectly elected Senate and the directly elected House, whose majoritarian claims the Senate was designed to restrain and balance.

Calhoun extensively laid out the logic of his thinking in his book, “A Disquisition on Government,” written from 1843 to 1849 and published posthumously in 1851.

For Calhoun, the whole point of a mixed constitutional republic was “to prevent any one interest, or combination of interests, from using the powers of government to aggrandize itself at the expense of the others.” The notion of “nothing more is necessary than suffrage” was thus at odds with what Calhoun called “the appropriate organism” that would not only give expression to the will of the majority, but to the interests of the entire society. “The numerical majority instead of being the people, is only a portion of them,” he wrote.

For Calhoun, majority rule registered at the ballot box wrongly assumed the identity of all interests in society. As he put it, rule solely by a democratic majority in both legislative houses meant the separation of power was only “nominal.” The imposition of limitations and restraint — what Calhoun called “the negative” — is what prevents the majority from absolute domination. “It is, indeed, the negative which makes the constitution — and the positive which makes the government. The one is the power of acting and the other the power of preventing or arresting action. The two, combined, make constitutional government.”

“Checks would also have to be put in place to prevent a selected or indirectly elected Senate from becoming a privileged aristocracy, as it did in Roman times.”

 The success of ancient Rome, Calhoun noted, was precisely due to the establishment of Tribunes to represent the plebeians and thus become a “negative” on the aristocratic Senate, as well as vice versa. It was the balance between the two that cemented the “bond of concord and harmony.” When that balance fell into disequilibrium, the republic collapsed.

To make a long story very short, the expansion of suffrage over the ensuing decades to all white males (if not yet women or Blacks) led to the emergence of political parties — the very “factions” the Founding Fathers so disdained — as a means to organize (and manipulate) all those new voters. 

In Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison famously wrote: “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

 In the minds of the Framers, republican mixed government was not only meant to buffer the immediate popular passions of a democratic electorate; it was also designed as a ‘disinterested’ way of governing that would thwart factions or parties from banding together across branches to impose their will and upset the institutional equilibrium. 

Factions organized to mobilize partisan constituencies inevitably sought to dominate the public discourse through connections and money, consolidating into “machines” that disenfranchised average citizens who were not part of the patronage network. Expansion of the number of voters, in effect, tended to empower rather than diminish factional influence precisely because the electorate became so vast that only those with the time, money and interest to organize could gain power. 

Paradoxically, then, the expanded franchise led to the relative disempowerment of the non-organized voter and benefited organized special interests. What the legal scholar Ganesh Sitaraman points out in his 2017 book, “The Crisis of the Middle Class Constitution,” was already true when the voter franchise was first widely extended: “Because of the asymmetry of time and resources, elections are dominated by the organized and the moneyed who are then chosen to govern. Elections even favor the rise of aristocracy.” 

The Second Turn: Direct Democracy & Smart Government

By the end of the 19th century, much like today, the disruptions of technological change and frustration with the capture of representative democracy by organized special interests fomented a revolt.

America had rebounded from the devastation of the Civil War as a unified nation with a single market, experiencing a great burst of commerce and economic growth. Railroads and telecommunications lines began to lace the nation. Modern public opinion was born with the dissemination of mass-circulation newspapers. 

The Industrial Revolution attracted mass migration to the cities where new manufacturing enterprises flourished. The self-reliant family farm, long the bedrock of the country’s economy and political institutions, adopted mechanization and came to rely on middlemen to sell its meat and crops in markets across the nation.

Henry Ford was gearing up his new-fangled assembly line to produce automobiles. The first great skyscrapers rose in Chicago and New York to house the banking, railroad, mining and oil monopolies that dominated voracious economic expansion. The super rich openly displayed swank and frivolity at odds with the traditional American qualities of frugality and modesty that Mark Twain attributed to the era, giving it its own appellation: “the Gilded Age.”

As always in history, the creation of vast new wealth with new technologies brought new inequalities, new winners and losers and new social movements that aimed to correct social injustice. New methods and patterns of production introduced whole new sets of concerns, from wages and working hours to food safety, energy and transportation costs, environmental protection, property use zoning, urban housing shortages and blight.

All these developments raced well ahead of regulation. Dwarfed by the changes in industry and commerce, what was still small government tended to go with the flow. Well-greased party-aligned political machines catered to the most powerful interests, settling on short-term fixes demanded by electoral cycles and the interests that dominated them. Government was increasingly seen as enabling the gilded few to get rich at the expense of the many. This ran counter to the egalitarian spirit of ordinary Americans. Partisan politicians lacked both the spine and the competence to manage the complexities of mass society in the emergent industrial era.

“By the end of the 19th century, much like today, the disruptions of technological change and frustration with the capture of representative democracy by organized special interests fomented a revolt.”

The social movements that arose to secure popular interests had a ready weapon for pushing back. The previous century’s gradual turn toward a more expansive democracy had fortified the idea of one-person-one-vote. If representatives who were supposed to rule “for the people” had betrayed the public interest, then giving more power to the people themselves through direct democracy would fix the problem.

In an age of mass communication through newspapers, after all, the ever more literate public could be as well informed in their decisions as their elected representatives. The representatives were no longer needed to “refine” the public view. All that was necessary was to remove the corrupt intermediaries or go around them by letting the people make laws directly at the ballot box. Meanwhile, to provide the government with the knowledge and wisdom needed to act effectively in an ever more complex society, a major new concept of reform emerged: banishing patrons and cronies and placing the administration of government in the hands of nonpartisan experts and professionals. 

 It was this philosophy of direct democracy and smart government that would animate the most far-reaching redesign of state-level government institutions since the days of the Founding Fathers. 

Collectively, the period of this movement, mainly from 1890-1920, came to be known as the Progressive Era. It was led by governors such as Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and Hiram Johnson of California. Legendary figures like Detroit mayor and later Michigan governor Hazen Pingree railed in 1899 against “the industrial slavery of trusts” while lowering streetcar fares, fixing the sewer system and proposing municipal ownership of utilities.

The depression of 1890 had given rise to the so-called Populist movement, seen by some historians as the precursor to the Progressive movement with its call for more direct democracy, social justice and women’s suffrage. Others saw it as the antithesis because of its distrust of urban elites, its intermittent racial intolerance and anti-Semitism, along with its backward-looking agricultural “utopianism” on the cusp of the industrial age.

The Populists, mainly driven by the interests of small farmers, forged alliances with labor unions in some places. By contrast, the Progressive movement was largely rooted in the urban, educated middle class.

Both Populists and Progressives were drawn to the notion of discontented constituencies asserting their interests through an entirely new mechanism of voter sovereignty that bypassed representative government. Specifically, the Progressives envisioned a system in which checks on the state legislatures and big-city bosses would come from below — the people themselves in their collective wisdom. 

To strengthen popular sovereignty registered directly by the public, the Progressives favored several instruments. The first was the citizen ballot initiative, imported from Switzerland, where it had been implemented in the late 19th century. It allowed members of the public to propose and pass laws as well as amend state constitutions without going through the legislature. The Progressives also favored the referendum process, allowing the public to vote to amend or overturn laws passed by the legislature, and the “recall” to remove elected officials with whom they had become unhappy. 

The Progressives well understood that the direct democracy they espoused would have been anathema to Founding Fathers like Adams and Madison, and that it was against the very spirit of mixed government enshrined in the federal Constitution. But in their view, history had proven Adams and Madison wrong: The republican experiment had foundered and decayed into a system that enabled and protected the privileged few.

In other ways, the Progressives embraced the Founders’ ideal of governance by knowledgeable elites.

In order to establish “disinterested” governance, Progressives proposed to delegate authority to non-partisan experts, independent of politics and insulated from elections, who would regulate business and administer cities and states swelling with population growth. Railroad and utility commissions, as well as professional city managers, were born in this period. The kind of independent, appointed regulatory bodies established in those days now exist across America.

A craze for the initiative, referendum and recall swept the states, especially the newer Western states where party machines that opposed such measures were weaker, populations were less concentrated and the hated monopolies, particularly railroad and mining companies, were more dominant.

Each state tailored its reforms to the particular abuses it was addressing at the time. In Oregon, the target was the undue influence of corrupt political machines. In California, Gov. Johnson, who was elected in 1911, barnstormed in a successful campaign for the citizens’ ballot initiative to harness voter ire at the Southern Pacific Railroad’s hold on the state Legislature.

“The Progressives well understood that the direct democracy they espoused would have been anathema to Founding Fathers like Adams and Madison.”

States often took cues on the substance of reforms from the most prominent Progressive of the day, Gov. “Fighting Bob” La Follette of Wisconsin, who was elected to two terms starting in 1900. La Follette showed the way by legislating direct primaries, civil service reform, a graduated income tax and the banning of political contributions by commercial interests. He and his progressive allies also enacted conservation laws, legislation regulating railroads and insurance companies through independent commissions, a statewide system of workers’ compensation and regulations regarding child labor.

Theodore Roosevelt remarked that Wisconsin had become “literally a laboratory for wise, experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.”

Most of all, what LaFollette contributed to the Progressive agenda was the practice of smart government, enlightened by knowledge to match the growing complexity of mass industrial society. The “Wisconsin idea,” as his approach came to be known, was that efficient government required control of institutions by voters rather than by special interests and that the involvement of specialists in law, economics and the social and natural sciences would produce the most effective government. The governor enlisted experts from the University of Wisconsin faculty to consult with legislators and help draft many of the state’s groundbreaking laws, including the nation’s first workers’ compensation legislation, tax reforms and the public regulation of utilities.

Summing up later in the century, Adlai Stevenson II, the eloquent liberal governor and presidential candidate from Illinois, remarked: “The Wisconsin tradition meant more than a simple belief in the people. It also meant a faith in the application of intelligence and reason to the problems of society. It meant a deep conviction that the role of government was not to stumble along like a drunkard in the dark, but to light its way by the best torches of knowledge and understanding it could find.” 

The novel idea of bringing the best and brightest into government as a way to supplant politicized administration gained wide appreciation in the wake of so much partisan bickering, corruption and cronyism leading up to the Progressive Era. As the powerful reformist columnist Walter Lippmann was later to write, “The value of expert mediation is not that it sets up opinion to coerce the partisans, but that it disintegrates partisanship.” 

The Third Turn: Participation Without Populism

Today, as we head toward the midpoint of the 21st Century, America is facing a crisis of governance not dissimilar to that at the turn of the 20th Century. 

The financial crash of 2008-2009 exposed deep fissures in the status quo. Globalization and rapid technological change have generated deep insecurity over job losses and diminishing opportunities for upward mobility. Digital capitalism has created new information monopolies and, along with the explosion of finance, concentrated wealth at the top. 

Polarization and partisan gridlock have sharply divided the country, disabling the capacity to achieve a governing consensus and paralyzing effective government. The “swamp” of special interests and partisan tribes has largely taken over state capitols and Washington.

Above all, the worst fear of America’s Founding Fathers that democracy would empower demagogues was realized in the U.S. presidential elections in 2016 and 2024 when the ballot box unleashed some of the darkest forces in the body politic.

The rise of MAGA and Donald Trump’s election was not the cause of the crisis of governance, but a symptom of the decay of democratic institutions across the West that, captured by the organized special interests of an insider establishment, failed to address the dislocations of globalization and the disruptions of rapid technological change.

To add danger to decay, the fevered partisans of populism that have gained power are throwing out the baby with the bathwater, assaulting the very integrity of institutional checks and balances that guarantee the enduring survival of republics. The revolt against a moribund political class has transmuted into a revolt against sound governance itself.

The lesson is clear for America and democracies elsewhere: When an unresponsive elite forsakes average citizens in a system legitimized by popular sovereignty, demagogues who fashion themselves as tribunes of the people ride the rage to power. They inevitably end up wrecking what has been painstakingly built. Most damaging of all, and most difficult to repair, is the loss of trust in the practices and institutions that enable negotiation and compromise to reach consensus while constraining the use of power.

“The revolt against a moribund political class has transmuted into a revolt against sound governance itself.”

“Belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust,” political scientist Frank Fukuyama has warned. “American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.” And so it has. From a reading of history dating back to ancient Rome, we know this is how republics unravel. That danger should be our uppermost concern today.

What has added rocket fuel to the pyre is the participatory power of social media. Despite hopes that the information age would make citizens more informed and capable of self-government than ever before, the opposite has happened. Unmediated peer-to-peer connectivity has fomented rife division within the body politic rather than pulling it closer together.

Instead of sober public deliberation on matters of consequence, discourse has deteriorated into a contest over who dominates the viral memes of the moment. Democracy has come to mean sanctifying the splintering of society into a plethora of special interests, partisan tribes and endless acronymic identities instead of seeking common ground.

Restoring trust in governance going forward must start from the bottom up in the states where institutional innovations have historically taken hold first.

A third turn of American democracy would address this state of affairs by adapting the enduring principle of the consent of the governed within a system of checks and balances on power laid down by the Founders for today’s densely wired digital society. It would also take into account the lessons of the Progressive experiment, which combined direct public engagement in setting the agenda with competent administration by those with the requisite experience and expertise.

Since social networks have today drawn more active players into the political fray than ever before, never has the need been greater for the counterbalance of impartial practices and institutions to sort out the cacophony of voices, the welter of conflicting interests and the deluge of contested information.

To mend the breach of trust between the public and institutions of self-government, “participation without populism” invites broader civil society into governance by integrating social network technologies and more deliberative platforms into the system as a complement to representative government.

The Limits Of Direct Democracy

On the face of it, the Progressive introduction of direct democracy through citizens’ ballot initiatives adopted in 27 states would seem to have fostered greater trust in self-government. Yet, it has not worked out that way in the state where it has been practiced most extensively, California.

It is true that citizens in that state have successfully used the initiative process to end gerrymandering by empowering a nonpartisan citizens’ panel — not the legislature — to draw electoral districts. They have voted to temper partisanship in open primaries where the top two from any party advance to the general election, dampening the incentive for candidates to stake out extreme partisan positions. And the process has established regulatory bodies like the Coastal Commission to protect the state’s magnificent coastline and keep it accessible to the public.

But other ballot measures have voted to prohibit same sex marriage and deny essential services for immigrants (both later thrown out by the courts). Ballot measures approved by the public at the polls have also created fiscal havoc with votes to lock in spending while locking out revenues through limiting taxation to cover the costs of programs that the same public approved.

The public is not stupid. But busy with work, life and family, it is, by and large, ill-informed. 

When asked in polls whether the public should determine taxes and the budget directly at the ballot box, most said yes. Then, when asked what the greatest expenditure in state government was (K-14 education) and the greatest source of revenue (income and capital gains taxes, of which the top 1% pay 50%), a majority did not know.

Mostly, however, those with the time and money to propose a ballot measure, gather signatures to qualify it and campaign for it have turned this supposed venue of recourse for the public primarily into a battleground between organized special interests. A typical ballot measure these days can cost between $10-20 million just for signature gathering, which is often handled by professional companies charging as much as $18 per signature, when 800,000 to 1 million signatures are needed to qualify for the ballot.

“The public is not stupid. But busy with work, life and family, it is, by and large, ill-informed.”

One prime example was Proposition 22 in 2020, which pitted Uber, Lyft and other gig companies against labor unions over the issue of classifying contractors as employees. The companies spent $224 million in that contest, which the ride-hailing companies won, boosting their market valuation by $13 billion the day after the election.

This corruption of the citizens’ venue prompted former California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ron George to ask, “Has the citizen initiative now become the tool of the very type of special interests it was intended to control, and an impediment to the effective functioning of a true democratic process?”

In effect, unmediated direct democracy in a system where money is considered “free speech” has disempowered, not empowered, the average citizen.

What is key to a third turn in democratic practice, then, is the need to institutionalize deliberative platforms of public engagement as a counterweight to organized special interests and their well-heeled capacity to spin the discourse, dominating the electoral agenda and its outcomes. Beyond this, there is a need for new forms of securing the consent of the governed that go beyond the ballot box and strengthen the connective tissue of democracy between election cycles.

Lately, the idea of deliberative polls and citizens’ assemblies convened to find public consensus on controversial issues has gained traction across the democratic world. 

Both involve convening a gathering of citizens indicative of the body politic as a whole to consider issues outside the fever of the electoral arena. In those nonpartisan “islands of goodwill,” knowledgeable experts provide verified information. Pro and con positions are presented, as in a jury trial. On that informed basis, citizens deliberate choices and seek consensus to guide policymakers and fellow citizens voting on ballot measures.

In effect, citizens in this way become temporary meritocrats — an “aristoi” of informed judgment of the kind envisioned by the American Founders as a check and balance both on the pure wash of public sentiment as well as on factional self-interest.

Many localities in the U.S. have conducted such deliberations over issues like zoning restrictions and data center construction. The famous ongoing exercise of “America In One Room,” conducted by Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab and the civic organization Helena, demonstrates time and again that the partisan rancor of electoral competition dissipates and common ground can be found through structured deliberation.

A 2022 report to California’s Secretary of State by former Gov. Jerry Brown and Chief Justice George recommended establishing “independent citizen review panels” convened as deliberative bodies representative of the public at large to evaluate whether qualified ballot measures are in the general public interest and to communicate their findings to fellow voters.

In Europe, citizens’ assemblies have been convened in France to propose climate policies, in Ireland to consider whether the prohibition of abortion should remain in the constitution, and cross-nationally by the European Union to solicit considered public views on continent-wide policies.

The limitation of most of these efforts is that they are advisory and not binding on the powers that be. In recent years, that is beginning to change as deliberative practices are being integrated into political systems through institutions that foster “government with the people,” to directly influence policy choices.

One idea floated in this direction by the Brown-George report considered whether citizens’ assemblies could be authorized to launch binding ballot measures as one way to reassert the public voice in a process otherwise captured by moneyed special interests.

In California, the Berggruen Institute has been engaged in moving toward the goal of linking robust deliberation to binding impact. Back in 2014, our Think Long Committee for California joined with other non-partisan civic organizations to pass legislation introducing deliberation, transparency and negotiation into the citizens’ ballot initiative process. 

Critically, it allowed the Legislature to negotiate with proposition sponsors to fix unintended consequences or temper extreme ideas while still addressing the issue at hand. If agreement is reached, the ballot measure can be withdrawn and replaced by more balanced legislation. California’s landmark laws on raising the minimum wage and data privacy emerged in this way.

The next step being implemented at this writing is the institutionalization of Engaged California, an AI-assisted citizen deliberation platform for topics of major public concern that are not being addressed or are not being addressed adequately by the government. AI is used to track the convergence toward consensus expressed in the iterative back-and-forth interventions of participants exposed to relevant information on the matter under consideration.

“What is key … is the need to institutionalize deliberative platforms of public engagement as a counterweight to organized special interests and their well-heeled capacity to spin the discourse, dominating the electoral agenda and its outcomes.”

It is a three-way tool that enables policymakers and administrators to listen at scale to average citizens outside of election cycles and be responsive; it invites citizens to directly voice their concerns and proposals on an ongoing basis; and it is a platform for Californians from all walks of life to interact with each other to find common ground. 

So far, the platform has been used to consider policy recommendations for post-fire recovery and rebuilding after the 2024 catastrophe in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Public employees have deliberated among themselves about how to make government more responsive and efficient. The impact of AI on work and society is another key topic under current consideration. The relevant government departments are mandated to address the concerns and recommendations raised through this platform.

As a proactive approach to “governing with the people,” not by them or for them, the Engaged California platform will help rebalance the institutional equilibrium of the state’s hybrid direct-democracy/representative-government system by giving voice to the non-organized public that has been shut out of the ballot initiative process. It is, in effect, an update and refinement of the Progressive Era notion that joins the consent of the governed, through citizen engagement, with the expertise of smart government.

The Path Back To Trusted Self-Government

All of this suggests that American democracy is at the embryonic outset of its third turn, which incorporates the experiences and lessons of the Founders’ design of governance as well as the permutations of the Progressive Era.

The core idea of “participation without populism” would renovate democratic institutions by integrating new forms of direct citizen participation into present practices of representative government while restoring to popular sovereignty the kind of deliberative ballast the American Founding Fathers thought so crucial to avoiding the suicide of republics.

America today is a far cry from the farms and small towns of its founding and a good distance from the early urban industrialization at the turn of the 20th century. While sticking to the principles of the consent of the governed and checks and balances on power, it is time, at 250 years on, to reconfigure the institutions of self-government to fit their times so that they can once again be trusted and responsive.