The Reason for Direct Democracy

There should be some way for ordinary citizens to be brought directly into contact with issues rather than having to express themselves only indirectly by voting for candidates they agree with.

Citizens should be able to participate in some way that lets them deal directly with issues, one issue at a time, so they don't have to surrender their thinking ability over to someone who has a collection of views, some of which the citizen may agree with while disagreeing with others. Why should a citizen be forced to embrace an entire collection of political positions rather than picking and choosing certain ones? Why can't the citizen be trusted to form his/her own opinions on each issue and be allowed to express each individual opinion separate from the others?

But how could this be done?

Right now it cannot be done. Outside of some cases where ballot measures are placed before voters, there is virtually no way citizens can express their preferences on individual issues. Nor is there any way to change the system to make it possible any time soon.

What is needed right now is some kind of experimental project which tries to put the idea of direct democracy into practice, in mock form.

For now, this experimental project must take a form that is wide open to everyone interested in the possibility of direct democracy, or even to those who oppose such a scheme and want to express their disagreement with it.

At first there should be no doctrinaire commitment to imposing direct democracy, or especially any one version of it, but rather there needs to be an open dialogue process which would include a wide cross-section of the population and would promote the kind of communicating and analyzing of issues that an ideal form of direct democracy would require.

The need is to experiment with different forms of such communicating and determine what procedures work best and what process might prove feasible for arriving at good decisions or resolutions of some of the major issues of conflict in society.