If Lawrence Grossman gets his way and the president creates a "National Commission on Citizenship," this book should be high on the commission's list of required reading. The Electronic Republic is a lucid and thoughtful exploration of the role of media in democratic life as we leave the industrial age for the information age.

Grossman's basic claim is simply that direct democracy is growing rapidly today, aided and abetted by the new media. Primaries have replaced party conventions. Ballot initiatives and referenda have become more common and more weighty. Polls tap public opinion more and more efficiently and public sentiment is relayed to elites more rapidly than ever through talk radio call-ins and computer networks. Politicians monitor public opinion on a daily basis and respond to it quickly. Presidents court the public rather than the Congress. Public opinion forms more directly and instantaneously than ever, responding in reflex to the apparently unmediated contact of television pictures rather than weighing with care expert interpretations in print. The result is "government by popular consensus." We are seeing the "rise of the American electronic republic" and the establishment of the general citizenry as the "new fourth branch of government." Grossman's task then is to document this development, evaluate its "promise anperils," and offer suggestions for organizing this newest stage of democratic life.

The book reviews these developments soberly. It is worried but patient -- no scapegoats, no shrill outcry, no easy answers, a calm good grace throughout. It has the whiff of middle-of-the-road, op-ed conventional wisdom -- if only wisdom were ever conventional! But if Grossman, former president of NBC News and head of PBS, raises familiar complaints, he also raises them to a higher level, integrating a wide range of relevant issues, refining them in the light of a strong sense of history.

Still, Grossman's argument that we are witnessing the vast expansion of direct democracy must be faulted on two grounds. First, it assumes too casually that direct democracy is the master trend of American history. Grossman holds that the Bill of Rights was an effort to procure greater political inclusiveness -- but it was no such thing. The Bill of Rights protects individual liberty against government, but it in no way encourages greater public participation in decision-making. A clause asserting the right of "instructing" congressional representatives -- insisting that they vote as constituencies or state legislatures advise them rather than according to their own best judgment -- was resoundingly defeated during congressional debate over the Bill of Rights. Late nineteenth century electoral reforms, like voter registration requirements, curtailed rather than expanded direct political participation. At-large rather than district city elections were instituted to disenfranchise immigrants.

In recent decades, efforts to create national referenda have consistently failed; the Congress, even in the heat of the Gingrich one hundred days, turned back term limits. Self-conscious experiments in teledemocracy have been few. So Grossman's emphasis on the trend toward direct democracy fails to acknowledge and make sense of the powerful countercurrents to government by popular opinion that are with us to this day.

Second, Grossman does not establish that the "public opinion" that politicians believe they are responding to today is a plausible representation of the opinion of the populace. Direct democracy is a system where the people make decisions, not where elites make decisions in their name. The town meeting where, at least in theory, every citizen has both a voice and a vote, must be distinguished from demagoguery, where political elites advertise and justify their acts as serving the popular will. Even in the 1990s, public opinion follows leadership more than leadership follows public opinion. Proposition l3 and the tax revolt beginning in California in the 1970s, Proposition l87 in l994, and the forthcoming anti-affirmative action initiative in California all exemplify more a new style of political leadership than the triumph of direct public decision-making. If the opposition to Zoe Baird's appointment as attorney general was spontaneous, then it was a stunning exception, not the rule.

I would add that Grossman offers too little resistance to a populist distrust of the deliberative institutions of government. Democracy is not just discussion open to all; it is the agreed-upon rules that enable discussion to represent everyone and not just the loud-mouths. The founders' emphasis on deliberation was not simply an elitist distrust of the "unmediated judgment of the people at large." After all, the people whose opinions Madison wanted protection against were not slaves, free African-Americans, women, or propertyless white males -- these groups were already disenfranchised. He was worried about the passion and parochialism of property-holding white men. Representative democracy was a way to favor white men's enlightened opinion over their unenlightened opinion. In other words, the founders believed that people should guard themselves even against their own unmediated opinions.

All people are too inclined to shoot from the political hip; only when people are obliged to hear the views of others in the course of legislative debate can representatives fully become public men. Only when people -- even elites -- are obliged to articulate and defend their views in a dialogue with others, does public expression become more than emotive interjection. I think that is still true. The tendencies toward plebiscitary democracy in the initiative and referendum process that Grossman tends to accede to, if not endorse, are problematic indeed.

Noting the views of optimists who hold the new technologies promise a vital new participatory democracy, Grossman recalls earlier technology-borne hopes for television and electronic teaching machines and a brave new world of education to come from them. He recalls how crashingly wrong such hopes proved to be. Still, the new technologies appear to have a flexibility and power of extraordinary dimension. Maybe, just maybe, the optimists will have the last word this time.

But then Grossman, the pessimist, speaks. He worries about economic concentration, about the power of money to corrupt free speech, and notes the compelling statistic that private organizations spend more money pleading their cause on California initiative measures than they do lobbying the California legislature. This is exactly the sort of concern that should have led Grossman to be more careful in defining just what sort of a new democracy he sees in formation. Worrying that the trend to direct democracy is both inevitable and easily corrupted, Grossman devotes the last quarter of his book to recommendations for reforming the media, politics, and citizenship so that new technologies can be harnessed to serve democracy well.

He concentrates on three areas. First, he seeks media reform -- the deregulation of broadcasting content (in his terms, adherence to the principle that "all media should be equally free") coupled with the vigorous enforcement of antitrust law against media corporations to ensure media diversity; new modes of financing public and citizen-oriented broadcasting, including extracting fees from commercial broadcasters for their use of the public spectrum and the earmarking of such funds for public education and government channels. He wants to improve the quality of public information, and quite imaginatively, he is thinking here not only about the news media but about how agencies like the Library of Congress or the political parties themselves can use the information superhighway to deliver information and opinion to the broad populace. (If anything, Grossman seems to have given up on the news media as hopelessly devoted to money. "Most popular news media," he observes, "end up narrowing rather than broadening t range of the public's choices.")

Second, political reforms could improve the quality of public information, Grossman suggests. He recommends that political candidates who accept public election financing be required by law to take personal responsibility for their campaign ads and to endorse or repudiate any advertising bought on their behalf. Candidates who accept public financing should also be obliged to participate in public debates with their opponents. Public financing of elections should be expanded and, correspondingly, caps placed on private contributions (a suggestion the courts may not be happy with).

Third, he has hopes for directly confronting the problem of citizenship through a National Committee on Citizenship. The committee, he hopes, would recommend ways to improve civic education, recommend ways of using the new electronic media for encouraging deliberative democracy, propose political reforms and weigh the possibilities for national initiatives and referenda, and suggest ways to strengthen the local basis for effective political participation. With the people more and more directly the agents of decision-making, they need "to know enough to participate in a responsible and intelligent manner."

That may be. But these small steps of solution will help us across our canyon of civic problems only if the low quality of public information is a central cause of our difficulties. I am not about to argue against more and better public information. But, curiously enough, we may already have that! The average American community has more competing news outlets today, and more professionally maintained, than fifty years ago when there were more local newspapers, but no television news, no national newspapers, no prestige newspaper news services. The average American student has more sophisticated, critical, and analytical American history textbooks in the schools than before. The paperback book revolution, the expansion of higher education, and the critical turn in American journalism from the 1960s on have made available to the average citizen much more history, social science, and book-length journalism and current affairs reporting than ever. Why doesn't any of this seem to matter?

Of course our information services need improvement, and our schools, but it is our social infrastructure we need to worry about. And here, I am afraid, we have failed to reckon with the fate of getting what we wished for. We have the progress of women in the paid labor force, but the problem of the decline in PTA membership; we have the blessed privacy of single-family homes in the suburbs with fenced backyards, and the problem that people do not know their neighbors; we have the great benefits to the elderly of retirement communities in the Sunbelt, but also the great loss to their families of their everyday presence; we have cleaner and safer and more technologically sophisticated industry in outlying areas, but few ways for inner city residents who need work to get to them.

 What these developments have to do with the rise of an "electronic republic" is just this: efforts at direct democracy, backed often by strange bedfellows on both the left and right, express an agony of disconnection more than a political philosophy of participation. The agony is all too real; it is just that ballot initiatives, term limits, talk radio, and teledemocratic voting procedures will not reduce it. These are not solutions to our real problems. It is all very well, Thoreau observed, that the telegraph connects Maine to Texas -- but what do the people in those places have to say to each other? The communication connections can play a role, and this very stimulating book helps us see that, but it is the content of what people have to say to one another that matters.

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