Word: beltways
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...same force fosters the gridlock that keeps the nation from balancing its budget, among other things, as a host of groups clamor to protect their benefits. In both cases, the problem is that the emerging cyberdemocracy amounts to a kind of "hyperdemocracy": a nation that, contrary to all Beltway-related stereotypes, is thoroughly plugged in to Washington -- too plugged in for its own good...
...lawmaking power out of the people's hands, opting for a representative democracy and not a direct democracy. What concerned them, especially James Madison, was the specter of popular "passions" unleashed. Their ideal was cool deliberation by elected representatives, buffered from the often shifting winds of opinion -- inside-the-Beltway deliberation. Madison insisted in the Federalist Papers on the need to "refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least...
...wild about something does not mean it's a mistake. But whatever the merits, the process that produced "three strikes and you're out" reflects a shift in American governance since the republic's founding -- the growing porousness of the supposedly impregnable buffer around Washington. This was outside-the-Beltway politics, and is typical...
...waitresses fretting about their imperiled jobs. And the restaurateurs hired Jack Bonner to roll out the Astroturf. "I see it as the triumph of democracy," Bonner said of his livelihood in a Washington Post interview. "In a democracy, the more groups taking their message to the people outside the Beltway and the more people taking their message to Congress, the better off the system...
President Clinton, being inside the Beltway, periodically gets accused of being out of touch, of not "getting it." But he has shown that he "gets" the basics: that voters are worried about crime, for example, and that they hate to pay taxes. If there's anything major he doesn't "get," it's that in a hyperdemocracy, "getting it" can be self-defeating. The voters demand slavish obedience, but the more they receive it, the less they respect it. Has this sort of disrespect reached such a level as to be actually auspicious for a politician who leads rather than...