Rethinking Referendums: Can Direct Democracy Defeat Populism?

Since then, there have been calls to re-empower the "gatekeepers", which is a polite way of saying that the unwashed masses should be kept as far away from political decision-making as possible.

Yet this liberal impulse reflects a misreading of recent history: it was elites, not the masses, who enabled Brexit and Trump.

Moreover, an unashamedly elitist disdain for direct democracy not only confirms populist rhetoric, but also ignores the fact that referendums can be highly effective weapons against populists.

Trump and Brexit agitators like Nigel Farage do not owe their victories to some fatal flaw in direct democracy, but rather to the elites who collaborated with them along the way.

British conservative leaders may have held their noses at Farage, but many ultimately deemed his case for Brexit to be sound, just as the Republican Party establishment granted Trump its formal imprimatur.

Yes, millions of British voters would go on to vote for "Leave", and millions of Americans voted for a manifestly unqualified presidential candidate. But that is partly because they had been assured by familiar figures like Boris Johnson and former US Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich that they were doing the right thing.

Moreover, party elites did not just give populists their stamp of approval. They also abdicated their own responsibility for formulating coherent policy platforms.

The Brexit referendum was a direct result of Tory leaders' inability to come to a collective, binding decision on the question of EU membership. And the Republican Party effectively outsourced its candidate-selection process to private cable TV stations, whose main concern is attracting viewers.

Still, aren't liberals on to something when they allege a...