The importance of ballot initiatives

Voting for political candidates or parties is increasingly a weary exercise in choosing the lesser of two evils.  As I've discussed before, the Republicans started going nutzoid around the time of the Tea Party craze, and have been getting steadily worse ever since; in recent years the Democrats too have been sinking ever deeper into crackpottery.  Both have been thoroughly captured by the power of billionaire donors.  It's no wonder both parties have such low popularity ratings.  These days elections largely work by people becoming so horrified by the abuses, delusional thinking, and tone-deafness of one party (generally whichever one happens to be in power at the time) that they flock to vote for the other one out of desperation.

The situation feels comfortable only for those people who march completely in lockstep with the whole agenda of one side or the other, but I don't believe the majority of people are like that -- and such people are probably becoming rarer as each side's agenda gets more and more baroque under the influence of unhinged ideologists dwelling in their respective echo chambers.  There is also a sense that real solutions to the problems that most concern the average person are being put outside the realm of political debate because they are opposed by the billionaire oligarchs who dominate both parties.  In short, representative democracy is losing its effectiveness because people don't have the option of voting for politicians who represent most of what they really want.

However, democracy itself offers a way out.  Many US states have a ballot initiative process by which citizens can place single-issue proposals on the ballot for all voters to vote on.  This enables the people themselves to sideline the politicians and parties and their agendas.

Ballot initiatives allow voters to fine-tune policy on a case-by-case basis, as opposed to having to choose which one of two fixed, all-or-nothing menus is somewhat less unappetizing than the other.  For example, the Democrats are pro-choice on abortion but anti-choice on gun ownership, while the Republicans are the other way around -- since I'm pro-choice on both, which party do I vote for?  If policy on both issues were set by ballot initiative, I'd have the option of voting for the position I actually support in both cases.

The dominance of the two parties enables whichever party wins to claim a mandate for things that are actually wildly unpopular, when people voted for that party on the basis of other policies that they do like -- "we won because people want to protect Social Security, rein in ICE, and strengthen Obamacare, but that also means we have a mandate to re-impose DEI, let another million refugees into the country, and let men play in women's sports!"  The more people can vote separately on each individual issue on its own merits, the more this problem is minimized.

Initiatives also allow citizens to circumvent the fake billionaire-imposed bipartisan consensus on what can and cannot be done.  The best current example is California's union-backed billionaire wealth tax initiative.  The entrenched establishments of both of the billionaire-dominated parties oppose it, yet it still might pass.  The mass movement against data centers has similarly caught politicians from both parties off guard, bloated as they are with infusions of dollars from "AI" companies run by tech billionaires.  Many politicians have been reluctantly dragged onto the people's side by fear of getting voted out of office -- but for tough, decisive action against data centers, the initiative process may be the best option, in those states that allow it.

Unless one or both parties shifts in a more economic-populist direction and jettisons the crank stuff so beloved of the insular ideologists, I suspect we'll see steadily greater use of the initiative process going forward.  We the people are not sheep whose only choice is between two competing shepherds.  We are the boss here, and it is our will that should be done.