¶ Planetary Democracy
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Index Entry
Planetary Democracy:
"along the way, at the inns and homes. They would tell everybody at home about the four letters from Europe this year and what everybody in Philadelphia (or later in Washington) thought about the situation, and what the people along the way think, and would then say to their home people, ‘How do you feel about it and what do you want me to do about it?’ They were told; and then they walked or rode on these, often many-days travel to the capitol. We had what scientists call a one-to-one correspondence between stimulation and response.
"With the unexpected development of the telegraph 30 years later news short-circuited the representatives’ direct communications system and reached people in minutes instead of in months; and the people had no way to respond to the stimulation. Since that time radio and television broadcasting have added to the telegraph-fed newspapers in producing a constant barrage adding to hundreds of thousands of stimulations before any political response could be manifest by the citizenry.
“Democracy worked well with the initial one-to-one correspondence. Today, democracy is not working. It is not the fault”
