Lessons from Brexit as referendum drums hit stunning crescendo

The chaos that has come to define Brexit exhibits, most starkly, some of the ills of direct democracy. Conceptually, democracy is rule by the people, who typically delegate their sovereign power to various organs, including elected representatives.

Sometimes however, the people will opt to exercise their self-governing power directly. It was in such direct exercise of sovereign power that the UK opted to exit a marriage it had been in for more than forty years. The decision to take such a momentous issue to the people through a referendum, which in a country where Parliament is sovereign was not necessary, was birthed through politics. David Cameron, then UK Prime Minister, was trying to manage the chaos in the Conservative Party where the Eurosceptics were running to the more rightwing United Kingdom Independence Party and Cameron believed that the promise of a referendum would woo them back to his party. Though he denies it, I am convinced that in retrospect PM Cameron rues the day he made the promise and carried it out.