John Dewey

And there are too many publics, for conjoint actions which have indirect, serious and enduring consequences are multitudinous beyond comparison, and each one of them crosses the others and generates its own group of persons especially…

There is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition.

The ramification of the issues before the public is so wide and intricate, the technical matters involved are so specialized, the details are so many and so shifting, that the public cannot for any length of time identify and hold itself.

But the very size, heterogeneity and nobility of urban populations, the vast capital required, the technical character of the engineering problems involved, soon tire the attention of the average voter.

In the long run, few questions exceed it in importance.

It is true that this matter does not come before the electorate directly, but the technical difficulty of the problem is reflected in the confused paralysis of the legislators whose business it is to deal with it.

And if they were competent after studying it, how many have the time to devote to it?

How many voters are competent to measure all the factors involved in arriving at a decision?

Similar considerations account for depreciation of the machinery of democratic political action in contrast with a rising appreciation of the need of expert administrators.

Even the specialist finds it difficult to trace the chain of “cause and effect”; and even he operates only after the event, looking backward, while meantime social activities have moved on to effect a new state of affairs.

Men feel that they are caught in the sweep of forces too vast to understand or master.

The confusion which has resulted from the size and ramifications of social activities has rendered men skeptical of the efficiency of political action.