2016 was the year the people made their voice heard, a year of great referendums. Among others, we saw the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, the mass rejection of the peace agreement in Colombia, Hungary’s refusal to accept EU refugee quotas, Thailand constitutionally solidifying its coup regime, and the rejection of the Italian government’s proposed constitutional reforms. But in so many cases, it seems hard to stomach what they’re saying.

For the Left, there’s a vague idea that we ought to quite like referendums. The yes-or-no choice represents a kind of popular self-determination without any of the usual excrescences of the political: no gurning, grinning, awful electoral figureheads with a filmy residue of malice glossing their TV-ready faces; none of the antidemocratic abstractions of parliamentary seats or electoral colleges; no need to choose the lesser evil — nothing but the people and their sovereign decision.

After all, wouldn’t any real, direct, non-representative democracy look something like rule by referendum; the Athenian council reconstructed, possibly using some kind of app, in the shining postmodern enlightenment of the twenty-first century?