Most coverage of democratic reform treats the desire for more citizen power as a progressive position. The people pushing for direct democracy are assumed to be pushing, at root, for a more interventionist state, a more redistributive economy, a politics that tilts left.
The assumption is wrong, and it has left the field to one half of the political spectrum. That suits nobody - least of all the citizens who do not fit neatly into either camp.
Alexis de Tocqueville, who understood American democracy better than almost anyone before or since, warned about what he called soft despotism. Citizens gradually hand power to a benevolent administrative state in exchange for security and convenience. The state becomes an overprotective parent. Citizens become permanent children, relieved of the burden of judgement because the state has already decided for them. The habit of self-government atrophies from disuse.
Tocqueville was a liberal conservative who believed the vitality of democratic life depended on citizens exercising real power in their communities - deliberating, deciding, being accountable to each other for the results. His fear was that democratic citizens would stop being citizens at all.
He was describing something that has happened.
Edmund Burke, one of the most influential sources of conservative political thought, argued that legitimate institutions earn their authority rather than assuming it. Power that cannot justify itself to those it governs is imposition, not authority. The test of a legitimate institution is whether it serves the people it claims to represent, and whether those people have genuine recourse when it fails.
Apply that test to the House of Lords. Apply it to the way arms sales decisions are made. Apply it to the donors who fund political parties and the access that funding buys. By Burke's own standard, these are institutions that have drifted from the purposes that once justified them. A genuine conservatism would want them reformed - because institutions that cannot justify their authority undermine the conservative case for authority itself.
There is a third strand, less philosophical and more immediate.
Across the country there are communities that have watched decisions get made about them, for decades, by people who do not live there, do not know them, and are not accountable to them. Factories closed. High streets hollowed out. Services centralised. The decisions were made in London, or Brussels, or in boardrooms whose shareholders live somewhere else entirely.
The left has responded by demanding more state intervention - more redistribution, more regulation, more management from the centre. The right has responded by demanding less state - lower taxes, fewer regulations, more market. Neither response has given those communities back what they lost, which is agency. The ability to shape the conditions of their own lives.
Direct democracy offers a mechanism for citizens to make their priorities visible and to hold those in power to them. That goal sits as comfortably in the conservative tradition as in any other.
DDD is asking citizens across the political spectrum to recognise that the current system is failing them, and that the response to that failure is rebuilding the mechanism rather than finding better people to operate the broken one.
Tocqueville's soft despotism is a choice, not a fate. Resisting it requires citizens who stay in the room, exercise judgement, and demand accountability from institutions that have forgotten what accountability feels like. That has always been a conservative argument.