… When modern polling began, in the nineteen-thirties, George Gallup claimed that it rekindled the tradition of the town meeting, but most members of Congress considered it to be, as one wrote, “in contradiction to representative government.” In 1949, the political scientist Lindsay Rogers complained that “pollsters have dismissed as irrelevant the kind of political society in which we live and which we, as citizens, should endeavor to strengthen.” Democracy requires participation, deliberation, representation, and leadership—the actual things, not their simulation. CONT.
Jill Lepore (Harvard), New Yorker