Such a trip can be accomplished in a few days or a few hours, depending on the relative urgencies involved. We travel more efficiently and more comfortably, over much greater distances than ever before. This is the crux of our new political milieu. We don't need to travel at all, in order to personally participate in meetings, conferences, conclaves and conventions, whether social, personal, political or governmental. Information exchanging and sharing, which a just few years ago constituted the greatest single bottleneck in decentralizing business-management, is now virtually automatic and available to everyone.
Distance is no longer a crippling disadvantage.
And that, therefore, necessarily dictated the Republican structure of our nation in its beginnings. Granting this, and who can deny it, no longer is it a de-facto necessity that decisions of government must be taken by elected representatives, with little or no direct contact, input or participation on the part of the electorate. No longer need the essential functions of private citizenship be limited to marking ballots at designated intervals and, in the periods between elections, surrendering their political well-being to elected surrogates. Surrogates, it is worth mentioning, whose principal claim to usefulness is their self-anointed presumption that they are better judges of what is good for their constituents, than are their constituents, themselves. A dramatic change takes place in the mental processes of a candidate who wins election.