As media have gotten bigger and more corporate, our grasp of local government has become fuzzier and more remote. Thousands of reporters are clustered in Washington, and most of them seem to go to the same few places every day to pick up one another's conventional wisdom and be fed their pronouncements and position papers. Governance has become an almost secret society, a closed circle.
Few people understand much about how it works, what it costs, or why.
This is not what Jefferson and his friends had in mind. Get the text-only version.