Why not start direct democracy cities?

[True Blue Door]

38. Your analogy between direct democracy and participation in representative democracy

is fallacious. You're comparing apples and coconuts. People don't participate very much in elections because their decision is so far removed from seeing the results that some people don't see the value - they're asked to cast a ballot once or twice every few years in order to pick a person who will fly hundreds or thousands of miles to a distant city and maybe, possibly, at some point in the ensuing 2, 4, or 6 years might mention the things they care about.

That's something radically different from people in their own communities, coming together to discuss what concerns them on a regular basis, and reach resolutions.

Moreover, you seem to be making some pretty severely circular arguments about the prevalence of such assemblies. "If they could be more prevalent, they would be" is a ludicrous position to take, and a definitively conservative attitude that shuts off all possibility of ever improving anything.

"Look, Mr. Franklin, the world is full of monarchies. With few exceptions, it always has been. Clearly that's the kind of government that works, and that's the government we need here in America. What you are proposing - this bizarre and laughable experiment in elective republic - would be doomed to chaos and failure."

People have no experience with assembly democracy. You have no basis to say they would reject it once they did, and in fact your examples argue against that conclusion: The evidence is that people who get a taste of it, want to keep doing it. Otherwise, why haven't those towns where it's practiced long ago just resigned their town meetings to elected officials? It's because free people don't do that when they know they're free. Only when politics becomes so far removed from their everyday lives that they see no difference between participating and not participating, and that's never the case when they're the ones making decisions.