What is needed is a simple election process. Where there are web pages with forums and question and answers. Where the heat and reason of debate would show all faces.
At what point is it to vote someone in that has no virtue and is just a pretty face(Edwards).
There is a vast bureaucracy inside the beltway that has tasked itself with providing us with information, and have set themselves up as the arbiters of what "true information" is. These are the same bureaucracies that write the rules and regulations we live under, and provide our legislators with the information they use to pass laws that enable the regulators.
They will be the first to point to Washington's admonishments that we owe our allegiance and compliance to the government, and hold that as absolute.
What happens when bureaucrats and politicians discern virtue and principle differently than the people, and seek to govern others by them?
This is what a vote is for.
So when you said, "People have to govern themselves," you meant that the majority must impose its will on the minority. Funny how the founders placed such strict limits on what the federal government was allowed to do, majority vote or not.