Many traditionalist Americans desire a decentralized American government, perhaps similar to that advocated by the anti-Federalists, wherein the central government would be stripped of most of its current powers and act principally for purposes of defense, and wherein local governments would be the most important governmental unit. Such local governments could work for moral goals without becoming horribly oppressive in so doing, as the federal government seems to be; the federal government's task would principally be to protect the autonomy of such local units.
This picture is very attractive to me. But I fear that working for it politically might be a fool's errand. Why is that?
Well, I'm simply unaware of any large nation or empire that has ever managed to pull off such decentralization in an (1) intentional, (2) peaceful, and (3) relatively permanent manner. There seem to be places that decentralize unintentionally--but this involves collapse, bloodshed, etc. There have been places that decentralized through warfare--but this involves much of the same. And finally, it maybe sometimes you can split up authority a little--but it does't last. The triumvirate tends to become Ceasar.
I may be wrong; please tell me if I am. History is useful. But if I am not wrong, then we shouldn't place our hopes on working out towards such a scenario as that above. It is likely a waste of time. Instead--Cartago Delenda Est!--we must be working for bringing about small communities that can survive when America begins to suffer the fate of all over-powerful (evident from all history), over-complex (Tainter, 1988), and over-decadent (Zimmerman, 1947), societies.
I'm not really sure when America is going to suffer a large, unintentional, and perhaps violence-inducing reduction of its prosperity. But given our failures in morality, our loss of all manufacturing, the stupidity of public schools, the increasing debt, the ever-decreasing responsibility of government, and so on and so forth, I find it difficult to believe that we will not, sometime, sooner or later, see such a collapse. And small, tight, communities would be both the best way to endure such a collapse and the best way to try to preserve a moral sphere before the collapse.
And perhaps the collapse will come too soon rather than too late.
My answer, unfortunately, is - I don't know. How centralized was Rome or the Islamic Empires or others? Did they specify the rules of marriage and divorce in their territories and determine which gods children could pray to in local schools? These are standard for today's empires like America, but I just don't know how this worked in history. The most recent decentralized countries have been America and Switzerland, but with Liberalism as the dominant world-wide religion, we can't expect any decentralized countries in our time.
ReplyDeleteRegardless of history, I agree that the best approach today is small communities, as you say.
Have we really lost ALL manufacturing?
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