by Jeff Deist
Leftwing Vox.com recently published a welcome and thoughtful piece on the virtues of devolving political and legal power away from the federal government toward states and localities. This is exactly the kind of conversation honest Americans need to have if we are serious about preventing the kind of political violence witnessed recently in Charlottesville and Berkeley. One overriding feature of the culture wars is that each sides justifiably fears the other will impose its way of living through a winner takes all political system.Violence is a natural and predictable response to this, a means of circumventing the ballot box.
The political class makes its living from centralized power and the attendant division it causes. But why should ordinary Americans accept the false choice between one brand of centralized government and another, when the obvious solution is staring us in the face? Breaking up politically is far more practical, and far more humane.
Written by a conservative who apparently supported Evan McMullin in the 2016 election, the Vox article raises two pressing questions: whether centralized governance is desirable in a vast country of 320 million people, and more importantly whether it’s even possible. Are overarching political solutions workable, or does politics simply enrich Washington DC while feeding the rapidly deteriorating culture war?
The author makes his central argument for subsidiarity as a peaceful approach for a large, diverse country:
…decentralization of power requires more than just devolution of a few powers here or there, but a society-wide commitment to transferring power, authority, and responsibility back down the totem pole. A diverse society can sustain itself peacefully when its members are committed to solving problems as locally as possible, involving higher levels of government only when absolutely necessary.
He also uses the seemingly intractable issue of abortion to make his point:
Where things get much trickier is where a more fundamental issue like abortion is concerned. On this issue in particular, many progressives and conservatives alike hope to achieve a victory that is far more total — more sweeping and national — than I think likely or desirable. That is, conservatives and progressives both seem to think that we need a federal rule about abortion. But we don’t, and indeed such a rule poisons the well of national politics. The reason is blindingly obvious: There is no federal agreement about abortion.
Ideologues on both sides will assert that, where highly charged moral issues are concerned, federalism is terrible: If abortion is wrong, it’s wrong everywhere. If same-sex marriage is right, it’s right everywhere. This is true in abstract moral terms, but it is not true in political terms, and the two are not the same, because it is immoral to compel a people to accept a set of laws with which they do not agree and which they cannot readily change.
Devolving political power is the first step toward making government smaller and less powerful in our lives. National and even supra-national governments are the biggest threats to human liberty and flourishing because they control the weapons of mass destruction: armies, nuclear missiles, central banks, economic sanctions, and trade tariffs. These are the elements of systemic contagion that should terrify us.
Your local city council may be dumb as a box of rocks or even evil, but at the very least it is far more accessible to you. Its damage is likely to be contained, and your ability to flee its jurisdiction may require nothing more than a cross-town U-Haul rental.
Continue: The Subsidiarity Principle | Mises Wire