America has conceded its popular sovereignty
Our centralized bureaucracy does not enhance the people’s powers; it steals them
By Jacob McKissock
Staff Writer
I have in recent years become increasingly optimistic about the widespread distrust younger Americans express towards their government. No longer does there remain a consensus of contentment among the incoming voting population with their pathetically ineffective federal government, a fact I am continually thankful for as a proponent for smaller government.
Despite these circumstances however, American political discussion, especially among the younger generations, retains an ironic ignorance that frightens me far more than the bloated bureaucracy we live under today.
America has fallen into a great ideological trap in believing that its government’s faults are a symptom of its members and their actions, not a result of the system they inhabit.
The solutions to our pressing issues as expressed by the growing progressive movement seek to expand the scope of an already overstretched centralized power — to give the government that they’re so quick to distrust more responsibility and power over their lives, in a futile hope that we get it right this time.
This nation was founded on the principles of community and small government. Gone are the days when the power of America truly rested with her people. It seems the only right we retain as a so-called sovereign majority is to decide, by flawed methods, whom we elect to control us. To suggest we should be satisfied with this current social contract is cowardly, and to support its further development, praying that its ailments can be mended, is tragically naive.
While I prefer that people take me at my word, I’m well aware that speaking out of my ass is only so convincing. Unlike my previous op-ed, I do not plan on keeping this piece purely anecdotal.
Pew Research recently compiled a plethora of data about public opinions on the federal government in 2022. In this report, a staggering 78 percent of Democrats or Democrat-leaning 18–34 year olds trust their federal government to do what is right only some of the time or never. Despite this data, a Harvard poll conducted in the run up to the 2020 election found that Democratic voters aged 18 to 29 considered Bernie Sanders the best candidate for president, with Sanders receiving 31% of the vote to Biden’s 20%.
A quick glance at Bernie Sanders’ website, especially his issues page, reveals massive blueprints for the expansion of the federal government that so many of his supporters claim to distrust.
My criticisms may seem flawed to many. Sanders is promoting a new government, after all, one that replaces our corrupt money-grubbing politicians and businessmen with actual representatives of the people, much like FDR supposedly did in the 1930s. Bernie Sanders and his supporters would liken him to be a modern day FDR, with ample references to the New Deal strewn about his policy positions and those of fellow progressives.
To many, FDR was the greatest American president in living memory, one who single-handedly pulled our country out of the Great Depression and into the age of affluence with his emphasis on social programs and a powerful national government.
All people, but Americans especially, love to romanticize their history and its leaders. We like to make simple stories about these people and their struggles because if they did it, so can we.
However, history tells a far more nuanced story of FDR’s legacy. While it was conventional wisdom that the New Deal pulled America out of the Great Depression, a host of modern economists would argue it prolonged it. It’s not surprising that the typically anti-war progressives gloss over the real reasons the Great Depression came to a close and America’s golden age followed shortly after: World War 2, and the confidence of the post-war period.
Putting aside these perspectives and assuming the best case for FDR and his influence, his legacy was that of a liberal establishment that sunk us into an unpopular war in Vietnam, bolstered efforts to overthrow legitimately elected regimes in the third world, and nearly brought
humanity to nuclear Armageddon.
You could argue quite successfully that FDR would be opposed to the heavy hands of leadership that followed his death, he was notably very open to a less hostile relationship with the Soviet Union, certainly compared to his predecessors.
My problem with this point is the same problem I have with almost all pro-centralization arguments: they love to bet on the wisdom and experience of a small handful of people and fail to anticipate who might replace them.
I have an analogy for human progress that I use often when speaking about the topic. Humanity sits at the outskirts of a field, and in the middle lies the golden beacon of utopian perfection. Reaching the middle ends all suffering, ensures complete fairness and equality, and proves that humanity is capable of perfect self-governance and control.
I do not deny the possibility of this utopia. Humanity is capable of unimaginable progress when we put our minds to it, but there is of course a caveat.
While progressives sprint forward towards the light with victory on their minds, they fail to understand a very important property of the field: it is strewn with landmines. Every step you take forward has the potential to ruin it all; the more drastic the movement, the higher the likelihood of an explosion.
One step may offer progress towards our goal but another may come with a host of terrible consequences: The Reign of Terror, the Vietnam War, the Holodomor, the Khmer Rouge, the atom bomb, and countless other examples.
Humanity has stepped on plenty of landmines throughout its long history, and yet we fail to consider that our foot may hover over another. Many progressive social policies sound enticing, just, and possible.
Most require money to flow from the pockets of the wealthy back into the hands of the people– who would argue against that? The money from new taxes on the uber wealthy can be used to pay for our healthcare, our infrastructure, our education, our homes, and everything else we desire in a perfect world.
It’s just that easy. These policies fail to assume that the wealthy and their
businesses won’t find new loopholes to keep their money, or that they won’t just pack up and leave. Most major corporations outsource facets of their work to overseas countries where they can pay less for greater output.
When does the taxation get high enough that they decide they might as well move and export their products back into the American market while avoiding those pesky lawmakers?
Trust me when I say that I am far from a fan of big business. It’s difficult to see a Walmart surrounded by a slew of rundown former Mom-and-Pop shops and suggest that there isn’t a problem. We face many issues as a nation. Plenty of them are economic, and plenty of them can be blamed on massive corporations, but the federal government is not your ally– it’s
theirs’.
Centralized governments are ripe for corruption; all the power of a nation rests in one spot with a handful of people. Even if we replaced all the greedy politicians with selfless ones, what’s preventing us from being fooled again a few decades down the line and handing an even more
powerful government over to the people with the money?
The conservatism I present would suggest that my distaste for progressive ideology extends indefinitely, when I in fact find excellent, non-government solutions to these problems in it.
I am very pleased to see progressives pushing for a revival of American unions. Workers unions are excellent examples of democratic, bottom-up governance done by the people who understand the facets of their industry. The government should certainly remain involved in programs to protect the longevity and creation of these unions, but its overreach in regulation has proven it has no place deciding how workers do their jobs.
This is entirely anecdotal, but I think you’d struggle to find a single blue-collar worker happy with the bureaucracy of OSHA seeping into their workplace. Unions don’t solve all of our problems, nor are they universally applicable to all industries, but they represent a great start to a community process of taking back our power as a people.
It should be evident at this point that I’m not a fan of big government, but as a critic society expects me to offer an alternative solution, and while I hate to be boring, my grand solution is federalism.
Despite what we’re told in civics class and in the media, American federalism is a shadow of its former self. While the federal government’s role is technically restricted to a handful of responsibilities in the Constitution, our modern government has taken up all tasks it deems itself worthy of and has left the scraps to the states, and the people.
An especially pervasive and concerning trend in national politics has been the framing of particular moral debates as national issues that the federal government must resolve. The moral beliefs of one state should have little bearing on the sovereignty of another. Forcing your perspectives on states whose majorities disagree will only breed resentment and heightened polarization, not progress.
This issue is relevant to both sides of the political aisle as both the Democratic Party and the GOP have introduced bills that attempt to establish their extreme morality on every American. Returning power and influence to state and municipal governments will not only bolster the legitimacy of their laws, but will also encourage greater participation and civic engagement as the power of individuals is increased when the size of their government shrinks.
Federalism also ensures that the most radical opinions remain restrained to particular states where their potential consequences will be far less disastrous than they would be if enacted at the national level. James Madison wrote about this particular advantage in one of the most important and influential pieces of our nation’s founding — Federalist #10:
“The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration
through the other states…any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the union, than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire state.”
- James Madison
The fear of these flames should be amplified in the modern day where social media allows for the instantaneous spreading of information allowing falsities and dangerous ideology to reach millions in minutes.
Without decentralization, future Americans will be at the whim of every new political fad devised ignorantly by their peers, or maliciously by their rulers.
While the empowerment of smaller governments is certainly a start in preventing potential disaster, a far more important and difficult transformation must occur in American culture.
Robert Putnam wrote about the decline of the American community in his 1995 essay “Bowling Alone,” which he later expanded into a book of the same name. Putnam identified a concerning trend in American public life, in almost all sectors local communities across the nation were collapsing.
From the 1960s onward Americans participated less in volunteer groups, union membership declined, voting decreased, and bowling leagues died out, leaving individual Americans to bowl alone. Without an active community that encourages grassroots participation in political and non-political organizations each citizen is left isolated in their worlds, a depressing thought, and a point of vulnerability easily exploited by authoritarianism.
As Putnam put it:
“The health of our public institutions depends, at least in part, on widespread participation in private voluntary groups-those networks of civic engagement that embody social capital.”
We cannot hope to solve anything as a nation without collective engagement from the bottom-up. This concern unfortunately cannot be remedied through legislation or the influence of a few passionate supporters, it requires the whole of American society to bring it back to fruition.
Alexis de Tocqueville was a French noble and classical liberal who documented his travels to America in the 1830s. Tocqueville saw American federalism in the early days of the union, and he praised it for its benefits to local communities and working people, especially compared to the heavily-centralized government of France.
Most political scientists heavily simplify Tocqueville’s ideology, claiming that he primarily envisioned the democracy of the United States spreading across the world in unstoppable force. While he certainly believed democracy would blossom across the globe much like it did in America, the simplified version leaves out an important point. While Tocqueville had plenty of praises for American democracy, he provided a stark warning about its future.
Tocqueville envisioned that democracy and love of equality would grow to such an extent that its people would want to guarantee at all costs its codification into law and would entrust an all powerful government to protect those rights. I am going to end this piece on his words, because I believe that they sum up my fears of our current federal government far better than I could do in my own:
“Our contemporaries are incessantly racked by two inimical passions: they feel the need to be led and the wish to remain free. Not being able to destroy either one of these contrary instincts, they strive to satisfy both at the same time. They imagine a unique power, tutelary, all powerful, but elected by citizens. They combine centralization and the sovereignty of the people.
That gives them some respite. They console themselves for being in tutelage by thinking that they themselves have chosen their schoolmasters. Each individual allows himself to be attached because he sees that it is not a man or a class but the people themselves that hold the end of the chain.
In this system citizens leave their dependence for a moment to indicate their master, and then reenter it. In our day there are many people who accommodate themselves very easily to this kind of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people, and who think they have guaranteed the freedom of individuals well enough when they deliver it to the national power.
That does not suffice for me. The nature of the master is much less important to me than the fact of obedience.”
- Alexis de Tocqueville
Jacob McKissock is a sophomore who plans to major in Political Science.
