Go Home, Mae West

Via-The American Interest

Walter Russel Mead

“I used to be Snow White,” Mae West famously said, “but I drifted.”

Power has been drifting toward Washington and the federal government in the American political system; it needs to start drifting back home to the states and to local communities or our democratic system will become increasingly strained.

The latest poll from Pew is a shocker: almost 80 percent of Americans don’t trust the Federal government to do the right thing. The Federal government received its lowest ratings in decades, with Congress in particular standing at record lows in the public esteem. Record or near record numbers also express the view that they want a smaller government with fewer programs. The RCP maintains a rolling average of polls on a range of questions; according to these ‘polls of polls’, 71.2 percent of those asked disapprove of Congress and only 36.6 percent think the country is headed in the right direction.
In the short term, this is of course horrible news for Democrats, who will be trying to explain to voters this fall just why they deserve to keep their majorities in the House and the Senate. As the self-avowed party of a powerful federal government, the Democrats are also getting another indication that the party’s basic ideological predilections run counter to what America’s gut instincts are telling us right now. The survey results also reflect short term discontent over the state of the economy; with the bailout and the stimulus package Washington has asserted its control over economic forces. People who are unhappy about the economy are likely to blame Washington for what they don’t like.

But the survey points to more than unhappiness with the Democrats. The reality is that both parties have been moving the United States toward a more centralized government system. The Bush administration dramatically expanded the powers of the federal government, and not just on matters relating to security. “No Child Left Behind” is if nothing else a sweeping venture of the federal government into educational policy across the country (a point made in Diane Ravitch’s article in the current issue of The American Interest). The Bush administration also created a new entitlement program: the prescription drug benefit program for Medicare recipients.More...

I have enough Hamiltonianism in my political DNA to believe that the United States needs a strong federal government. Providing for the national defense, managing the country’s international engagements and commitments, supporting economic development through the provision of a sound national currency and the prudent (but not innovation-suppressing) regulation of financial markets, and the regulation of interstate commerce are all big assignments and they cannot be fulfilled without a strong national state. In addition, the federal government has a special historical responsibility to assure African-Americans equal treatment under the law. This responsibility, given to the federal government by the Civil War-era amendments to the Constitution and renewed by the Civil Rights movement, requires the federal government to monitor a range of practices in the private sector and in state and local governments across the land. In a perfect world, the federal government would not need these powers, but with almost 400 years of history behind us on this issue, federal action remains necessary as we struggle to defeat the lingering after-effects of the great national curse of race prejudice.

Even so, I believe that the time has come when we urgently need to move power and policy from the federal level back to the states and localities — not to weaken or undermine the strong federal government that we need, but to improve and defend it. Vermont and Utah are very different places with very different ideas about social, educational and economic policy. They have different needs and different priorities. Only rarely can the federal government make the people in both states happy; more usually, the compromises built into federal policy and programs will irritate the residents of both states. Left to themselves, the people in Utah and Vermont would develop very different policies on matters ranging from drug use to abortion to gay rights to education. Within some very broad limits (and with special attention to race given its special constitutional status) I don’t see why, they shouldn’t be free to do so.

Given this freedom, all of the states will do stupid things some of the time, and no state is likely to adopt the exact mix of policies that I personally would like to see, but so what? The federal government doesn’t always get things right either, and at least this way more people are likely to be reasonably contented with more of the laws and policies that directly touch their lives. There are also some built-in limits to the damage that states can do; people can cross state lines to get services or products that their own states forbid — or, in extreme cases, they can move.

A return to state power and state authority is not a perfect solution to problems of human rights and cultural freedom in the United States and not everyone will be happy with the results. There will be some states that largely ban abortion; more will restrict gay rights, especially when it comes to marriage and/or civil unions. On the other hand, some states would go farther, faster than the federal consensus would permit on other issues. But no system is perfect and returning responsibility for more of these issues to the states will promote a healthier and more vital national debate and in time, I believe, will lead to greater public acceptance of minority rights and viewpoints.

But even if state governments are less competent and less wise than the feds on specific matters, it’s vital to the continuing health of American democracy that Mae West goes home, that power drifts back to the state and local level. The federal electorate is so large, and the ability of voters and communities to affect federal election outcomes is so small, that individual citizens will inevitably feel frustrated and powerless before it. To preserve both the reality and the appearance of self-governance, to give individuals the experience, maturity and sense of participation that comes from playing a serious part in serious political events, it is necessary that some important issues be decided closer to home. In most states and communities, individual citizens can still band together into groups and movements that can fairly quickly have an impact on political events. (I’ve argued in the past that big states should think about splitting up; California, New York and Florida in particular are badly governed in part because they are large and their regions are so diverse that it’s almost impossible to provide effective government at the state level.)

The American people need to feel that they are citizens and power-holders rather than consumers and spectators passively watching the political circus. Otherwise our society will slowly unravel and the fabric of our common political life will steadily weaken. The sense of civic responsibility and the dignity that come from actively participating in self-government are necessary elements in the virtue that makes our form of government work and that keeps the economy strong. If we lose these priceless assets American society will be fatally undermined.

There are many reasons why power keeps drifting to Washington. Some are straightforward and obvious: the growing complexity and integration of the national economy creates new issues demanding federal involvement (environmental and financial regulation) and the growth of national entitlement programs which must be federally-managed to some degree. Some are rooted in the desire of power to grow: all bureaucracies and political bodies characteristically seek to increase their power, their size and their financial base of support. Some reflect cultural and political factors: ambitious and energetic people gravitate to the center. A career in Washington seems more exciting and fulfilling than a career in Albany or Sacramento. Intellectuals and policy wonks get a bigger charge out of planning grand national programs than a bunch of state and local initiatives. (That’s partly because so many states have to balance their budgets; what is the fun of government initiatives when they all have to be paid for?)

Life isn’t all skittles and beer at the state level, either. States like New York and California are even worse run than the federal government. The thirteen original colonies had a combined population of 3.9 million people in 1790; the 1990 census showed two counties with more than 3,900,000 inhabitants and a third with almost that many. State and local government often don’t get the press attention or the intellectual and political energy that they need, and the curse of public sector unions in many cases makes state and local government ruinously expensive and inefficient to boot.

If American democracy is going to thrive in the twenty-first century, this all needs to change. The Progressive reformers of 100 years ago brought new energy and commitment to state and local politics as well as to the national stage. They took on big city machines like Tammany Hall and enacted reforms to make state and local government more transparent.

In some ways, the Progressives were the opposite of what we need today. They believed that centralization of power and professionalization of government service were the most important items on the reform agenda. To some degree, today’s reformers will need to undo the work the Progressives did. The original Progressives harnessed new techniques of management and information control to create large, professionally-administered government bureaucracies. Today we need to use new techniques and technologies to break those bureaucracies down, to make small units of government more powerful, and to make government at all levels more responsive and more user-friendly. In virtually every case this will involve taking on government employees, reducing their numbers, eliminating their job security and cutting back on unsustainable retirement and other benefit levels.

Many intellectuals today, hypnotized by the Progressive state and the blue social model, look at Tea Partiers and anti-government protesters as enemies of all that is holy and good. I think not; I think they embody a spirit of populist revolt against centralized power that on balance makes sense. (Like all movements they have their share of hotheads and loony tunes; so do the greens, so did the anti-war movement in the Bush years. That’s life in this big, partly wacko country of ours. I didn’t think the loons defined the anti-Bush movements; I don’t think they define the anti-Obama ones either.)

But for social movements to rise past the level of ephemeral protest, they need to do more than talk about what they don’t like. They have to develop a vision of what they want, and they have to build a reform program that hangs together and produce cohorts of members willing and able to take the time to make that program work.

When populist movements don’t generate and sustain that kind of consistent political energy directed toward lasting change, we get a politics of slogans and piecemeal, contradictory populist reform. Take California, whose considerable problems are exacerbated by the result of past ballot propositions that came from spasms of anger and resistance rather than reflecting a consistent set of reinforcing and complementary ideas. Or we get movements and political figures like Ross Perot who strut their brief hour upon the stage, their sound and fury signifying nothing.

Will today’s populists bring forth the kind of committed and thoughtful engagement that over time will put our federal system back on solid ground, enhancing the effectiveness of government at all levels while returning power and responsibility to local communities? Or do the Tea Parties and other movements of protest, left and right, simply represent spasms of anger and frustration that will have little long term effect?

So far, American society has always managed to rise, eventually, to the challenges it faces and to develop creative new solutions to the ever more complex problems of our innovative and growing society. We are about to find out whether our luck still holds; today’s populists need to develop into a new breed of genuinely progressive reformers if the American experiment in democratic self-governance is to survive.