Balance of Power
(posted by FreeDem)
Libertarianism, of the non-anarchic variety, has typically favored a decentralized and federalist approach to government. Modern liberalism tends to take the opposite view, favoring centralized government. In the former, federalism protects you from the tyranny of the national government and decentralization enables you to move around and force local and state governments to compete. In the latter, centralization allows for a uniform protection of your civil liberties across the nation and for the local minority to be protected by local majorities. Ideally.
The liberal strategy seems to work best when imagining a nation that on the whole favors liberty and freedom, but has regional majorities in favor of authoritarianism. But where does the standard libertarian approach work, in practice? If federalism is being called upon, how could libertarians hope to defeat the political will of a national majority in favor of authoritarianism?
Francis Fukuyama argues that in modern China and several European states of the past, it was decentralization and a weak central government that allowed for the abuse of liberty by regional authoritarians.
Americans traditionally distrust strong central government and champion a federalism that distributes powers to state and local governments. The logic of wanting to move government closer to the people is strong, but we often forget that tyranny can be imposed by local oligarchies as much as by centralized ones. In the history of the Anglophone world, it is not the ability of local authorities to check the central government but rather a balance of power between local authorities and a strong central government that is the true cradle of liberty.
The 19th century British legal scholar Sir Henry Sumner Maine, in his book “Early Law and Custom,” pointed to this very fact in a fine essay titled “France and England.” He notes that the single most widespread complaint written in the cahiers produced on the eve of the French Revolution were complaints by peasants over encroachments of their property rights by seigneurial courts. According to Maine, judicial power in France was decentralized and under the control of the local aristocracy.
By contrast, from the time of the Norman conquest, the English monarchy had succeeded in establishing a strong, uniform and centralized system of justice. It was the king’s courts that protected non-elite groups from depredations by the local aristocracy. The failure of the French monarchy to impose similar constraints on local elites was one of the reasons the peasants who sacked manor houses during the revolution went straight to the room containing the titres to property that they felt had been stolen from them.
Many libertarians in the United States will admit that they aren’t anarchist, but still favor less government than the status quo. Could the same logic be extended to federalism and the balance of power? Too much centralization would be bad, but not enough would also be bad. In that case, however, couldn’t the same logic be used to argue in favor of even higher up levels of government? States and provinces keeping localities in line, nations keeping their states and provinces in line, and some international level of organizations keeping nations in line. But in that situation, who’s keeping the international organizations in line? Who is watching the watchers? And the watchers of the watchers. And the watchers of the watchers’ watchers . . .
Tags: liberalism, libertarianism
May 8th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
FreeDem-
What you are proposing is that the optimal situation involves a balance, one that can probably only be identified by judgment calls rather than appeals to general philosophical principles. That sort of balancing act will go over poorly with libertarians because we tend to prefer arguments from principle over arguments from the particularities of a situation. And there are good reasons: If you don’t know the particulars of a situation, if you don’t insist on arguments from principle you’re sort of at the mercy of the person who insists that he has the facts of the situation and swears that this is a case that calls for a government intervention. Of course, while that approach has its merits, it also has obvious weaknesses, because sometimes the facts on the ground really DO merit some sort of policy response.
To aim some fire at the other side, liberals may pay lip service to the idea of a tension between central and local power, but they find it difficult to tolerate any system in which a local authority makes a bad decision and the central authority is unable to intervene. Implicit in any sort of tension between authorities in a balance of power is that sometimes the prevailing authority will make a bad decision, and you have to accept the occasional bad decision by that authority to prevent the other authority from having an absolute veto. However, a liberal is likely to insist that any failure of local authorities MUST be addressed by central authorities in ALL cases. This, of course, means that there is no real tension or balancing act, because the final say always goes to the central authorities.
May 9th, 2008 at 7:28 am
thoreau, it seems that the practical matter is to emphasize subsidiarity, and allow for the argument to be made on a case by case basis on what level of government is best to handle the situation at hand. And yes, in practical terms this means accepting bad decisions by local authorities in some cases, with the hope that maybe the local authorities can come up with better and more innovative solutions than what the central authority would provide. This is probably one of the more difficult areas for liberals to accept, although I believe that the possibility of a conservative block of Senators holding up progressive legislation could encourage more liberals to renew their interest in federalism.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:32 am
The liberal strategy seems to work best when imagining a nation that on the whole favors liberty and freedom, but has regional majorities in favor of authoritarianism
I don’t think the nation on the whole favors those things. I think all governments will grab as much freedom from us as they can while still staying in power. The larger they are, the more dangerous they are.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:49 am
TGGP, and if the nation as a whole does not favor liberty and freedom, neither decentralization or centralization will work because those opposed to liberty and freedom, being in the national majority, will simply overwhelm whatever legal protections are in place to protect decentralization and regional majorities for liberty and freedom. At that point, what is the solution?
May 9th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Most people define freedom as the ability to live according to the norms of their primary reference groups. The problem with the massive, centralist, continent-wide state we have now is that we have a huge plethora of cultural and ideological groups competing for control over central power. The system in turn tries to be everything to everyone and ends up being nothing to no one. What I would prefer to do is dissolve/devolve the state along culturally specific lines. Rural counties can have “conservative” governments. Cosmopolitan metro areas can have “liberal” governments. The inner-cities and some regions of the south can have “afro-centric” governments. Backwater Idaho can have an “aryan-centric” government and San Francisco can have a “gay-centric” government. There could be independent enclaves for everyone from drug users to polygamist cults to Maoists.
The basic idea is hundreds of Liechtensteins, organized as intentional states for those with a preferred cultural orientation. What Kevin Carson says about local manufacturing for local use, within a framework of stable extended families would be the economic half of what I’m talking about.
May 9th, 2008 at 11:38 am
The problem we’re having here, as I see it, is the problem of guarantees of freedom and civil liberties. As I see it, there are none to offer. Doesn’t matter how great your system of government is, how enlightened your culture is, how educated and judicious your population is. Nothing is certain.
I think it just comes down to preferences, which is great, because maybe libertarians can finally stop thinking that their principles are the end-all-be-all. The same for liberals. If decentralization is just a preference, perhaps I can be convinced that there are reasons to deemphasize it in favor of other values worth achieving.
Maybe there’s a way to empower individuals without making subservient to large, distant institutions. I’m open to it as a practical step forward towards a better world.
May 9th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Good point. I don’t think the solution at that point is even political. At that point, you have to think very deeply about what is important to you and how you’re going to achieve it. But that’s good advice anyway, because you really can’t change others. Isn’t that what our politics comes down to, in the end?
May 9th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
If you don’t know the particulars of a situation, if you don’t insist on arguments from principle you’re sort of at the mercy of the person who insists that he has the facts of the situation and swears that this is a case that calls for a government intervention.”
Funny, my first instinct after reading the Maine example was to think of a way to disprove the France vs. England example. My argument is that the difference probably had a lot more to do with the difference between the two countries. As soon as France became centralized, they invented the concept of slave armies and went on a rampage across Europe. When you look at China versus Europe in the 15th-20th centuries, US pre-Civil War versus US today, Venice, Genoa, and Naples versus a united Italy, Prussia versus Germany, Soviet Union versus Eastern Europe today, etc. - it gets very hard to find examples where centralization has meant more freedom.
Complicating factors is that federally sponsored university professors tend to cherry pick the facts. The Civil War is used as an example of a strong centralized government creating freedom for blacks. However, had there not been a federal government in the first place, and had there been no Section 2 of Article IV of Constitution that required Northern states to return slaves, it’s likely slavery could not have survived in the South as long as it did.
Another complicating factor is that sometimes I want my local community to be authoritarian. For instance, my university had a rule banning freshman from owning cars and requiring them to live on campus. If a national government tried to do this it would be the height of tyranny. Yet the university is a community I belonged to by choice, and I was very much in favor of the regulation. The ban on owning cars made the community much tighter and made more people happy.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Keith,
I wonder if you’re assuming too much similarities based on one’s location. I tend to agree that increasingly like minded people live together, but I also recognize that this isn’t a perfect correlation. Having grown up in the South, I know of many situations where a large black minority in a county can be repressed by the white majority.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
“I wonder if you’re assuming too much similarities based on one’s location. I tend to agree that increasingly like minded people live together, but I also recognize that this isn’t a perfect correlation. Having grown up in the South, I know of many situations where a large black minority in a county can be repressed by the white majority.”
Well, what I’m for is what might be called “cultural separatism”. Groups that are incompatible with one another should be politically autonomous from one another. On the race issue specifically, what I’m for is reparations for the creation of economically viable, culturally independent, politically sovereign black states, regions, and cantons in exchange for the dismantling of coercive integration, federal regulation of race relations, and affirmative action. The ultimate goal ought to be separation of race and state along the same lines as present day separation of church and state.
I’d apply to same principle to conflicts between the religious right and feminists/homosexuals, traditional families and counterculturalists, fascists and communists.
May 9th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
FreeDem,
You can find out more about my perspective here:
http://attackthesystem.com/liberty-and-populism-building-an-effective-resistance-movement-for-north-america/
You’ll find my perspective is rather far removed from both conventional liberalism and conventional libertarianism in favor of a much more radical perspective.
May 10th, 2008 at 2:27 am
FreeDem, you are right that the people opposed to freedom will also oppose decentralization. However, the power-hungry want to reign in hell, not merely live in it. The elites not quite at the top but envious of those who are can be willing to endorse separation if that boosts their power (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita discusses how that resulted in the end of the Soviet Union here). Given existing decentralization, you may have elites that would have as their first preference centralization with themselves in charge, but will resist centralization at their own expense. This sets elements of the state against each other, keeping it weaker (and their loss is our gain, just as their gain is our loss). The total amount of power wielded by any one organization is minimized, though still probably not to a level I’d trust any of them with. Decentralization is hard to sustain (technological progress enables the state to expand), but if you have it there can be a situation where each state would like more power, but “policy competition” prevents them from doing so, just as market competition constrains the prices of firms. Lawrence Summer sees that as a bad thing, but I do not.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:33 am
If you believe as I do that politics, government and law are nothing more than a slightly more sophisticated version of gang warfare a la the Bloods/Crips rivalry, then the only real political question so far as institutional arrangements goes is whether you prefer to have lots of small gangs covering small amounts of “turf”, or one big gang that dominates nations, continents or the entire globe. Or to put it another way, is it good that the Crips have to compete with the Bloods, Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, Nazi Low Riders, MS-13, etc., or would it be better if one of these had a nationwide monopoly on gang activity?
Most proponents of centralization that I have discussed these matters with usually have no clue as to what the state really is. They usually know nothing of the real history of U.S. imperialism or aggression overseas. They usually know nothing about how extensive the military-industrial complex really is. I once heard Robert Scheer say, “We don’t just have a military-industrial complex. We ARE a military-industrial complex.” Incidentally, I also heard Scheer, a lifelong leftist, say the US federal system is so corrupt and tyrannical that at this point he would prefer to take our chances with the states and private sector.
I’m not accusing FreeDem of this, but many liberals and leftists I’ve discussed this with act as if these things don’t matter. Hell, what’s killing a few million people in counterinsurgency programs in the Third World so long as we can have national health care? What’s the federal drug war so long as the Supreme Court upholds the right to have an abortion eight months into pregnancy and have gay sex in the men’s room at the airport? What’s the corporate state so long as the EPA is protecting spotted owls?
May 12th, 2008 at 9:20 am
As someone who has been lampooned here for favoring decentralism, I’ll take this opportunity to note that I have no problem with centralization - as long as it is the result of a bottom up, and not a top down process. I think that small communities can and probably would band together on certain issues. The key is to allow them to end these associations when they feel that they no longer serve their purposes. Of course, I would feel the same about members of the communities that secede - they should have the right to end their association with their community once it no longer serves their purposes - and in some sense, I could see how the larger, organically centralized association might act in a way to protect those who wish to remain associated despite their communities decision to secede. It’s exceedingly difficult to predict how this might work out, because it so foreign to our current regime, but the concept of such a scenario seems pretty straight-forward, to me.
The Articles of Confederation were pretty close (though obviously far from perfect) to what I’m describing as a model. The Constitution was a counter-revolution to plant the seeds of top-down imposition.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
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