By no means do I have "the solution" for what ails the American body politic - as always, there are many causes (and many competing solutions) for our current predicament. And to be clear, I speak not about the day-to-day ins and outs of what's happening in the District of Columbia - who can keep track of it all? - but about longer-term trends. One of those trends is the ever-increasing centralization of governance at the national level.
As I understand it from my readings in American history, the Framers had great admiration for small republics ancient and modern (Athens, Rome, Florence, Venice, Switzerland, etc.) and wished to emulate their success. It was James Madison who had the insight to forge a republic on a larger scale than any previous state except perhaps the Roman Republic. Yet it's pretty clear that things aren't working out quite as the Framers planned.
Part of the challenge is that it's hard to scale the state. The best-governed countries in the world are all relatively small. If we take lack of corruption as a rough proxy for quality of governance, the best-governed countries are as follows:
For purposes of comparison, the population of those countries ranges from about the size of Vermont to about the size of Michigan. Of course, good government depends on many factors other than the size of the population (culture, laws, historical precedent, institutions, etc.), but size isn't nothing, either. Would an Anglosphere country such as New Zealand be as well governed if instead of having 5.5 million people it had 340 million people like the USA? I doubt it.
Another factor underlying the quality of governance is simple competence. More specifically, as countless corporate conglomerates have discovered, it's difficult to do many things well. The Constitution defined a short list of national matters to be handled by the national government, with everything else to be handled by states, counties, towns, cities, and other localities closer to the people. The short list did not include housing, education, energy, transportation, labor relations, and a whole host of other things that partisans fight over these days at the national level. Moreover, many of those now-national functions are also duplicated at the state level, leading to further inefficiencies.
Could it be that engaging in these activities only at the state (or more local level) might lead to better governance across the board in polities more on the scale of the independent nations listed above? It certainly seems like a direction to pursue, especially since that's how the American system was set up to operate in the first place.
But I'm just one powerless person without any influence over national, state, or local affairs, so who am I to prescribe political remedies?
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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