Unfortunately, the post-Soviet experience suggests that many of the new breakaway states will not enjoy any marked change from the bad, old ways of doing things, but they will simply enjoy a new dispensation under the rule of equally miserable political bosses. We, too, could enjoy our own Berdymukhammedovs and Nazarbayevs. As amusing as the name Berdymukhammedov is, I don’t think that would be a desirable outcome.

Nonetheless, I am (obviously) entirely in agreement with as much radical decentralisation as we can possibly have. The post-Soviet arrangement simply saw the old party bosses in the different republics retain their control, which would be like a break-up here where the establishment of the national party elites as the rulers of the new states. Democracy does not function in large, consolidated states except as travesty, and it seems likely that representative government cannot long successfully operate on the scale of even some of the original larger states. If we want real self-government, our polities would probably ultimately need to be on the scale of counties, rather than states, and the focus of political life would be within the city district and the small town rather than the imperial city. Obviously, we are a very long way away from that.

Government becomes impenetrable and impossibly complex because people require it to do as much as we require of it. There are better and worse ways of managing this baffling complexity, but an even better solution to much of it is to devolve many of these activities to entities other than public authorities. There are certain unavoidable corruptions that come with government. No serious decentralist pretends that local and county government is not full of stupidity, venality and corruption–undoubtedly it is, and sometimes quite a lot of it (see Chicago)–but that it is far better to keep as much control over the stupid, venal and corrupt as possible, and this can only be accomplished by keeping them as close to the citizens as possible, to make them as accountable and answerable as is reasonably possible.

The thing I have never understood about the position of the rationalising centralist is that he takes for granted that a Daley administration, for instance, is full of crooks, but has relatively limited power to do harm, but he somehow thinks that as more power over ever-larger swathes of the country is concentrated in a few hands the proportionately greater the resistance to corruption there is in the office-holders. He must believe that, or he has committed himself to creating and maintaining a system that not only breeds more and more gross corruption, but also a system whose corrupt governors wield even more destructive instruments of coercion over a much wider area. This is why “reformers” who always want to appeal to the center and come up with a “national” standard for this or that drive me mad–by doing this, they probably will not eliminate whatever evil they are trying to eliminate, but they will destroy the bulwarks that provide some shelter to the people against the injustices of the newly empowered central government.

I never really considered that before, but I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense.

In CA a lot of the decisions are made by boards and commissions appointed by various local and state officials. It’s entirely impenetrable.

Lawyers and politicians “create problems to sell solutions,” as the Brazilians say.

I’m not sure it was ever much better.

I fear this may, in fact, be the case. The outcome of so many election results can only be explained by this Politician as Celebrity model.

Now, I’ve only begun recently to follow politics with any regularity (Eunomia being one of my primary sources), and I can STILL barely keep up with the ebb and flow of power in Washington. When so much power is centralized at so high a level, it becomes exceedingly difficult to stay informed. The decisions being made on the Federal level have so many layers of bureaucracy between those who make them and those who implement them that there’s almost no real connection between who I vote for, informed or not, and what actually happens to me. Even on the broadest of policy issues — immigration or tax reform, for example — there is no guarantee that being informed will actually help, or that the guy you vote for who is 100% on the right side of one issue, won’t be 100% on the wrong side (or be forced to compromise in that direction) of another issue. There’s just too much power at too high a level spread among too few people to make the mass of voters feel engaged or empowered.

So they vote by celebrity, or sound-bites, or hair size, because, to some extent, it makes just as much sense as voting by the issues, in terms of actually having one’s will enacted. Look — it took the Daily Kos folks just three months to realize that the Democrats they helped elect into the majority in Congress, largely on a platform of ending, or at least setting a timetable, to end the war, can’t even come together to do this. How many different proposals are out there now? How many of them are even binding? How many groups of Democrats have now turned against each other, in some cases using the same “Support the Troops” rhetoric that was used against them by the Republicans for so long?

Don’t get me wrong, I think the level of ignorance is absolutely stunning — Hillary as an evangelical? What, I ask, the hell? — and I have a lot of problems with the “virtues” of a mass democracy, but I’m not sure if our present situation is one that could be solved, or even really addressed, simply by having a well-informed electorate?