Not too long ago, I encountered an item reminding me of a little-remarked feature of our national polity: the immense dilution of the meaningful individual voice in governance.
At our nation’s founding, each Congressman represented few people – 50,000 or something. Today he or she represents roughly 700,000. This historic figure may be wrong, but the difference is by orders of magnitude.
And even at that, with 435 members, Congress is pretty unruly. We really can’t grow Congress back to where a Congressman represents something like the relatively few of yesteryear. It would be totally unworkable.
This leaves voters alienated from the national government.
In contrast, I have for a number of years, on and off, participated in my local Chamber of Commerce’s “Third House” program. Every Saturday or two during the Indiana legislative session, the “Third House” meets to eat an excessively large breakfast, hear reports from our representatives and to give them feedback on Bills that affect us. They sit at table and break hash browns with us, sharing a common cup of orange juice. Thus there’s informal chatter as well as formal reports from them to us and votes by us to inform them. It’s not uncommon for as many as 5 State Senators and Representatives to be present, nor for our input to influence their votes.
So what if we broke up government and devolved power back to the states so as once again to empower and dis-alienate voters? We’d still need, I think, a national assembly to provide for the national defense and a few other limited functions, but there would be multiple more regional assemblies. Like, maybe, fifty of them. Doing meaningful things independently of what happens in Washington, DC.
This ought to appeal to the Left counterculture and to the Right as well. Indeed, although I still very much consider myself a conservative, I’m finding plenty of kindred spirits on the Left, courtesy of this wonderful gathering place of cyberspace.
But I just described (except for the cyberspace thingy) Federalism, the intent of the Founders. Somehow, some centripetal force has driven the real power toward Washington, DC contrary to the original design. We can argue about why (I have some half-baked theories, riffing off the trope “nation with the soul of a Church” the dogmas of that Church being “democracy” and “American Exceptionalism” and the undermining of Federalism’s political safeguards by the direct election of Senators), but it’s hard to argue that the effect has been entirely healthy (or so it seems to me).
This gives me great appreciation for the wisdom of the Founders, who gave us a Republic, if only we’d kept it.
These thoughts brought to you courtesy of a goading by this Wilfred McClay article on Federalism.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 