I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. The County has a new transportation and housing plan for my neighborhood and nearby neighborhoods. The plan is opposed by nearly every resident in the affected neighborhoods. As I pointed out in testimony before the planning board, the plan is ideal for a 30-something white-collar hipster with no children, but that is not who we are. The plumbers, handymen, and nurses are not going to ride scooters to their jobs. Parents with children are not going to put their week’s groceries in a backpack and walk home.
Even the outgoing County Executive, who does not live in our area, opposes the plan. He points out ways in which the plan conflicts with other housing and transportation initiatives.
The plan is sure to pass. Because we have no power. In a County of 1.0 million people, we are but several thousand residents. We do not even have enough votes to unseat our district representative on the County Council, much less the other ten members.
In my most widely-unread book, Unchecked and Unbalanced, I pointed how the balance of power between citizens and government has shifted as population has increased. Compared to a more genuine democracy, like Switzerland, American citizens are powerless.
Compare Montgomery County, Maryland, with the Swiss Canton of Bern. The County has an annual budget of $7.6 billion. This budget is controlled by a County Council of 11 members. Population per legislator is about 900,000. Dollars spent per legislator is nearly $700 million.
The Canton of Bern, Switzerland, also has 1.0 million people. It has a larger budget, of close to $17 billion. The Grand Council that oversees this budget has 160 members. Population per legislator is about 6200. Dollars spent per legislator is just over $100 million.
Moreover, the Canton of Bern is divided into 388 municipalities, each with its own local government. If Montgomery County were similarly divided, our group of neighborhoods might make up a municipality. We could have much more of a say over housing and transportation policy where we live.
In my widely-unread book, I point out that disempowerment of citizens has taken place at the national level as well. When there were just 13 states, the population was 4 million and the House of Representatives had 65 members, or about 60,000 people per legislator. Today, we have 340 million people, with 435 legislators, or an average of 800,000 people per legislator.
Citizens who feel that they are powerless in today’s “democracy” are correct. Legislators also feel powerless, because government budgets are so large and complex that no one understand them, but that is another issue.
If we could design a system for today’s United States, I would want to distribute much more power to localities. Countries like Switzerland, Singapore, and Norway show that you can have adequate state capacity at a scale of less than 20 million people.
As a thought experiment, imagine that we broke up the United States into twenty independent states, each with sovereignty over all domestic policy within the state. This would leave the Federal government with responsibility only for overall defense. As in Switzerland, states could further subdivide into cantons, and cantons could subdivide into municipalities.
What we experience instead is the unbalance of power. As citizens and as local communities, we are overwhelmed by the government structures that exist.
Support for federalism and subsidiarity often seems to run very thin among many ideological groups, but it's a particular problem for individualist libertarians who don't believe any level of government can have proper authority to regulate certain rights, and so are comfortable (or have become so since WWII) with levels higher up the governmental hierarchy squashing attempts lower down to use such powers.
The trend has been toward a de facto political arrangement in which, practically, and for anything of real importance, there is only the individual and the national (or affiliation with a national, ideologically-narrow political party, which amounts to the same thing), which is a big reason why few people even know the names of even their democratically-elected local officials anymore. They don't have to know the names, they only have to vote for their side's machine.
Plenty of today's 'YIMBY' / "Build Baby Build" libertarians seem happy to support central governments rolling over the preferences of the current residents of local communities by outlawing the capacity of those communities to decide collectively on the rules for their own urban arrangements and developments. Really, it's YIYBY, "Yes in -YOUR- Back Yards". But as I've said before, many people aren't really NIMBY in terms of some inflexible political position or perspective, but as a kind of second-best cope to the fact that it's the only way to exercise any kind of local control in a system that has tended towards its erasure.
I think schools underwent a similar process. While public schools in the US are under the management of an elected local school board (sometimes a mayor) and under the legal frameworks established by each state, various nationwide initiatives have stripped local elected officials of much of their power. I was just reading a 2014 interview Marco Rubio did where he pointed out that Common Core was a backdoor to federal control of school. While we may or may not remember that Common Core was technically passed by each state, adoption of its testing regime (and by extension the standards) was incentivized at the federal level. Beyond standards and testing, federal oversight and court cases related to civil rights and disability shifted power up the chain to the DOE, diluting the level of representation.
One of my personal theories of the rise of populism in the US says that frustration with schools, especially the loss of local control, drove many “normie” centrist types into the populist camp when it came time to vote. They, at least, wanted to empower local schools boards once again.
An interesting outcome, though, is that in some instances that local power has been short-circuited by states or by choice and voucher programs. In the former case, some states have taken a very active role in managing schools, overriding local boards or enforcing their preferred ideological conventions on curriculum and materials. In other cases, while parents can use vouchers to “vote with their wallets”, they’ve ceded democratic accountability at the school/district level for the state level (since the states determine how vouchers may be used and which schools qualify). It’s kind of a tossing up of hands, I think. They’re saying, “well, if we can’t oversee our own schools, we might as well be able to do something else.”