We May Need a Devolution

Note: this is not a history-of-technology piece.

Here’s some recent-history context for some of the big questions and concerns swirling around right now.

For decades, the political “right” has decried “big government”—a concentration of power in the Federal government vis-à-vis state governments, local governments, and non-governmental institutions (except major corporations). Those of us who aren’t infected with that particular disease haven’t worried about “big government” as much, because—domestically at least—the Federal government has largely used its power to do constructive things, and to prevent bad actors from doing destructive things. Even after the “Reagan turn” of 1980, this remained largely the case—though at the same time, the forces that have gotten us into this mess accelerated from that point to now.

Those of us whose political consciousness was formed shortly after the end of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement that ended apartheid in the South and little-apartheid in the rest of the country came to that consciousness keenly aware of the role the Federal government, and especially the Federal Courts, played in forcing states whose governments and, for that matter, all power structures were firmly in the hands of sadistic bigots, to conform to Federal law and the will of decent American voters. Those of us in the South learned that the Tennessee Valley Authority, an initiative of the Roosevelt Administration, had electrified the South and thus made it possible for the region to enter the twentieth century, with the hope for more prosperity that entailed. (My parents both grew up on farms where life was almost identical to what it would have been a century earlier.)

So, the Federal government was primarily a force for good in the country. That view was heavily tarnished when we got old enough to learn that, when it came to foreign affairs, that government was a willing participant in inexcusable acts and policies. It was heavily tarnished by the election of Reagan and the ongoing legacy of that turn.

Now, the Federal government has been taken over by bad people. Really bad people. That too is part of the Reagan legacy, though there’s more to it than that. What I want to focus on here is this government’s throwing-off of one of the defining lies of modern “right”-wing politics, and the ramifications of that. That lie is the lie of “small government.”

Libertarians have traditionally voted for the Republican Party in the U.S., at least for the past several decades. I’m not sure if an analogous situation exists in the UK, Canada, or Australia. But the relationship between libertarians and the Republican Party has been fraught for a while. Now, there is no place for them in the Party at all. This government is flexing its power in every way it can think of, more than any other Federal government since the war. It makes no pretense of believing in small government. It is accused of attempting to destroy the Federal government, but its actual agenda is just to take complete control of it and use it for its own purposes, regardless of the will of anyone else in the country.

I think that, whenever it’s occurred to us how much power the Federal government has accrued over the past 90 years, and what could happen if bad actors had access to that power, we’ve taken some solace in the notion of checks and balances, of the built-in limitations put into place by the Constitution and its amendments, and by judicial precedent, such that no one branch of the government can exercise too much power.

But now we find ourselves waking up from a long snooze during which bad actors have largely taken over the high courts, the legislature, and the executive. This isn’t complete, and there are still some checks and balances operating, but not nearly enough. The bad actors are, of course, helping each other.

The most elite U.S. universities, whose academic reputations are second to none in the world—and which are private, not public—are capitulating to a government run by criminals and idiots—but those criminals and idiots control big money upon which those universities have come to depend. One by one, they are having to pay millions to the government in “settlements,” and agree to implement policies dictated by the administration. What is this about? It’s simple when boiled down. In no particular order:

--They must conform to the administration’s stance that there is no such thing as “transgender” people. They don’t exist. This must be reflected in university policies and official verbiage.

--They must completely abandon any overt efforts to recruit students from historically-disadvantaged groups, and they must prove to the administration, however the administration wants that done, that they are not doing that. Why? Because white people of European descent should rule. The people calling these shots take advantage of the resentment of the bottom of white society, who want to be counted as marginalized too (sort of), and who don’t want to see other disadvantaged people getting a leg up that they can’t get. (Good luck selling “white privilege” to those folks.)

--They must make “amends” to Jewish students for “tolerating antisemitism” on campus and must implement programs and policies that affirm Jewish students and American Jewish life on campus.

The first of these is immediately understandable; these people are absolutely committed to the sexual binary underpinning 19^th- and early 20^th-century “Western” culture—because they themselves want to live in that culture, unchallenged, and make everyone else live in it too—under their control.

The second is also obvious: they’re racists. Duh.

The third isn’t quite so clear, but it’s also because they’re racists and cultural chauvinists.

The administration does not give a rat’s ass about antisemitism; let’s get that out of the way. It uses “antisemitism” to do a few closely-related things that all support an agenda of completely excluding Muslims from American life. It deliberately misreads the protests against the ongoing Israeli atrocities in Gaza as “antisemitism,” which was made slightly easier to pull off by the excesses we expect from late-adolescent and young-adult protestors who still have a lot to learn and a few years of brain development left before their executive functions work fully. Most of us have been there, if we ever gave enough of a shit about anything but ourselves.

This allows it to pressure universities to disallow these protests and silence the collective voice of those who advocate for Palestinian rights to—well, I was going to say self-determination, but at this point, it’s just “to survive.”

Why do the administration, and its supporters in Congress and the courts, care about this so much? Because they hate Muslims. That’s in accordance with other policies; the current president has been completely open about wanting to exclude Muslims from coming here and kicking out the ones who are already here. When he sees American college students wearing the checkered Palestinian head scarves, he foams at the mouth. And then he makes university presidents and boards kowtow to him, and they do it. To the long-term detriment of their status and credibility.

I think there is some danger here that the interests and well-being of innocent Jewish people could ultimately be set back somewhat by the backlash to this equating of Judaism with Zionism and Israeli violence, an elision orchestrated by AIPAC and the Zionists and those who think Netanyahu & Co. are OK, who are, even if they’re not fully part of the fundamentalist-Christian-dominated American “right,” are being used by them.

An important quesiton is, assuming the country doesn’t completely devolve into authoritarian wrong-wing pseudodemocratic oligarchic autocracy, will this ultimately lead us to roll back the power of the Federal government? To devolve some power back to the states, the cities and counties, and extra-governmental institutions—like universities? We can’t predict that. We could be entering a rather profound shift from how we’ve been doing things for almost a century now. Right now, we certainly see state and local governments taking actions in response to Federal dysfunction and wrongdoing.

It wouldn’t be the first time in my lifetime that those opposed to a would-be authoritarian (in this case, Nixon) pushed through postmortem reforms that reined in executive power—reforms that Congress has failed to enforce while Presidents largely do as they please. But there would be some irony in a shift by which support for limiting Federal power and increasing state and local power started coming from progressives and those who lean libertarian (not an alliance we’ve seen so far), versus the Republicans. Such shifts are by no means unheard-of, though. Before Jim Crow fell, the Democratic Party could rely on the staunch support of the deep apartheid South to win national elections—the same region that Republicans now count on every cycle, and have since the 1970s.

But a shift toward devolution would have to involve a transfer of money. If the Feds are taking all the tax revenue, then they will continue to call all the shots, more or less. (Federal income tax is a 20^th-century development.) They have a long winning streak of getting their way with states, even when they have no legal authority to force their will, by tying compliance to funding—frequently for infrastructure. This is what got the 21-year-old drinking age adopted nationwide, something the Federal government could not impose on the states directly.

In my lifetime, the country has largely run on a funding system whereby everyone pays Federal taxes, and then the Federal government redistributes much of that money to the state governments as stipulated by Congress and executed by Federal agencies. A real devolution here would require that, at the same time, the Federal government lowered taxes and the state governments picked up the difference. Right now, the administration in Washington is trying to use its agencies to block this funding, which is illegal, as those agencies are legally-required to comply with the law as passed by Congress. But cutting funding without across-the-income-spectrum tax cuts just wrecks things. That’s not devolution of power; that’s just throwing a spanner in the works. Which is why states are suing the administration and winning, and the administration is backpedaling on some of their illegal freezes. But, Congress has, by razor-thin party-line votes, used budget reconciliation to support some of the administration’s agenda. The way to turn that around is for the Republicans to lose control of Congress next year. The Republicans will likely do anything, legal or illegal, to try to stop that. Will enough people turn out to vote that it doesn’t matter what they do? We shall see.