Kotkin:
Progressives may preach the joys of localism, but the trend in government is all the other way in everything from climate change to the economic complexion of your neighborhood.
The End of Localism
This
could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends. World
leaders—the super-rich, their pet nonprofits, their media boosters, and their
allies in the global apparat—gather in Paris to hammer out a deal to transform
the planet, and our lives. No one asks much about what the states and the
communities, the electorate, or even Congress, thinks of the arrangement. The
executive now presumes to rule on these issues.
For
many of the world’s leading countries—China, Russia, Saudi Arabia—such top-down
edicts are fine and dandy, particularly since their supreme leaders won’t have
to adhere to them if inconvenienced. But the desire for centralized control is
also spreading among the shrinking remnant of actual democracies, where
political give and take is baked into the system.
The
will to power is unmistakable. California Gov. Jerry Brown, now posturing as
the aged philosopher-prince fresh from Paris, hails the “coercive power of the
state” to make people live properly by his lights. California’s high
electricity prices, regulation-driven spikes in home values, and the highest
energy prices in the continental United States, may be a bane for middle- and
working-class families, but are sold as a wonderful achievement among our
presumptive masters.
The Authoritarian Impulse
Under
President Obama, rule by decree has become commonplace, with federal edicts
dictating policies on everything from immigration and labor laws to climate
change. No modern leader since Nixon has been so bold in trying to consolidate
power. But the current president is also building on a trend: Since 1910 the
federal government has doubled its share of government spending to 60 percent.
Its share of GDP has now grown to the highest level since World War II.
Today
climate change has become the killer app for expanding state control, for
example, helping Jerry Brown find his inner Duce.
But the authoritarian urge is hardly limited to climate-related issues. It can
be seen on college campuses, where uniformity of belief is increasingly
mandated. In Europe, the other democratic bastion, the continental bureaucracy
now controls ever more of daily life on the continent. You don’t want thousands
of Syrian refugees in your town, but the EU knows better. You will take them
and like it, or be labeled a racist.
Already
the disconnect between the hoi polloi
and the new bureaucratic master race has spawned a powerful blowback, as
evidenced by the rise of rightist, even quasi-fascist parties throughout the
old continent. The people at the top—including much of the business
leadership—may like the idea of a central European master-state, but support
for the EU is at record low. Increasingly Europeans want, at the very least, to
dial down the centralization and bring back some control to the local level,
and something of the primacy of traditional cultures and what are still
perceived as “European values.”
In some
ways, the extreme discontent in America—epitomized by the xenophobic Trump
campaign—reflects a similar opposition to bureaucratic overreach. This conflict
can be expected to grow as new federal initiatives—initiatives that seek, among
other things, to enforce racial and class “balance” in neighborhoods and
high-density housing in low-density suburbs—stomp on even the pretense that
cities might have any control over their immediate environment. This policy is
being adopted already in some regions, notably Minnesota, where planners now
seek to change communities that are too white and affluent populations need to
meet new goals of class and economic diversity.
The Rule of the Wise-people
Historically,
advocacy for the rule of “betters” has been largely a prerogative of the right.
Indeed the very basis of traditional conservativism—epitomized by the Tory
ideal—was that society is best run by those with the greatest stake in its
success, and by those who have been educated, nurtured, and otherwise prepared
to rule over others with a sense of justice and enlightenment. In this century,
the idea of handing power to a properly indoctrinated cadre also found radical
expression in totalitarian ideologies such as communism, fascism, and national
socialism.
In
contemporary North American and the EU, the ascendant controlling power comes
from a new configuration of the cognitively superior, i.e., the academy, the
mainstream media, and the entertainment and technology communities. This new
centralist ruling class, unlike the Tories, relies not on tradition,
Christianity, or social hierarchy to justify its actions, but worships instead
at the altar of expertise and political correctness.
Ironically
this is occurring at a time when many progressives celebrate localism in terms
of food and culture. Some even embrace localism as an economic development
tool, an environmental win, and a form of resistance to ever greater
centralized big-business control.
Yet
some of the same progressives who promote localism often simultaneously favor
centralized control of everything from planning and zoning to education. They
may want local music, wine, or song, but all communities then must conform in
how they operate, are run, and developed. Advocates of strict land-use policies
claim that traditional architecture and increased densities will enable us to
once again enjoy the kind of “meaningful community” that supposedly cannot be achieved
in conventional suburbs.
In the
process, long-standing local control is being squeezed out of existence.
Ontario, California, Mayor pro-tem Alan Wapner notes that powers once reserved
for localities, such as zoning and planning, are being systematically usurped
by regulators from Sacramento and Washington. “They are basically dictating
land use,” he says. “We just don’t matter that much.”
The Road to Imperium
As the
Obama era grinds to its denouement, grassroots democracy, once favored by
liberals, is losing its historic appeal to the left. Important progressive
voices like Matt Yglesias now suggest that “democracy is doomed.” Other
prominent progressives, such as American
Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, see the more authoritarian model of China as
successful while the U.S. and European political systems seem tired.
Increasingly
the call is not so much for a benevolent and charismatic dictator, but for an
impaneled committee of experts to rule over our lives. Former Obama budget
adviser Peter Orszag and Thomas Friedman argue openly that power should shift
from naturally contentious elected bodies—subject to pressure from the lower
orders—to credentialed “experts” operating in Washington, Brussels, or the
United Nations.
The new
progressive mindset was laid out recently in an article in The Atlantic that openly called for the creation of a “technocracy”
to determine energy, economic, and land-use policies. According to this
article, mechanisms like the market or even technological change are simply not
up to the challenge. Instead the entire world needs to be put on a “war
footing” that forces compliance with the technocracy’s edicts. This includes a
drive to impose energy austerity on an already fading middle class, limiting
mundane pleasures like cheap air travel, cars, freeways, suburbs, and
single-family housing.
The
vagaries of America’s political system have contributed to the left’s growing
embrace of centralism. The Republican ascendency in virtually all states away
from the coasts all but guarantees their control of most legislative branches.
In contrast, the Democrat control of major cities, particularly along the
coasts, and their ability to woo voters who come out only every four years,
gives them a tremendous advantage on the presidential level.
This
creates the ideal preconditions for what
Ross Douthat accurately notes is a rising “Caesarism of the left” since the
2010 Republican congressional sweep. There is broad backing among liberals for
President Obama’s tack of avoiding Congress through presidential decrees. Nor
is this tendency likely to end soon. Hillary Clinton, whose husband’s success
was in part derived from working with Republicans, is already stating her
intention to go over Congress if they don’t go along with her ideas.
My word
to liberal friends: Think a bit about this embrace of imperial presidential
power if the person ruling from above was, say, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or,
worst of all, Donald Trump.
Slouching towards Imperium
The
centralization of power reflects disturbing tendencies in our economic life.
Despite all the hopes for a more distributed, less concentrated “new economy,”
we appear to be moving ever more toward economic centralization on a massive
scale. Indeed, after decades of losing market share to smaller firms, the share
of GDP controlled by the Fortune 500 has risen from 58 percent of nominal GDP
in 1994 to 73 percent in 2013.
Part of
this is driven by the relentless growth of large financial institutions, the
very folks who precipitated the financial crisis with their ill-advised
speculations. They have taken advantage of new regulations to greatly increase their share of the financial market to an unprecedented 44 percent.
This
economic consolidation, and how it plays into centralization, is rarely recognized
by Republicans, living in mortal fear of offending their cherished K Street
collaborators. A powerful central state often rains money on well-connected
capitalists who have flourished under
state-dominated systems in places as varied as Venezuela and Iran. Similarly, a
draconian climate regime certainly enhances the fortunes of capitalists such as
Elon Musk as well as other Silicon Valley and Wall Street supporters who seek
to force consumers and businesses into purchasing expensive, often unreliable renewable
power from favored wind and solar projects.
The
increasing power of the central state, in contrast, is the bane of small
companies, who are far less well-positioned to deal with ever-increasingly
regulation. Washington’s efforts to control financial activities proved a
disaster for the country’s entrepreneurial economy, long dependent on small
community banks for loans. Overall for the first time in recent memory (PDF),
more businesses are being destroyed than created. Concurrently, if unsurprisingly,
the middle class is shrinking, and seeing its share of the economy steadily
diminish.
There
are some alarming parallels between these developments and the last days of the
Roman Republic. There, too, developed a similar tendency toward vicious partisanship
and a growing concentration of wealth in a few hands. In Rome’s case, the old
middle classes and yeoman farmers were gradually replaced by patricians with
access to slave labor; in our society, cheap foreign labor has been perceived
as doing much the same for our oligarchs. Much as in Rome, our republican
virtues are also fading. Instead, society seems to require a sure hand,
particularly if the central authorities decide to transform society in ways
that the vast majority might not like (for example, essentially banning
suburban development or gas-powered cars). It may take a strict nanny state, to
paraphrase Mary Poppins, to make the bitter medicine go down.
The Coming Conflict
Yet
there’s a problem with centralization: People don’t trust the very institutions
that would be charged with carrying out their policies. Levels of trust for the
dominant institutions like the federal government, Congress, the courts, big
banks, media, and the academy are at historically low levels.
Roughly
half of all Americans, according to Gallup, now consider the federal government
“an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” In 2003
only 30 percent of Americans felt that way. Even in my home state of
California—now a mecca for ever-expanding government—large majorities favor
transferring tax dollars out of Sacramento to the localities, according to a
December Public Policy Institute of California poll.
Critically
this blowback is not among conservatives or exurbanites. Much of the strongest
opposition to the federal and state planning regimes are in areas such as
California’s Marin County, north of San Francisco, where residents have
objected to densification schemes that, they maintain, would undermine the “the
small-town, semi-rural, and rural character of their neighborhoods”—the very
qualities that attracted them there in the first place.
Similar
attempts to enforce density on suburban population have also led to uproars
in blue bastions such as the northern
Virgina suburbs, the famously progressive University of California at Davis,
and hip Boulder, Colorado. The New York
Times’s Tom Edsall notes that the federal Department of Housing and Urban
Development’s dictates may have already shifted politics in affluent
Westchester County, an early target of the social engineers seeking to enforce
HUD policies, to the right.
Some
leading progressives, like Nation
contributor and Bay Area activist Zelda Bronstein, attack the growth of
regional governments, designated to force compliance with state and federal
mandates, as fundamentally undemocratic, embracing “insular, peremptory style
of decision making.” Even millennials, who have tended to the left, are
skeptical about over-centralized government. A recent National Journal poll showed that they, like most Americans, are
not enamored of top-down solutions: Less than a third favor federal over
locally-based solutions.
Simply
put, there is no huge appetite for ever expanding federal power among the
majority of the populace. What is missing, outside of nihilistic opposition to
all government, is a strong movement advocating for more authority in the hands
of local communities, families, and volunteer organization. This does not
necessarily mean a decline in environmental standards, since most people care
most about the places where they and their families reside. Even with climate
change, a carbon tax could be approved without adopting the California formula
of ever more mega-regulations covering virtually every aspect of life.
As
Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, the genius of this republic lies not
in its central state, but in its dispersion, voluntary association, and
ideological diversity. If we undermine the legacy of our federal structure to
something more akin to that, say, of France or Russia, the United States could
no longer play its historic role as a rare beacon of independence and
self-government in a world increasingly dominated by various manifestations of
centralized tyranny.
