Imagine you are a mouse — a placid little creature — living in a labyrinth. You don’t know it’s a labyrinth; it’s just where you live. You follow a well worn path, meandering along, chasing the red button. The red button provides you with food or whatever makes you happy.
But you’ve started to notice that things are changing. It’s not as good as it used to be in the labyrinth, not as easy to get to the button. And the payoff when you get there isn’t as good anymore. You’re anxious, but you’re not sure what to do. You’re starting to wonder about things. It’s been dawning on you that following the path isn’t getting you anywhere, and you may even be going backwards.
Suddenly you’re presented with a choice: keep running along the same path, or exit the labyrinth. Will you head for the door? Are you nodding yes? Will you do it? What will it take for you to lift up your head and leave the comfortable confines of the labyrinth?
In a recent Substack article, the online commentator Kulak wrote that history is divided into alternating periods of the centralizing or decentralizing of political power, noting that we have been in a period of centralization from 1700 to 1945. That seems about right, although things took a turn for the worse in the short-term after 1945 with the rise of the gargantuan state. Now the cracks in the foundation are beginning to show.
In fact, don’t tell anybody from the Deep State, but decentralization is happening now. The grand bargain the American people made with an expansive federal government is falling apart. The people tolerated big government for a lot of free stuff, but now the government is undermining the bargain it made for greater power with its ham-fisted use of it and over-the-top spending. The centripetal pull in bureaucratic governance, after accelerating with World War I and blossoming into the New Deal, is petering out. Centralization of power is accepted by the people when it confers benefits, but when those benefits diminish, as they are doing presently, the relationship of the people with its government will change.
When people are free, they will get the government they desire, despite what the powers-that-be might want. As a large, centralized federal government becomes unable to deliver its promised benefits, the rulers’ relationship with the ruled will break down. The people will stop accepting the government’s authority in their lives. If people get what they expect, they’ll ignore the things that bother them. But when benefits are threatened, as we are starting to see now, the relationship will change.
Take education, for example — a paradigmatic service people expect from government. People are openly challenging public schools, which spend more on racial and sexual ideology than on reading, writing, and arithmetic. On crime prevention, perhaps the number-one benefit derived from government, problems abound. Crime is surging. Progressive no-bail policies are releasing offenders the same day they are arrested. Terrorists and criminals are flooding across our borders unvetted. At the federal level, we’re more vulnerable to attack than we have been in decades because we redirect defense spending from war-fighting to DIE seminars. If you are a low-wage worker, open borders allow illegal aliens to pour in and take your job. The government is not keeping its end of the bargain. Insecurity is the word of the day.
Will the people demand a new relationship with their government? In Hartford, Connecticut, armed groups of black residents made the news recently when they gathered together to clean up their neighborhood since the local government and police weren’t helping. In other cities, people are banding together to evict squatters because courts and the police won’t protect their property.
We’re seeing this changing attitude toward government writ large in Donald Trump’s evolving relationship with black and Hispanic voters. Part of the undeniable movement of traditional Democrat voters to Trump in the polls is their rejection of the paternalistic relationship the Democrats have created with minorities for decades. They don’t want top-down solutions that don’t fit their problems. They want empowerment. They want change, not excuses. They are ready to renegotiate the old bargain, but Democrats get what they want from the old deal — votes — and they have no incentive to change it.
In addition, people are demanding a new relationship with government power in school boards across the country, ending liberal governance in many locales due to an extreme transgender and LGB agenda. Pressure is being applied on soft-on-crime district attorneys, whose no-bail policies are making our streets less safe. Change is percolating.
The only thing that can stop the approaching decentralization of government power is force. That’s why bureaucrats everywhere, including in Washington, and especially authoritarian entities like the U.N., WHO, and WEF, look to China as their model. They don’t look to America and its traditional model of consensus-building; they look to totalitarian structures, where the people are controlled by force through the threat of violence and the denial of benefits. That’s government hard power.
The other way governments force compliance, and we see this more broadly today in the developed West, is through information. The government’s manipulation of information is soft power. It is a bending of the will of the people to the government’s will through withholding or manipulating information. This type of soft government power got a big boost during the COVID scare. However, the tide is turning on that as well, as court cases move through the system to hold government actors accountable, and the skepticism of expertise grows.
A turning point is approaching in the culture, too. A recent article in The Spectator by Justin Brierly talked about a subtle but noticeable movement toward Christianity among younger people in the U.K. It is inevitable that such a turn will happen throughout the West. The human person can take only so much lying and nihilism, as the Soviet Union demonstrated. Eyes are opening, at least for those willing to look.
Western society generated surplus prosperity that enabled the construction of grand cathedrals of government, and it had the Christian impulse to make life better for people. Unfortunately, that impulse has been tossed out the window, along with the Christianity, and the only goal now of the powers-that-be is power itself. But don’t give up hope. Open your eyes and renegotiate this failed bargain. Decentralization is coming soon to a government near you.
Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).
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