“We are, if territory and population be looked at together, one of the great countries of the world—a monster country, one might say, along with such others as China, India, the recent Soviet Union, and Brazil. And there is a real question as to whether “bigness” in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name.
There is, in the first place, the question of the effect of size on the quality of government. The greater the country, the less the intimacy between rulers and ruled. The more these latter become separated by great bureaucracies and legislative establishments, the more the individual citizen feels isolated from any form of government above the local level. All this tends to the creation of a certain anonymity of federal power. And while this anonymity does not take on in the democracy the Kafkaesque sinisterness that it did under the totalitarian systems (where it was an essential feature of the terror), it still plays its part, contributing to the impression of remoteness and impersonality on the part of government and of insignificance and helplessness on the part of the individual, and thus impairing the very meaning of citizenship. In the times when I have chanced to live in smaller countries, I have envied them the greater intimacy of their political life—the fact that a far greater number of people in government knew one another personally, and that a larger percentage of common people knew at least someone in government. Governmental personalities tended less to be meaningless names to one another and to the constituents, and more to be living, accessible figures. This, to be sure, sometimes favored the intensification of animosities as well as of friendships. But better, I thought, to view with dislike someone you really knew than to fumble in the dark with figures that were no more than remote and inhuman ciphers. It is the anonymous ones that instill the nameless dread, the panic before the menacingly inhuman, the rumbling of the distant drum.
Aside from that, excessive size in a country results unavoidably in a diminished sensitivity of its laws and regulations to the particular needs, traditional, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and the like, of individual localities and communities. The tendency, in great countries, is to take recourse to sweeping solutions, applying across the board to all elements of the population; and these have the drawbacks of all least common denominators. Particularly is this true in the United States, with its highly legalistic traditions, its dislike (as mentioned in the preceding chapter) of any sort of discriminating administration, its love for dividing people into categories, its fondness for regulating their lives in terms of these categories and treating them accordingly, rather than looking at the needs of individuals or of smaller groups and confronting these on the basis of common sense and reasonable discrimination. One of the unique features of American government is, in comparison with other modern systems, its neglect of intelligent and discriminating administration. It is a system that looks to the legislative branch to pass laws. It looks to the judiciary to interpret these laws. It looks to the executive branch to see that laws are carried out and enforced. But nowhere does it provide for the use of flexible judgment and common sense in their administration. Such questions are left, far more than they ought to be, to the courts, which are obliged to settle, by study of the letter of the law, numbers of matters that ought ideally to be decided on the basis of the merits of the particular problem at issue. But the decisions of the courts, particularly those of the Supreme Court, have themselves a normative character, and allow for little discretion in their application. Rarely, if ever, can the workings of federal laws be adjusted to meet unusual but reasonable requirements of the affected locality or individual.
A good example of this will be found in the current abortion conflict. Both sides seem to assume that this question should be decided by a sweeping national decision, applicable to every woman in the country, regardless of the circumstances of the particular case, as though there were not endless variations in the ways this problem presented itself. The greater a country is, and the more it attempts to solve great social problems from the center by sweeping legislative and judicial norms, the greater the number of inevitable individual harshnesses and injustices, and the less the intimacy between the rulers and the ruled. When I am confronted with the question “What is your position on abortion?” I can only reply, “Whose abortion?” I see no reason why the same rule should apply to tens of millions of women scattered across the land.
And there is a further quality of greatness of size in a country that deserves mention here. One might define it as the hubris of inordinate size. It is a certain lack of modesty in the national self-image of the great state—a feeling that the nation’s role in the world must be equivalent to its physical size, with the consequent relative tendency to overweening pretensions and ambitions. I don’t mean to say that the great power is always and everywhere imperialistic. There have been times, to be sure, when the United States was very much just that. The turn of the century, the period of the Spanish-American War, was one such time. But there have also been times when little of that sort of thing was observable. The fact remains that, generally speaking, the great country has a vulnerability to dreams of power and glory to which the smaller state is less easily inclined. Such dreams can be, and usually are, benevolent in intent, at least in the minds of their authors. But since the belief that one country can do much good for another country by intervening forcefully in the latter’s internal affairs is almost invariably an illusion in the first place, the entertainment of such dreams is usually no more than another example of the proverbial road to hell, paved with good intentions.
Bureaucracy
Mention was made above of the significance of bureaucracy as one of the factors impeding any sort of intimacy in the relationship between the citizen and the governmental establishment. When the distance between the two becomes too great, it is democracy that suffers, bureaucracy that gains. And this mention calls for a few words of explication.
How to determine the number of human hands actually required for the performance of any given governmental function is not as easy a problem as it appears on the surface to be. Most of those who have served for any length of time in a large government office—or in any large organization, for that matter—will readily confirm, I believe, two observations that this writer carried away from his years in the State Department and the Foreign Service.
The first of these is that the growth of bureaucracy is largely self-engendered, in the sense that only a small part of it derives from the real requirements of the function to be served, the greater part being the product of tendencies and pressures arising within the bureaucratic process itself. The bureaucratic apparatus, in other words, grows, like a
fungus, from purely internal causes, not connected with any real and legitimate need. Such growth is a form of illness in any large clerical organization and is, as such, not only illogical and unnecessary but at times directly detrimental to the ability of the unit in question to serve the purpose for which it was established. The State Department of the years of his service there often used to appear to this writer as a large, poorly designed, and overelaborate machine, the greater part of the energies of which were consumed in the effort to overcome its own internal frictions, the frictions being, of course, the products of over-staffing and bureaucracy. These last mean: more people involved, more internal correspondence, more staff meetings, more levels of authority, more offices to be consulted before anyone could decide anything. I have sometimes insisted that you could set up an American embassy in the middle of nowhere, with no host government to be accredited to, and its staff would be so preoccupied with its internal problems that within a year they would be complaining of shortage of personnel.
Second, it was clear to me then, on the basis of governmental experience, that there did not yet exist any science that could analyze the causes of this disease or design a cure for it. If any such science has yet been developed, I am unaware of it. The only instances known to me where this tendency to uninhibited self-engendered bureaucratic growth has been successfully halted or reduced have been ones where the methods employed were brutal and surgical ones, usually unjust to many of the persons affected, and usually flowing from causes and motives unrelated to the problem itself. I recall being told by our ambassador to one of the East European Communist countries that when the government of that country, for purely political reasons, forced the curtailment of the size of the American embassy staff from eighty-some to fifteen, it was in his estimation the best thing that had ever happened to them. All went better. The remaining few coped nicely with their assigned duties. The U.S. government, left to itself, would, and could, never have effected this improvement. And a particularly unfortunate result of this absence of any science of organization is that when new units have to be created within the governmental apparatus, the bureaucratically bloated existing unit often comes to be taken as the model, so a certain measure of unhealthy growth is built into the new unit from the very start.
It was, and is, of course, not only the federal government that is affected by these tendencies. They are observable as well in smaller governmental entities, such as state, municipal, and local authorities. They make themselves felt in most large and complex nongovernmental offices—industrial, commercial, educational, and charitable. But for obvious reasons they assume a particularly large place in the governmental apparatus of the great country. This is true not just because the legitimate needs, constituting as they usually do the original point of departure for unhealthy bureaucratic growth, have greater dimensions but also because growth of this sort enlarges personnel requirements not just in an arithmetic relation to the original needs but in a geometric one, so that each increase in the real needs produces an even larger proportionate growth in the bureaucratic superstructure. For this reason, the governmental apparatus of the great country grows around itself a thicker and more formidable bureaucratic coating than does the smaller unit. And this, in turn, enhances the isolation of the individual citizen, whose own personal dimensions suffer no proportionate enlargement, and who finds himself even further repelled by this abnormal protective coating of the government.
This phenomenon of bureaucratic enlargement is particularly dangerous in the democratic society, because as the administrative superstructure grows, so—alas—does the number of persons who have a stake in it and an interest in its perpetuation. If it should indeed prove to be true that the only effective way of combatting such growth is the brutal surgical incision, then the democratic government will be the one least likely to master the problem. Aside from the fact that such an approach would bring injustice to a host of innocent people who are not at fault for being employed where they were not really needed, these people are not without means of self-defense. Their numbers are such that they constitute in themselves an appreciable electoral force, and they would, if their positions were seriously threatened, find considerable support for their cause in Congress—an institution which is, incidentally, not without its own bureaucratic crust, and has no greater awareness than does the rest of the government of the causes of this unhappy condition, or the possible cures.
Thus we are safe in assuming that even if an adequate science of large-scale organization were available, and even if the causes and possible cures for bureaucracy were made evident, the only effective remedial measures would be so uncomfortable for everyone concerned that the tendency would be to regard the treatment as more painful than the disease and to leave well enough, or what appears to be well enough, alone. We must, then, learn to see the governmental apparatus of any country as largely helpless in the throes of this particular sort of elephantiasis, and handicapped, accordingly, in its ability to be to the ordinary citizen all that government, in normal conditions, could and should be. But here again, the severity of this problem grows, and grows exponentially, with the size of the country and the government, so that the government and people of the great power are more heavily burdened by this disease than are those of the smaller entity.
Decentralization
It is under the influence of these views about the disadvantages of “bigness” that I have often diverted myself, and puzzled my friends, by wondering how it would be if our country, while retaining certain of the rudiments of a federal government, were to be decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment. I could conceive of something like nine of these republics—let us say, New England; the Middle Atlantic states; the Middle West; the Northwest (from Wisconsin to the Northwest, and down the Pacific coast to central California); the Southwest (including southern California and Hawaii); Texas (by itself); the Old South; Florida (perhaps including Puerto Rico); and Alaska; plus three great self-governing urban regions, those of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—a total of twelve constituent entities. To these entities I would accord a larger part of the present federal powers than one might suspect—large enough, in fact, to make most people gasp.
It would, of course, be pointed out that this would involve many new complexities and not a few inefficiencies. That would indeed be true. The regions thus created would be strikingly varied in character and in the problems they presented for effective government. There would be much room for local innovation and for departure from older national norms. But a case might be made, I think, for the thesis that nothing is more greatly to be feared, in the realm of governmental theory, than the effort to create governmental systems that are logical, uncomplicated, efficient, and vast in scope. That is not the way people themselves are constructed; and a governmental system that strived too hard for these apparent advantages would be bound to do violence to people’s deepest needs.
Let me emphasize that what is suggested here is not a change based on ethnic or racial distinctions. Several of these proposed individual republics—New England, the Old South, the Middle West, and the great urban regions—would embrace within their borders a good cross section of the diversity of cultures, traditions, and ethnic and racial colorations now borne by the country as a whole; yet each of them would be marked by certain peculiar cultural and social qualities that would set it off” from the others. Ease, flexibility, and intimacy of government, not a quest for racial or ethnic uniformity, would be the purpose of such a reform.
A more serious objection to what I have just suggested is that it is too late: that there are no longer any significant sectional differences in America; that the melting-pot process has gone too far; that modern means of communication, notably television and the cult of screened images generally, are destroying local differences and pressing us all into one mold, forcing upon us a national uniformity, making us increasingly less distinguishable one from another. Beyond which, it will be argued, nothing could resist the leveling effect of the great monopolies, constantly growing with the effects of the recent takeover fever, that dominate our national economy. All the forces of modern free I enterprise, we will be told, work in the direction of uniformity—of leveling and equalizing—of the creation of a colorless uniformity of habit, of outlook, and of behavior, before which local and sectional differences in way of life, tradition, and conception have no chance of survival.
Perhaps, perhaps. It would be sad if it were true. But again, perhaps, not all is lost. If sectional differences have indeed been weakened by these forces, they might be reinvigorated, stimulated, and encouraged by the sort of decentralization I have suggested. If traditional and cultural differences are in danger of obliteration, perhaps they could be rescued and sharpened by this very different sort of a framework. Perhaps the interaction among different values, different outlooks, and different goals, which here as elsewhere has served in the past as one of the greatest sources of intellectual and aesthetic fertility, could be allowed once more to fulfill that function.
A pipe dream? Largely, if you will. It is indeed hard to imagine any such changes, bound as they would be to tread painfully on a great many entrenched political interests, having their origin, or even finding any response, in the present American political establishment.”