Centralism Sickens a Century
“The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately.”
—Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson’s statement above expresses the central ideal of American politics—that people are not generally to be ruled over by others, but should make their own decisions and order their own lives.
While that may sound relatively innocuous, it’s a principle respected by few rulers during the century just ended. Even in the Western democracies, there developed quite a taste for booting and whipping the masses. In socialist Europe, bureaucrat-ridden Japan, and left-wing bastions across America, proponents of the welfare state, government-run “industrial policies,” and order-giving elites like . America’s National Endowment for the Arts or Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry have insisted that spur-equipped bureaucrats and planners are just what society needs.
Then there’s the rest of the world. In places like centrally planned India, collectivist Tanzania, and other nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, decision making was concentrated in just a few hands for most of the twentieth century. .And in Communist paradises like the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, and North Korea, the citizenry spent most of this century being brutally ridden by a small master class dispensing orders from Party headquarters.
The amount of leading-by-the-nose that went on in such places is mind boggling Scholar Robert Conquest, whom we quiz on page 42, has written that in the course of a year a typical Soviet farm was targeted with more than 5,000 “directives” from central offices. Since picayune control of this sort was not practical, the order givers and order getters mostly just pretended to be responding to each other.
The extreme economic and political centralism imposed by Communist regime: was more than just ineffective, though. It was also, right from the beginning, deadly. In the Black Book of Communism, Nicolas Werth reports that in just two months in 1918, that Bolsheviks executed more than twice as many political opponents as the Czars had in tin previous century.
And they were just warming up. In subsequent years, the Russians—followed by the Chinese, Cambodians, and other leftists—repeatedly used secret police, labor camps, induced famines, and other measures to break resistance to their plans. Collectively, Communist bosses killed 100 million people between 1917 and the 1990s.
For the record, this was many times more than the millions done in by Hitler. The Communists and the Nazis were kissing cousins, though, in their insistence on central control. As Michael Ignatieff noted recently in The New Republic, both camps “hated moral and political individualism: the idea that a nations destiny should depend on the sovereign judgment of separate individuals.”
The megalomania of Communist rulers made the twentieth century the most murderous in history. All told, professor Rudolph Rummel has estimated, nearly 170 million civilians were killed by governments during the 1900s. It took extreme centralizations o power to produce terror, and deadly error, on that massive scale.
So: If someone looked at this magazine’s cover and assumed the “Mistake of the Century” had to be “Communism,” he would be perfectly justified. But we suggest Communism was only the worst aspect of a twentieth-century disease that struck more broadly. Even in places that avoided Communism, a tremendous centralization of political and economic power occurred during the 1900s. The data on pages 15 and 47 document some of this build-up in the United States. And in our first three feature articles—on school consolidation, city planning, and big business—we show how widely die centralizing mania spread in recent generations.
In the U.S., though, there was eventually a backlash against these attempts by elites to hoard power. Popular disdain first appeared in a visceral way in the presidential candidacy of George Wallace. Americans were “fed up,” said Wallace in 1968, “with strutting pseudo-intellectuals lording over them, writing guidelines, telling them they have not got sense enough to know what is best for their children or sense enough to run their own schools and hospitals and local domestic institutions.” Roaring this raw complaint, Wallace won 10 million working-class votes and shocked the professor/lawyer/journalist/activist elites of the Boston-Washington corridor, who thought they had won the battle over who was going to run America when they got their way on the New Deal, civil rights legislation, and Great Society programs.
Ronald Reagan and company took this same chafing against intellectual authoritarianism and rule from the center and added philosophical and empirical depth. This wasn’t hard, for by the late 1970s evidence abounded that bureaucratic rule was hasting disastrous results.
A recent study for Congress’s Joint Economic Committee presents a broad overview of the trends. The authors compare economic growth to government growth in 23 advanced nations over the years 1960-1996. They discover that the countries with the smallest increases in government enjoyed vastly better economic outcomes than the countries with the largest increases in government. Zeroing in on the most economically successful countries, the researchers then find that GDP grew much more rapidly in each nation during periods when government was shrinking than when it was expanding.
Damning findings like these didn’t result in any sudden rollback of government centralization, but slowly a tide began to turn. In the ’80s, Reagan enacted large tax cuts and put the brakes on new regulator)’ and spending programs in Washington. He lent new intellectual respectability to the principle of devolving government power to more local levels.
Then in the ’90s welfare reform arrived, and New Deal farm subsidies were phased out (though partly replaced with “temporary” slush funds). And the rejuvenated private economy, combined with improved fiscal discipline in Washington, actually allowed federal spending to become a smaller portion of the economy—falling from 24 percent in 1983, to 22 percent in 1990, to under 20 percent this year.
Careful though: While spending is down, federal taxing is actually at a post-war high right now (see page 47). That’s how our politicians got rid of the deficit.
And it’s a fact that residents of the federal flea hive continue to be dangerously money and power hungry. In addition to its $1.8 trillion budget, our national government will impose on Americans $800 billion in other expenses this year-—the costs to citizens and businesses of complying with its various edicts. That burden of central government totals to $2.6 trillion—or a stunning $10,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country, most of it hidden in higher product costs and invisible taxes.
Moreover, while some progress has been made in resisting economic centralization, victories against over-centralization in the cultural realm have been rarer. Judicial fiat, educational homogenization, and moral imperialism now pose serious threats to American self-determination. Federal authoritarianism now often comes dressed in civil rights rhetoric or some other progressive mantle, but it’s oppressive just the same.
The real engine tugging America away from its mid-century flirtation with centralism, however, is not new politics or changed convictions in government, but rather new forces in America’s dominant private sector. As we show throughout this issue, fresh riches, liberating technology, and shifting tastes are increasingly nudging American society away from one-size-fits-all planning and control.
For a good metaphor of how the last half of the twentieth century has proceeded, think of phone service. For decades, we had a single, massive phone network, mostly under the control of one company, which funneled all calls through a relatively small number of centralized switchboards. Calls were expensive, and there was exactly one choice in phones: that Western Union rotary desktop model shaped like a large wedge of cheese, available in black only.
At the close of the century, on the other hand, the fastest growing phone service was cellular-—built on thousands of small towers scattered across the fruited plain. In 1999, there were something like 75,000 separate transmission cells in the U.S., operated by nearly 40 different companies. Yet these decentralized cells were capable of finding and connecting with individuals nearly anywhere they might roam on the continent. The choices in hardware and services? Almost innumerable.
If you’d asked an expert in 1900 whether he thought a reliable and inexpensive communications system could be cobbled together out of thousands of Mom and Pop antennas dropped on farmsteads, hidden in church steeples, and stashed on apartment building roofs, all coordinated by a crazy quilt of unrelated companies using differing technologies, and dialed up by consumers from battery-operated phones that are sometimes given away as doorprizes, he’d have checked your breath and told you patronizingly, “In our industrial world, complicated tasks can’t be accomplished in that sort of disorganized way.”
But he would have been wrong. Not only in communications but in many other areas as well, problem-solving units built from lots of small, independent cells have trumped the single grand solution as a way of achieving intricate ends.
The general superiority of decentralized problem-solving reflects some iron rules of nature. Even a half-inebriated crowd can manage to empty any football stadium in a matter of minutes. But as Arthur de Vany points out in Behavioral Scientist, plotting those 50-100,000 exits from some master position is literally “an intractable computational problem.” You could cover the field from goalpost to goalpost with hardware and programmers, and you’d still never be able to direct that (comparatively simple I process from above. There are just too many variables. Yet leave each slob to himself, and he’ll be opening the door to his Chew before the scoreboard lights are cool. He may not realize he’s “exhibiting large-scale adaptive intelligence in the absence of central direction,” as de Vany puts it, but he is.
So why are many people so distrustful of decentralized processes that they’ll often sacrifice their autonomy and freedom for some centralized solution instead? Perhaps they’re thinking too much, and observing too little. People should recognize, de Vany suggests, that decentralized problem-solving is “ubiquitous throughout nature and society.”
As part of preparing this issue, I read a new book called Ants at Work, written by a Stanford entomologist named Deborah Gordon. For 17 years, Gordon has intensively studied a large colony of harvester ants to discover how these tens of thousands of tiny creatures coordinate the many specialized tasks essential to colony health—food harvest and storage, garbage toting, child care, tunnel making, war fighting, etc. Who’s directing the show to make sure the right work gets done?
The answer, Gordon reports, is nobody. Each colony “operates without any central or hierarchical control…. No insect issues commands to another.” These complex societies are built instead, she demonstrates, on thousands of simple decisions made by individual creatures, with the many micro-decisions melding together to yield an efficient macro-result. Gordon, like de Vany, notes that this pattern of complex problems being solved by small actors working without direction is a common one all across nature.
The fact that humans are much more sophisticated than ants suggests we have even less need for caste and central authority in most tasks. And humans living in America are especially inclined against centralism. This begins with our roots in England—one of the first places to reject the idea that a king could do whatever he wanted. In England, even the humblest landowner could forbid the monarch from trespassing on his private property. Overlaid upon this English tradition in parts of America was the continental European principle of “subsidiarity,” which dictated that any social task should be performed by the smallest unit possible—by the family before the neighborhood, by local government before the central state.
From these beginnings, Americans raised the concepts of individual sovereignty, local control, and self-determination to new heights. They didn’t just pay lip service to these ideas, but acted on them daily in many practical ways. During the Battle of King’s Mountain in the Revolutionary War, American Colonel Isaac Shelby instructed his men, “When we encounter the enemy, don’t wait for the word of command. Let each one of you be your own officer.” His scattered backwoods marksmen went on to defeat a larger force of regimented soldiers. Throughout the nineteenth century, authority in America remained highly decentralized. The French observer Tocqueville pronounced himself “more struck by the innumerable multitude of little undertakings” in America than by any large, coordinated projects.
This toleration for each man operating as his own officer, and the tendency toward many small enterprises rather than a few grand ones, continues in the U.S. to the present day. A study recently reported in the Wall Street Journal found that 90 cent of Americans admire independent entrepreneurs. In big-business worshipping Japan, by contrast, only 8 percent of adults consider it prestigious to start a company.
As our world continues to move beyond the machine age, every society that wishes to prosper will have to from factory-style command and control toward more local and less directed forms of organization. The U.S. made a good start during the 1980s and ’90s, recoiling from many of the concentrating tendencies that grew up earlier in the century. In economics, in social life, in politics, we have begun to pull away (to varying degrees) from the damaging nostrums of centralism. This has left us much healthier than some of the other nations tempted in the same direction. We are, however, not yet free of what was a heavy sickness.
One of the best ways to complete our recovery would hand off more federal assignments and authority to private institutions and individuals, or more local governments. And governments at all levels ought to concentrate on offering Americans choices rather than edicts. Then we’ll enjoy the natural richness, efficiency, and freedom of society without dictators.