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Excerpt from Toward an Expanded Democracy

DECENTRALISM FILE

Richard M. Nixon

Richard Nixon (1913-1994) was an American politician and President from 1969 to 1974. The most remembered parts of his career were, as a California Senator, his aggressive prosecution of alleged Communists in the U.S. government, and as President, his tough Cold War stance against the Soviet Union, his recognition of the People’s Republic of China, his “New Federalism” program to give federal funds to state governments, his proposed Family Assistance Plan (an expanded cash support plan that failed in Congress), his conversion of a conscription based to a volunteer military, and, finally, his personal involvement in the Watergate campaign scandal of 1972 that led to his resignation from the Presidency in the face of certain Impeachment.

One would scarcely think of Richard Nixon as a friend of decentralization. The presidential reorganization commission that he launched in his first term (the Ash Commission) had no interest in that idea, and his New Federalism proposal had the reverse effect of making state governments ever more dependent on the Federal government.

However, in the early stages of his 1968 campaign he delivered a perceptive and eloquent national radio address, largely written by his aide Raymond K. Price Jr., who was something of a decentralist believer. It remains an eloquent statement of decentralist thinking, even though that thinking made little or no appearance in the Nixon Presidency.

“No great movement, no trend, takes, takes place in a vacuum. The spread of violence and disorder is obviously no accident; obviously, it has roots in the pattern of current history.

These roots are many and complex. But I am suggesting tonight that one of the central roots is this: the steady erosion of the sense of person, of a place within the system, that we have allowed to accompany the development of our mass society.

As everything around him has gotten bigger, the individual has grown smaller by comparison. He’s been lost in the mass of things, his voice drowned out in the chorus.

The machinery of government seems increasingly remote, increasingly incapable of meeting his needs when action is needed. The community itself begins to appear less relevant, and its standards and restraints become less effective. He feels that the system has left him.

One reason people are shouting so loudly today is that it’s so far from where they are to where the power is. If we fail to bring power closer – if we persist in treating complex local needs from remote centers we’ll be repeating tomorrow the mistakes that already have added dangerously to the frictions of today…..

After a third of a century of concentrating power, an old idea is winning new acceptance: the idea that what we need is a dispersal of power. What we need is not one leader, but many leaders; not one center of power, but many centers of power…

Power has been flowing to Washington for a third of a century, and now, it’s time to start it flowing back – to the states, to the communities, and most important, to the people…

The time is now for an expanded democracy, of moving government closer to the people, of breaking massive problems into manageable pieces. This way the people can participate, they can be involved, their voices can be heard and heeded…

What we need is nothing less than a revolutionary new approach. Government hasn’t kept up with the times. The times have been rapidly changing, but government has been only growing. As it’s structured today, government simply can’t keep abreast of the mushrooming complexity of the country. Power has to be spread out; otherwise it can’t be responsive.”

(“Toward An Expanded Democracy”, national radio address, June 27, 1968.)

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