Self-Government

Start with something most people around here already believe: the decisions that shape your life are made too far away, by people who will never meet you.

The office that decides whether your road gets fixed is not on your road. The board that closed the school never sat in its gymnasium. The company that owns half the housing in the county answers to shareholders who could not find the county on a map. Whatever divides people politically, the experience of being governed from a distance, by institutions insulated from the results, is close to universal. So is the suspicion that it does not have to be this way. This text takes that suspicion seriously. More seriously, maybe, than the people who usually voice it.

The suspicion has a long pedigree, and not a radical one. Tocqueville, touring the country in the 1830s, thought the most remarkable thing in it was not the federal government but the township: ordinary people meeting to run their own schools, roads, and disputes, acquiring the habit of self-rule by practicing it. Wendell Berry has spent a lifetime arguing that a community is not a market or a voting bloc but a membership, people bound to a place and to one another, and that nothing administered from far away ever loves what it administers. Neither man is anyone’s idea of an extremist. Both understood that self-government is not a slogan about voting every four years. It is a practice, and practices atrophy when someone else performs them for you.

The trouble with the instinct, for the people who usually invoke it, is that it does not stop where it is supposed to. If a decision belongs to the people it affects, that principle is not exhausted by complaints about Washington. It applies with equal force to the statehouse that overrides the town, the county seat that ignores the hollow, the absentee landlord, the distant employer. Followed honestly, the logic of self-governance keeps going until decisions actually reach the people who live with their consequences, and it does not much care whose ox that gores along the way.

Nor is the capacity in question hypothetical. Neighbors already coordinate disaster response before any agency arrives. Volunteer fire departments already protect a vast share of this country. Churches, granges, unions, and burial societies once handled, voluntarily and locally, much of what was later centralized and made worse. The competence for self-rule sits in every community, mostly idle, like a well-kept tool nobody is permitted to pick up.

The honest objections deserve honest answers. The first is order: without authority, what keeps it? Mostly, the same thing that keeps it now. Enforcement touches a sliver of human conduct; the rest is held together by relationships, reputation, and the plain fact that people who must face each other tomorrow behave differently than strangers. Distant authority does not create that order. It free-rides on it, and frequently corrodes it, by teaching people that responsibility for their neighbors belongs to a department. The second objection is the small-town tyrant, and anyone who grew up in a small place knows he exists. But notice what makes him survivable: he is small. He can be seen, named, organized against, or walked away from. Concentrated power offers none of those exits. The remedy for local domination is not a larger dominator further off. It is keeping power distributed enough, and participation open enough, that nobody can lock the room, which is a design problem free people have solved many times.

There is an old name for the position this argument arrives at: that people can run their own lives through voluntary cooperation, that power belongs with those it affects, that nobody is fit to rule anyone else. The name is on the front of this site, carrying a century of caricature, most of it upside down. Nobody is required to adopt it, and the work matters more than the word. But if you have read this far nodding, the distance between your instincts and ours is shorter than either of us was told.