Tom Brokaw looks at America and sees the problem: too much local government. It's just too darned inefficient. He points to the Dakotas and the preponderance of universities up here in the Northern Plains:
In my native Great Plains, North and South Dakota have a combined population of just under 1.5 million people, and in each state the rural areas are being depopulated at a rapid rate. Yet between them the two Dakotas support 17 colleges and universities. They are a carry-over from the early 20th century when travel was more difficult and farm families wanted their children close by during harvest season.
I know this is heresy, but couldn’t the two states get a bigger bang for their higher education buck if they consolidated their smaller institutions into, say, the Dakota Territory College System, with satellite campuses but a common administration and shared standards?
If you read Brokaw's entire piece you'll see that his complaint isn't that we've got too much government, but that we've got too much local government and not enough state and national government. In Brokaw's mind, efficiency, brought on by consolidation and centralization, is the hallmark of good government.
Patrick Deneen begs to differ.
Brokaw - that chronicler of “The Greatest Generation” that did so much to dismantle the localities of our nation in the oil and auto rush of the 1950’s - sees only inefficiencies and antiquated resistance to “progress” or “evolution.” Quite remarkably, his short memory overlooks our recent experience with $140/barrel oil, and the sudden “new” experience of travel not being quite so easy as we’d grown accustomed to in roughly 30-40 years - a very short time in human history, and one that hardly justifies dismantling those local communities that pre-existed the age of oil and will be desperately needed when we depart that short-lived era. But perhaps more importantly, these institutions are the starved remnants of a period of far greater self-government and the places where a sense of common weal and public good could be articulated by actual citizens. While largely eviscerated by the logic of our age, our impulse should not be to further dismantle them, but to strengthen those local places that still exist while thinking inventively and experimentally to create new places where a felt-sense of self-government can be fostered and cultivated. We should reject calls for “efficiency” and instead install in its place calls for “citizenship.”
Indeed, if anything should be learned from our current crisis, it is that the very apparent “efficiencies” of larger and more consolidated entities actually decrease our capacity to govern ourselves.
Read the whole thing.
Is it any wonder that as our government and economy have succumbed to ever increasing centralization, that the feelings of inefficacy and the inevitable apathy that follows have risen? The notion that our lives are governed by impersonal forces beyond our control has taken hold in many minds, and has done so with considerable justification. It is in these "inefficient" local governments, city councils, county boards, school boards, etc., that the habits of citizenship are cultivated. To eliminate them is to be penny wise and citizenship foolish.
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