The Case for Decentralization

America is my country. It's a large chunk of the North American continent, it's the people I grew up around, our shared history, and the shared customs. The United States, on the other hand, is a legal fiction. There's a difference between America and the U.S. America is a collection of people, places, and things I love, while the US exists on paper.

America is also too big for its own good under the present system. There are over 330 million Americans submitting to the authority of the US under an idealistic hope that one government can serve the basic needs and interests of 330 million people. The evidence shows that it obviously can't. No matter which administration is in power, there will always be critics on the opposite side of the political spectrum who feel threatened when people come to power who don't represent them. Republicans under Obama were convinced he would deploy troops to take all the guns away whereas today, Democrats under Trump are finally starting to agree that the office of the Presidency has too much power.

The bottom line is this: there are 330 million Americans with different political agendas, different sets of values, and different local sub-cultures. The two Establishment parties and the two leading third parties (L.P. and Green) all represent competing ideologies and visions for government and society. There's no way that any 1 national government can adequately or fairly provide for everyone's interests when there are so many people and competing interests scrambling for the same table scraps.

The conservative majority in Texas cling to their God and guns and they flirt with secession. Progressives in San Francisco want a high minimum wage and and single-payer health care coverage. In northern California and southern Oregon, rightwing militia members and liberal NPR pundits are United in their desire to form a state called Jefferson, since neither Sacramento nor Salem adequately represents their interests. Let them all have what they want!

The main reason people with opposing political ideas spend so much time, money, and effort fighting and demonizing each other is because they're all bound together under one corrupt government that doesn't serve their interests. Moreover, both think the reason the US government doesn't represent them is because the other party controls it (for now). Instead of trying to kill each other in this bitter marriage, they should just get a divorce and part ways.

Americans will never be unified on hot-button issues. Instead of large political minorities trying to impose one-size-fits-all policies on 330 million people, they should decentralize government to the state, county, or city level so that each independent autonomous government can best represent its local constituency and respond swiftly to local problems. Local problems shouldn't have to wait on Supreme Court cases to be resolved when locals can find practical, speedy solutions that meet their needs. Think of how much quicker and easier it is to propose a new bill or ballot measure on the municipal level than it is to get a bill passed into law through the US Congress.

One example of partial decentralization is China in the 20th century. For nearly 50 years, China was one nation under 4 jurisdictions: the People's Republic (the mainland), the Republic (Taiwan), and then Hong Kong and Macao under the British. The result of this decentralization is that the latter 3 parts of China were spared from the untold miseries brought by the Maoist regime: the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution. Thousands of Chinese drowned trying to escape to Hong Kong or Taiwan.

There are Americans with different ideologies and values, each with their own subjective idea of what tyranny is. Instead of subjecting all 330 million Americans to the will of one ruling minority, let America govern itself at the local level.

If the U.S. were to be dissolved, the following American traditions will live on because they're so embedded in American culture: Valentine's Day dinners, 4th of July barbeques, trick-or-treating, artsy vegan restaurants and deep-fried county fairs, the National Guard, sending kids to school, Scouting programs for youth, eating turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, and celebrating Christmas by putting trees in houses and going broke at the shopping mall.

America and the US are not the same. Let America decentralize and truly govern itself. And if there were to arise communities and areas that leave self-government entirely to the individual citizen, it wouldn't be a tragedy...