In a comment to yesterday’s post, our reader Jason cited an article by Claire Berlinski, in which she points out one of the cardinal weaknesses of our form of government — to wit, that the constant demand of election cycles make officials focus almost exclusively on the short-term problem of holding their offices.
[The problem] is the mismatch between democratic time and the world’s growing complexity. Modern democracies face problems—climate change, migration, AI regulation, aging, fiscal sustainability—with long time horizons and a planetary scale. They’re governed by institutions that respond to short-term and local electoral incentives. The result is a widening gap between what needs to be done and what can be done democratically.
This is certainly true, and it has for decades now been one of NRx’s chief critiques of democracy (though far from the only one). But the time-horizon problem has a complementary aspect as well: not only is our system constrained to think in time-frames that are too short to allow effective long-range planning, or to commit reliably to sticking to such plans, but its mechanism for decision-making — legislative processes that bog down constantly in factional disputes, commonly result in ineffective compromises, and which are often delayed and hampered even further by appeals to the courts — means that it cannot possibly respond swiftly and accurately enough to events and crises that, in an increasingly interconnected world of exponentially accelerating technology and communication, require faster and faster decision-making.
I wrote about this compression of time and space twelve years ago, using a metaphor borrowed from physics describing the behavior of gases under compression. (The post is here, if you’d like to read it. See also this post, from 2024.)
As volatility and the rate of change increase, it becomes more and more difficult for systems and institutions that operate at a constant pace — the legislative processes of large democracies, for example — to respond effectively to innovations and crises…
As this happens, the scale and scope of government, and the depth and breadth of the administrative and legislative tasks that government must perform, increase rapidly as well. But the capacity of a finite number of human legislators, administrators, and civil servants to operate this expanding hierarchical apparatus, across all its parts in real time, does not “scale up” at the same rate, and so the ability of these increasingly vast hierarchies to respond flexibly and effectively to accelerating change falls farther and farther behind.
In short: it should be increasingly obvious that our antique system of government is not only inadequate in terms of sheer scale for the management of an empire of the size and diversity of the United States and its vassals, but that it is increasingly inadequate — in not one, but two different ways — to address the challenges presented by acceleration and temporality.
How can this be solved? (Something has to happen, after all, and so it will.) Given that acceleration causes “decision space” to shrink, then either the scale of that which must be governed must shrink, in order to reduce the load on central authority (breakup and subsidiarianism), or, somehow, the locus of decision-making has to find a way to operate at far greater speed. Given that legislative processes at human scale involving thousands of Congress-critters and their staffs (and PACs and lawyers and lobbyists and courts) cannot possibly move much faster than they already do, then the current arrangement must surely break down (as it seems already to be doing). When that failure becomes impossible to ignore, then if the system is to continue to operate at continental (and arguably global) scale, the radius of practical sovereignty will almost certainly have to shrink, likely by orders of magnitude, in order to be responsive enough to cope.
What will that sovereign look like? Will it even be human? Or will it be whatever AI is about to become?
7 Comments
Your post begs the question of whether legislation is the answer to all, or most, or even some of what you see as the problems and crises confronting our society. It’s just possible that it was never intended to be.
That’s a good point, JD, and the answer is that of course it wasn’t; the scope of government today would have been unimaginable in the founding era. (Which is why one of the possibilities I mentioned was “breakup and subsidiarianism”.)
But your question raises another: was the centralization of power that we have seen in the past couple of centuries — the gathering of all sovereignty into the federal Leviathan — inevitable? Was it “baked into” the Founding itself?
And a couple more: what systems of government can operate flexibly enough to be successful, as the speed and interconnectivity of the world accelerate? And at what possible scale?
Subsidiarity is the obvious fallback position. And the truly efficacious, efficient system to begin with. This may be seen in the routine responses to regional catastropes like hurricanes. The Feds are great, usually – they are after all staffed mostly by normal humans with normal beneficent human feelings and intentions toward their connationals. But as compared with the locals, the scratch respnders from near and far, and the churches, they are a day late and a dollar or two short.
Empires must subsidiate, hard, if they are to retain that elasticity of response that got them imperial power to begin with.
Empires fail but very seldom disband or relax. I suspect this is because the pain of failure is not felt by the small group of people who control the central power and could disband or relax it. Or they feel the pain too late for their reforms to save the empire. For example, the pain any individual felt from the recent government shutdown seems to have been inversely correlated with their power to end the shutdown (or fix the underlying problems).
The failure of an empire necessarily causes unofficial subsidiarity, or feudalism if you like. But I don’t think a failing empire can decide to half-dissolve itself. It will just go on and pretend to be what it was until it absolutely cannot.
Rome managed well for a while with a “soft subsidiarity” approach that preserved for its vassals, as much as possible, local language, customs, mores, and some attenuated sovereignty.
In part, though, that was because the realities of logistics, monitoring, and communication made total real-time control unrealistic.
Now, that’s changed, and the temptation is much harder to resist. I think subsidiarian challenges to centralized power will be fought at every step, and that power will only be yielded under irresistible pressure, either of decay or of arms.
Thanks for the hat tip Malcolm. I wish I had something profound to add, but really Dr.Smith, Kristor, JDinPA, and yourself have said it all. Simply based on the Dr. Johnson principle that it’s better to be reminded than instructed though, let me point out that the best thing during this approaching new age is perhaps to just live lives of personal integrity (as much as is possible in this vale of tears). Since we’re not God, there’s really not much else we can do. Promoting intergenerational family solidarity, building up our personal libraries consisting not of cyberspace but paper and cardboard, helping out friends and neighbors – that’s the game.
Right, Jason. As my daughter likes to say: control the controllables.