Forget Left/Right. It's really Big and inhuman vs, Small and Human

One aspect of progressive politics that gets little notice in the MSM and among liberals themselves is Decentralization.

The Decentralization movement advocates for a return to traditional human scale community-based economics and government and other institutions. It's an extension of the "Small is Beautiful" philosophy that emerged in the 1970.

Before you say "Whoaaaaa. That's really naive and unliberal," take a deep breath. It is an approach that is worth exploring more.

It's got many aspects and implications, and is more a loose knit network than an actual movement. Many of you are decentralists.

But at its base it's really very simple. Economies and government work best when the centers of power are closer to people and where the decisions and interactions are on a human level. One sunmmation is "economics as if people matter."

It's the opposite of the phony left-right dichotomy that passes for political labeling today.

It reflects the real battle that underlies most issues today, which is the crushing and oppressive size of modern corporations and other institutions.

In a political sense this is important, because it is actually a way to bridge the gap between the left and the right. That's because it provides space for both the "we're all in this together" community instincts of libertalism, and the individual freedom and flexibility of HONEST conservatism and librtarians.

If you're interested in finding out more, the E.F. Schuimacher Society website is a good starting point. Schumacher was the economist who originally coined the term "small is beautiful."

http://www.schumachersociety.org/


Here's one excerpt from a good overview:
http://www.schumachersociety.org/frameset_decentralist.html


AN OVERVIEW OF DECENTRALISM

by Kirkpatrick Sale

...I am afraid that such people are victims of what I would call the flat-earth delusion of politics. That's when you see all political thought on a straight line, with Left over here and Right over there:

LEFT---------------------------------------------RIGHT

But as you all know, we've given up the idea of a flat earth - most of us have, anyway - and the appropriate way to look at politics today is with a round-earth perspective. In that, you see, the Left makes up one hemisphere and the Right the other.

And the important thing about it is that, at the poles, the Left and the Right are not so far apart - because at one pole you have the authoritarians of both camps, the Stalinist Left and the Hitlerian Right, for example, and there's not much to choose between them; then down in the middle, along the equator, you have the squishy middle-ground liberal-moderate types of both Left and Right, far apart; and at the other pole you have the antiauthoritarians, the decentralists of all stripes, anti-big government, antistatist, communitarian, the anarchocommunalists and communitarians and communards and anarchists on the Left, and the libertarians and Jeffersonians and individualists on the Right, and they're really not so far apart.

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Let me start by suggesting some of the things that decentralists generally agree on, whatever part of the round earth they come from.

First, big is bad - the corollary of Schumacher's small is beautiful. The centralized state, particularly the mass-society state of the 20th century, is inherently a failure: it is authoritarian and anti-liberty, imposing checks and laws on all individual actions; it is hierarchical and arbitrary, with power at the top and subservience for the great majority below; it is bureaucratic in order to function at all, but it functions poorly nonetheless because bureaucracies are always inefficient and clumsy and self-perpetuating; it is undemocratic, because it is too big to allow direct face-to-face decision making and substitutes various forms of representation, all of which take power from the individual.

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But to continue with what we agree upon, we decentralists, about why big government is bad... it is dangerous, inevitably dangerous, because it favors war, welcomes war - war is the health of the state, as Randolph Bourn put it - and is not afraid to use its citizens as cannon fodder; and it is technological, continually amassing more and more complicated technology of the kind that increases its power and control over citizens, increases its ability to centralize all authority.

In my book Human Scale...I have a chapter called "The Law of Government Size." It is lengthy, but it's easy enough to reduce its lesson to a few words: "Economic and social misery increases in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation or state."

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Enough, then, about big government - that is the place where all decentralists begin, the common ground for all the rest of our shared understanding.

The next, following, point of agreement is that power should be diffused, and to the lowest level possible - which means to a bioregional level, and beyond that to a community level, a neighborhood level, a family level, an individual level. Nothing should be decided at any level beyond that where the people effected get to have their say and participate in carrying it out. Following from that, as a next point of agreement, is that the community is the most important human institution in the life of the species - the small, place-based community, where each member is known to every other. It is primarily there that power should reside - social, economic, political, whatever.

And finally, also following, liberty is not the daughter of order but the mother. In a true decentralist society, freedom comes first, upon which are then built the needs and obligations of individuals one to another, and thus the order and harmony of the community and the society at large. Liberty is the mother of order.

Now having said all that, I am obliged to confront the question of where we decentralists stand today - together, communalist Left and libertarian Right. But we both must recognize that this is, without question, the Age of Authoritarianism. ...The 20th century is the era of the large and powerful nation - state, a condition only made worse by the fact that it is also the era of the global corporation, superpowerful entities that have all the characteristics of the state, except any vestige of responsibility, and operate with their own free - wheeling authoritarian ways. Yes, what we face today, in both political and economic spheres, is Authoritarianism Triumphant.

And yet - and yet - these are facts: decentralism is the basic human condition; decentralism is the historic norm for human societies; decentralism is deeply in the American tradition; and, despite everything, decentralism is alive and well today. I want to expand briefly on each of those points. ...

MORE

Not sure I understand that one.

You run into them in science fiction stories from the late 30's to the early 1950's. But after Sputnik, people got caught up in thinking that the job of science fiction was to describe what the future *would* be like -- which generally meant like the present, only bigger -- and that utopian element pretty much dropped out.

I can't help thinking that the same thing has been true of society as a whole. We've been mesmerized by the rather unpleasant, dehumanized future we see rushing down on us to the point where it's become difficult to imagine anything different.

The one greatest obstacle I see to bringing together the communitarian left and the libertarian right is the right's adherence to extreme, every-man-for-himself individualism. I don't see a possibility for any kind of viable decentralized society that isn't based on community.

I also gather that is is mathematically inevitable for wealth and power to become increasingly concentrated unless explicit social mechanisms are in place to redistribute wealth downward and break up concentrations of power. The optimal form of such mechanisms for a society like ours still has to be determined (the income tax isn't working that well, and we can't go back to potlatches), but if the current arguments over intellectual property lead to a reconception of the idea of property itself, that would be a good start.

Like any other way of thinking, pure decentralization is more of an ideal to strive for, rather than a pure solution.

It's more a direction to strive for. One of the problems with liberalism, is not the notion of community implied in liberalism.
Rather it has become associated with Big Government and abusive bureaucracy. That is a valid criticism. But a more decentralized form of liberalism could resonate more with people who are traditional conservatives.

Likewise with capitalism. Businesses have to be more accountable to their customers the closer they are associatd with them. It's when Mammoth corporations supplant small and mid-sized businesses that problems arise.

any thoughts?

We need to spread the message that the most important thing you need to do is to join your local Dem Party organization and participate. Nothing will happen from the top down.

The Democratic Party is pretty impervious to the grassroots. Money and power speak a lot louder than idealism and enthusiasm. The Democrats may not be totally corrupt, as the Republicans are, but they're corrupt enough that the grassroots can't get a toehold.

What made the New Deal possible in the 30's is that there were a lot of people and groups well to the left of the Democratic Party. They both put pressure on the Democrats and also provided cover for Roosevelt by making him seem moderate rather than radical.

Since that time, the right has systematically destroyed everybody to the left of mainstream Democrats -- communists, then socialists, then even left-liberals. They've been very clever about it and totally ruthless. They're currently trying to get ut to the point where even Joe Lieberman appears slightly left of center.

The only way I know to spring ourselves out of that trap is to establish new left-wing groups and ideals that the right can't touch. And the best way to do that is by systematically decoupling ourselves from the big-government, bureaucratic, paternalistic New Deal model of liberalism. But that means going outside the Democratic Party.

I'm not in favor of establishing third parties. I think we should continue to support the best available Democratic candidates for office. But we should start to put our primary energies into non-party institutions to push for an agenda of communal decentralization. Once we get up some momentum, we can start to pull the Democratic Party along with us.

We have a long journey and there isn't a roadmap.

The problem, IMO is that the "political debate" has become so narriow that new ideas -- or resurrecting good opld ideas -- are totally left out of the equation.

It also creates false dichotomies and phony conflicts. IMO the oppressive nature of institutions that have gotten too big for their britches is what a lot of people feel. The Corporate Right Wing has made it seem like they are the allies of the values of ordinary Americans, when in fact they are part of thje problem that boppresses people.

I am bookmarking this thread for reflection and future reference.

Thanks!!!

WE NEED TO BE STRONG!

I wasn't really thinking so much in partisan terms at all, although the Democrats should be a logical home for decentralization.

I was referring to reasserting human-scale values in all aspects of society. IMO that's one way that "liberalism" and progressive ideals could relate more to honest conservative/libertarians.

Gigantisism and "bigness for its own sake" is at the root of many problems that bothers both liberals and traditionalists.