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OPINION | Covid-19 has exposed the weakness of the US federal government.

2020-07-02T22:42:16.473Z


For many, the covid-19 pandemic has exposed the weakness of our federal government. The question is what could be done about it and how could it be done in a way that strengthens the demo…


Editor's Note: David Stasavage, author of the new book "The Decline and Rise of Democracy," is Dean of Social Sciences at New York University and Professor in the Department of Politics at the same university. The opinions expressed in this comment are yours; See more opinion at CNNe.com/opinion.

(CNN) - For many, the covid-19 pandemic has exposed the weakness of our federal government. The question is what could be done about it and how could it be done in a way that strengthens democracy instead of undermining it. There are several paths that we could take in response to this crisis, and only one of them is desirable: strengthening the federal government by first making investments to reduce mistrust among citizens.

The US has a form of government where a large part of the power rests with the state and local authorities, even when compared to many other contemporary democracies such as France or the United Kingdom. This is a product of the way our country was first colonized by Europeans, often in small communities in the middle of a vast desert where strong central control, whether from England or from the colony capitals, simply did not was doable.

This helped pave the way not only for an American tradition of robust individualism but also for an early form of democracy for free white men, based on local control with a weak center.

There was nothing unique or miraculous about the pattern of early democracy in the US. Before the European conquest, Native American societies in the forests of eastern North America had been organized in exactly the same way, and the same had happened. with many other societies throughout history, from ancient Mesopotamia to pre-colonial Africa.

The lesson in all of these societies was simple: place power in small communities and minimize central control to avoid autocracy. In my new book, I show how widespread this phenomenon of early democracy was.

Now, the great challenge for all democracies with such decentralized institutions is that sometimes coordination and central control are really useful, for example, to provide external defense or to facilitate economic development, or perhaps even in the face of a pandemic to ensure that nurses do not have to use garbage bags instead of standard protective equipment. Actually, having an effective core state can be positive.

In the US today we are in the process of learning how 40 years of an ideology bent on weakening our government "in Washington" has eroded central power just when we could have used it to provide a coordinated response to covid-19. So what does this mean for the future of our democracy?

The potential risk of greater central control could lead to the decline of democracy and the rise of an autocracy. Throughout history, famine, plague, and war emergencies have given potential autocra a window to assert themselves, to build strong central state institutions, and dispense with any need to consult people. Today, from Hungary to Cambodia, autocrats hope that the current pandemic will produce just that result.

To consider what history says about this possibility, there is the case of Prussia. Before the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which spread violence, famine and plague, the government in Prussia resembled that of many other areas of Western Europe. There were representative assemblies that verified the power of the rulers, and the cities had a certain degree of autonomy. This was not democracy as we would think of it today, but it was a far cry from the kind of centralized autocracy one would have seen in China at the time under the Ming dynasty.

The crisis of the Thirty Years' War opened the door for the Prussian rulers, the Hohenzollerns, to build a new form of centralized and bureaucratic state that dispensed with any need to consult the people or their representatives.

This new state proved effective in many ways, but it also put the country on an autocratic trajectory that would not really end until the official abolition of the State of Prussia by the Allied Control Council on February 25, 1947, following the defeat from Germany in World War II. It was a model that deprived people of their freedom in what the German historian Otto Hintze called "police state".

Does the Prussian experience suggest what could happen in the US if we strengthen our central state institutions? Probably not. The most obvious reason is that the pandemic at its worst will be much less destructive than the Thirty Years' War, but there is also a deeper factor pushing in the same direction.

Democratic practices in the US emerged long before a central state first developed, and in every moment of state strengthening, from the Constitution to the New Deal, people's representatives have played a critical role in configuration of new state institutions rather than top-down imposition. We can expect this pattern to continue.

So could we see a second positive path for the US where democracy is preserved and central state institutions are strengthened in response to better management of an upcoming pandemic? Maybe. But there is also the risk of a less positive third trajectory: our democracy will survive, but it will also continue without doing what we want.

To see this, take a look at the evidence in which parts of our government are trusted today. We know that in the current crisis, many state governors like Andrew Cuomo are getting better marks for their efforts than Donald Trump as president.

While much of this has to do with the individual personalities involved, this phenomenon also has deeper roots, and it tells us a lot about the challenge facing American democracy today. Indeed, decades have passed, through the presidential administrations of both parties, in which there has been substantially less trust in the federal government compared to state and local governments.

Evidence of trust at different levels of government suggests that in the US we have not escaped a fundamental limitation; Throughout the broad spectrum of human history, democratic government has been more successful as a small-scale issue. Contrary to what James Madison told us in Federalist 10, the United States Constitution did not solve the problem of maintaining democracy in such a large territory.

The great problem for the great republics is to prevent their citizens from mistrusting a distant center, a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with polarization. The thinkers of the first republic soon recognized its situation, as did Madison himself after the foundation.

Members of Congress began trying to address this threat through investments such as subsidized newspaper distribution, so that people had better information, and state governments began to provide funds for ordinary schools where people could be educated to participate in democratic governance.

The lesson of the early republic is clear: Large scale is a challenge for a democracy, but this obstacle can be overcome. If we want to strengthen our institutions to face the next pandemic or the next emergency, we must first think about how we can invest again to connect citizens with the government.

One idea here is to draw directly on the experience of the early 19th century and invest again in civic education, a topic that has recently been given little importance. If we do this, we will also have to recognize that, as was the case two centuries ago, this will not happen on its own. It is the government itself that will have to make the effort.

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2020-07-02

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