The Federalization of America
In the past few weeks in this area, there have been local elections happening for mayor, city councils, and school boards. On the way into work this morning, I heard the voter turnout listed at between six and eight percent. Hearing that makes me want to shake my head–both at myself and my fellow local voters. The simple fact that elections that are that impactive on a person only drawing that much is disappointing–to put it mildly.
When this country was founded, the breakpoint between Local control and Federal control was supposed to be around 95% to 5% during peace time. The idea behind this is that most of the government should come from the local level where you have much more of a say and only during times of national crisis should that balance shift and allow the Federal government to have much more say in how things go. Over the years, however, this balance has shifted for a variety of reasons until now much more government is coming from the Federal level than there ever should have been.
Now, is all of this a bad thing? Not necessarily. It allows for more uniform enforcement of laws across the country and standards setting for things such as discrimination and the like. The drawback, however, is that people pay far less attention to the local politics than they should. This puts them in a situation of allowing themselves to be blindsided when local level politics pull out the governmental steamroller to nail the residents of their area.
As the years have gone by, communication has become easier, with information from the other side of the country no longer taking weeks or months to get to us. This has led to an expanding of the perspective of people when it comes to politics, but it has also made them somewhat farsighted (in the ophthalmological sense) when it comes to such things. With the focus shifting to national level politics, it’s that much harder for local politics to get their attention–not that most local politicians want that to happen. They’re quite happy with the circus on the Federal level keeping people distracted from what they’re doing locally.
Now, that’s not to say that all local politicians are slimy people who want to get away with whatever they want with no repercussions. Honestly, politicians like that exist on every level. But the old adage of the paving on the road to hell can very much be applied to many local politicians. The fact that people are willing to let a small minority decide on the people who will control the schools their children will attend, who will set property taxes, and who will decide how their local taxes are spent is disappointing in the extreme.
I’m sure there are many people (myself included) who will point to the media blitz that comes during upper level campaigns compared to local races. After all, how many television ads do you generally see for local races? Most of the times, they’re limited monetarily to signs and postcards to get their information out with the occasional sparsely attended local forum. However, many of the people who ignore these local races are the ones at school board and city council meetings screaming bloody murder when policies go in ways they dislike.
In the past few months, I gave active thought to running for the school board in Wake County. In the end, I opted not to do so because my fiancée and I were moving to Durham County, and it simply wouldn’t be right to run (no matter my chances of winning) if I wasn’t going to be able to finish out the term. I also didn’t vote for the same reason. In the end, a sense of ethics over voting for elections that, in the end, wouldn’t effect me won out over a sense of duty in voting.
In the end, I suppose it’s a matter of the Jeffersonian influence in my political philosophy coming through when it comes to this particular subject. I would very much prefer to see people tear their eyes away from the dog and pony show on the Federal level and pay some of that attention to the local level. As a long term goal, I’d love to see people take power back from the Federal level and remand it back to the much more limited role devised for it, but for now I’d settle for better than a sub-10% turnout for local elections. You have to learn to walk before you can run, and right now we’ve definitely regressed to the crawling stage for local politics.