It's Time To Give Power Back to the People. But How?

There is a growing sense in many Western nations that democracy is no longer serving the interests of ordinary people. Political rulers are increasingly disconnected from the man and woman in the street, across a range of issues, including immigration, transgender ideology, "15 minute cities,” and climate taxes.

People feel profoundly disempowered from the political system. So the question is, how can we give power back to the people? There is no way to completely guarantee that people will always be taken seriously by their representatives. However, you can greatly reduce the risks of domination and alienation by introducing decentralising reforms, to bring centres of power and decision-making closer to the people.

1. What does “giving power back to the people” entail, doctrinally and practically?

Institutionally, the goal of decentralisation is to weaken the hold centralized institutions have over citizens’ lives, and provide citizens with meaningful leverage over the governmental process. In other words, to make the system as a whole less oligarchic and more democratic. But what does this mean in practice?

1. A rethinking the sovereignty of parliament. The notion that political representatives or officials have either total or near total authority to regulate civil life, an idea that is quite influential in the United Kingdom, must be refuted and abandoned. No human parliament is “sovereign” over social life. Public authority is legitimated by popular consent and by the service of citizens’ shared interests; and it is necessarily distributed across multiple political organs, in particular local governments, who are authorised by local constituencies, not by a grant of power from a national government.

2. Political, regulatory, financial, and taxing authority must be decentralized, somewhat along the lines of Switzerland, so that regional and municipal governments are independent political actors in their own right and not just adumbrations of a national administration or bureaucracy.

3. Political representation, whether at the local or national level, must be complemented and checked by mechanisms of direct democracy, through which citizens can either propose new laws or block laws proposed in parliament, with a certain number of signatures. The availability of this mechanisms forces legislators to think twice before passing unpopular laws.

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2. What is the philosophy behind political decentralization?

Those of us who believe we need more political decentralisation often share a certain perspective on human nature, knowledge, and social development. Broadly speaking, we:

1. tend to trust the ability of communities to adapt to their environment and regulate their own lives, if they are provided with the tools to do so

2. tend to be skeptical that a highly centralised political or scientific class can successfully govern the life of a diverse society, because knowledge relevance to governance is too widely dispersed to be mastered from a central fulcrum

3. are leery of any political arrangement that concentrates large amounts of power in the hands of a few, given the risks such power will be used to in abusive and destructive ways.

3. What sort of strategic goals could a “power to the people” movement hope to achieve in a few years?

The evidence of voter discontent is quite abundant from the unexpected successes of anti-establishment parties and candidates, not only in the UK but in the USA, Sweden, France, and Germany, as well as the decline of trust in public institutions, detected in opinion poll data over the past four decades or so.

Many voters are now politically homeless. They vote to limit damages, but they no longer believe in “the system” as a structure that can genuinely support their life projects and communities. This presents an opportunity for any movement seeking to transfer power away from centralised governments back to local communities, because such a movement taps into citizens’ sense of frustration and exclusion, and offers them a way to re-connect with a political project that actually matters to them.

Of course, large-scale reform of the political system is very difficult and takes many years and decades. A “power to the people” movement would face formidable obstacles:

• the UK’s & USA’s first-past-the-post system make it extremely difficult for new parties to make big gains in elections;

• those who currently control centralized political structures will probably fiercely resist efforts to transfer their power to the local level, or give ordinary citizens greater say over public affairs.

Nevertheless, a “power to the people” movement might aim to gradually shift the narrative and open up a bigger discursive space for discussion of decentralizing reforms. Once such a discursive space is pried open, it may expand, even to the point at which decentralization looks like the only alternative to political collapse. How might this come about?

1. by winning enough seats to the legislature – even if not many – to gain a more effective platform for a power to the people movement.

2. by forging alliances with existing political representatives, to bring them on board with a decentralizing agenda.

3. by cultivating a demand for decentralization, through grassroots events and organisations, independent journalism, pro-decentralisation podcasts, etc. A power to the people movement would not be viewed as compelling or legitimate unless it was seen to have popular support, from the ground up.

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