Over the years I have written quite a lot about the state of the Union. Now, in the interest of novelty, I’d like to discuss the Union of the State. I have always tried to say something so obvious that no one else has noticed it. For instance, I once suggested that we criminalize most firearms, and legalize most drugs. This would put an end to the now-eternal War on Crime that, we are told, is devastating our alabaster cities and not doing the amber waves of marijuana much good either. I realize, of course, that vested interests are now too great for us to do anything of an intelligent nature in this—or almost any—regard. The National Rifle Association will never wither away as long as there is a single Congressman left to be paid off or a child unarmed.
Our violence and murder rate are unique in the First World. This may be a negative uniqueness but it is all our own, and to be cherished; at least we are number one at something other than indebtedness. We now have over a million people in prison* and another couple of million on probation or parole; why not just lock up half the population and force the other half to guard them? That would solve crime; it might also entice Amnesty International to start whining here at home. After all, 58 percent of those in our federal prisons are there for drug offenses. Most are not dangerous to the public, and even though our overkindly government thinks they are dangerous to themselves, they should still be allowed to pursue their constitutional, if unhealthful, happiness in freedom. Certainly they do not deserve to be confined to a prison system that a Scandinavian commission recently reported to be barbarous for a supposedly First World country.
Unfortunately, the rulers of any system cannot maintain their power without the constant creation of prohibitions that then give the state the right to imprison—or otherwise intimidate—anyone who violates any of the state’s often new-minted crimes. Without communism—once monolithic and on the march—our state lacks a Wizard of Oz to terrify all the people all the time. So the state looks inward, at the true enemy, who turns out to be—who else? the people of the United States. In the name of correctness, of good health, or even of God—a great harassment of the people-at-large is now going on. Although our state has not the power to intimidate any but small, weak countries, we can certainly throw most Americans in prison for violating the ever-increasing list of prohibitions. Will this change for the better with a change of Congress or President? No. Things are going to get a lot worse until we apply the state’s new white hope to the state itself: Three strikes, you’re out. How then to “strike out” the state? I have an idea.
Kevin Phillips recently attacked—in Time—Washington, D.C., a beautiful city, built, if not on a hill, at least on what, in 1800, was a quite attractive swamp. He quoted Jefferson’s warning that when every aspect of government is drawn to Washington—he meant the city, not the general—Washington, in his words, would become “as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.” (This was England, by the way, not the Disney studio so recently and bloodily thrown back at Bull Run.)
Phillips tacitly acknowledges that the people have no representation within the Beltway, unlike the banks or insurance companies. Consequently, officeholders and their shadow, the media, are equally disliked by a vast majority. Unfortunately, the people are without alternative. That is what makes the situation so volatile and potentially dangerous. Think what might have happened had Ross Perot possessed the oily charm of Charlton Heston. Certainly it is plain that when a people comes to detest the political system in which it is entrapped, that system will not endure for long.
I’ve always been mystified at how obtuse politicians and the media are. Every politician of consequence, for the last quarter-century, has run against Washington, against lobbyists, against insiders, against Jefferson’s “venal and oppressive” ruling class—or, to be precise, the representatives of our actual rulers, who circle the globe like Puck with all the swift anonymous speed of a fax laden with campaign money. It is very hard, one would think, to live with so total a contradiction. For instance, both Carter and Reagan campaigned against Washington, and both won. Neither understood why people voted for him. Neither made the slightest attempt, even cosmetically, to curb Jefferson’s tyrannous capital. The two new employees forgot their speeches and went right on doing business as instructed by those huge economic forces that govern earth.
Can someone like Clinton make a change? I don’t see how. We would like health care of the sort every civilized nation has but we can never have a rational system as long as insurance companies are allowed to benefit. The people may want affordable health care, but they are not going to get it in the United States of America as now constituted.
Phillips has come up with an old notion of mine: devolution, the dictionary word for breaking up the Union into smaller, more manageable units. He would move much of the government away from Washington, I suppose to inconvenience the 800,000 lawyers who will then be able to deduct as legitimate travel expense the weary weekly journey from cozy Montgomery County to sky-topped Denver. He would move various departments permanently to other states and rotate the capital from this to that city. He would like an amendment to the Constitution “setting up a mechanism for holding nationwide referendums to permit the citizenry to supplant Congress and the President in making certain categories of national decisions.” Like declarations of war? Could he be that radical? Along with this bit of major surgery on the body politic, he has some useful Band-Aids. But no more. Nevertheless, I am well pleased that what I’ve been proposing for so long has now gone mainline. So let me go a bit further out.
In 1992 I switched on CNN and heard Jerry Brown—in New Hampshire—giving pretty much a speech that I had given for the National Press Club on how to restore power to its only legitimate source, We the People. As Jerry and I had not spoken since I ran against him in the California Senate primary in 1982, I was pleasantly surprised and praised him publicly for his wisdom, while blessing him for his plagiarism, no matter how belated. He rang me in Italy. Yes, it was my speech. Unlike Joe Biden, he is an honest man. And did I have anything more? And would I come to New Hampshire? I said, yes, I had more, but, no, I would forgo the winter wonderland of New Hampshire, currently known as Dole Land.
However, thanks to CNN and the fax machine, I could monitor his campaign and send him my thoughts immediately. So a number of suggestions of mine entered the primary campaign. The principal notion was conversion from war to peace. Find a defense plant that’s closing and say that it should be kept open but converted to peacetime, using the same workforce and technology. Brown did just that in Connecticut. He told the soon-to-be-dismissed makers of Seawolf submarines that if he became President, they would be making not submarines but bullet trains. At five in the morning I got a call from political operator Pat Caddell. “We won!” he said. “We won Connecticut.” Then they—not we—lost New York.
Meanwhile, Perot grabbed my We the People as the strange device for his eccentric banner. I felt very odd, watching CNN in Italy, and hearing at least three candidates using my lines.
Jerry was headed for Pennsylvania after New York and, as the game was up, I said why not propose something really useful: launch a new idea that might take a few years to penetrate but when it does, might save us all.
Here is the gist of what I wrote him. I started with the eternal problem of what we do about income tax. As the people at large get nothing much back from the money that they give the government—Social Security is not federal income—why not just eliminate the federal income tax? How? Eliminate Washington, D.C. Allow the states and municipalities to keep what revenue they can raise. I know that tens if not hundreds of thousands of lobbyist-lawyers and hired media gurus will have a million objections. But let us pursue the notion.
Why not divide the country into several reasonably homogeneous sections, more or less on the Swiss cantonal system. Each region would tax its citizens and then provide the services those citizens wanted, particularly education and health. Washington would then become a ceremonial capital with certain functions. We shall always need some sort of modest defense system, a common currency, and a Supreme Court to adjudicate between the regions as well as to maintain the Bill of Rights—a novelty for the present Court.
How to pay for what’s left of Washington? Each region will make its own treaty with the central government and send what it feels should be spent on painting the White House and on our common defense, which will, for lack of money, cease to be what it is now—all-out offense on everyone on earth. The result will be no money to waste either on pork or on those imperial pretensions that have left us $4.7 trillion in debt. Wasteful, venal, tyrannous Washington will be no more than a federal theme park administered by Michael Eisner.
Will the regions be corrupt, venal, etc.? Of course they will—we are Americans!—but they will be corrupt on an infinitesimal scale. Also, more to the point, in a smaller polity, everyone knows who’s up to no good and they can police themselves better than the federal government ever could—even if it had ever wanted to.
All over the world today, centrifugal forces are at work. In a bloody war in the old Yugoslavia and parts of the old Soviet Union, and in a peaceful way in the old Czechoslovakia. Since history is nothing but the story of the migration of tribes, we must now note that the tribes are very much on the move again, and thanks to modern technology we can actually watch Bengals and Indians overflowing each other’s borders.
Racially, the composition of Europe has changed more in the past fifty years than in the previous five hundred. Whether this is good or bad is irrelevant. It is. Now, here at home, people fret about invasions from the Hispanic world, from Haiti, from the boat people of Asia. But, like it or not, we are changing from a white, Protestant country, governed by males, to a mixed polity, and in this time of change there is bound to be conflict. The fragmentations that we see everywhere are the result of a dislike for the nation-state as we have known it since the bloody nation-building of Bismarck and Lincoln.
People want to be rid of arbitrary capitals and faraway rulers. So let the people go. If our southern tier is to be Spanish and Catholic, let it be. But also, simultaneously, as we see in Europe, while this centrifugal force is at work—a rushing away from the center—there is also a centripetal one, a coming-together of small polities in order to have better trade, defense, culture—so we are back, if by chance, to our original Articles of Confederation, a group of loosely confederated states rather than a United States, which has proved to be every bit as unwieldy and ultimately tyrannous as Jefferson warned. After all, to make so many of Many into only One of one you must use force, and this is a bad thing, as we experienced in the Civil War. So let us make new arrangements to conform with new realities.
I will not go so far as to say that we shall ever see anything like democracy at work in our section of North America—traditionally we have always been a republic entirely governed by money, but at least, within the regions, there will be more diversity than there is now and, best of all, the people will at last have the sensation that they are no longer victims of a far-off government but that they—and their tax money—are home at last.
The Nation
December 26, 1994
*As of 2000, USA Today reports on its front page that 6.6 million adults (3 percent of the adult population) are in prison or “correction.” No other society has ever done so deadly a thing to its people and on such a scale.