Here's a provocative article.It's something we can talk about in both 2305 and 2306, and it reminds me of counter-intuitive point we will see in Federalist #10. James Madison though that the lack of diverse points of view in local governments were more likely to allow for tyrannical majorities to emerge and threaten unpopular minorities.
Being a wealthy landowner, as were the rest of the Founders, he was worried about what the property less would do to the propertied class. They were in fact a numerical minority. But the same logic applies to any minority group. Local governments - he claims - are dangerous, and the federal government is needed to limit that danger.
The fault lies in the increased number of states that are dominated by one political party, the demise of the press and an increase in voter ignorance about the working of local government. We are not really aware of the abuses happening at the local level because we tune them out.
This is worth a good discussion in class, but its worth noting that a key point he makes is contrary to what we saw in a previous post suggesting that local government are very responsive to the preferences of the electorate. But if the government is responsive only to the majority, and the majority wishes to violate the rights of the minority, there's little to stop them other than the state or federal government.
Here's a bit from the article - note the use of the terms autocracy and oligarchy.
These are boom times for provincial autocrats. In many chunks of the country, state and local politics were once a competitive affair; there was an opposing political party ready to pounce on its foe’s malfeasance. That sort of robust rivalry, however, hardly exists in an era in which blue and red states have become darker shades of themselves. Thirty-seven states now have unified governments, the most since the early ’50s. And in many of these places, there’s not even a remote chance that the ruling party will be deposed in the foreseeable future. The rise of one-party government has been accompanied by the evisceration of the local press and the near-extinction of metro-desk muckrakers (14,000 newsroom jobs have vanished in the last six years), crippling the other force most likely to call attention to official misdeeds.
The end of local media hasn’t just removed a watchdog; it has helped to complete a cultural reversal. Once upon a time, Jefferson and Tocqueville could wax lyrical about local government, which they viewed as perfectly in sync with the interests of its yeoman citizenry. Whether this arcadia ever truly existed is debatable. But it certainly hasn’t persisted into the age of mass media. Nowadays, most Americans care much more passionately about national politics than they do about the governments closer to their homes. They may harbor somewhat warmer feelings toward states and localities, but those sentiments are grounded in apathy. Most Americans can name their president. But according to a survey conducted by Georgetown University’s Dan Hopkins, only 35 percent can identify their mayor. The nostrum that local government is actually closer to the people is now just a hollow piece of antique rhetoric.
With so many instances of unobstructed one-party rule, conditions are ripe for what the political scientist Jessica Trounstine calls “political monopoly”—officials and organizations who have so effectively defeated any potential predators that they can lazily begin to gorge. She writes: “When politicians cease to worry about reelection, they become free to pursue government policy that does not reflect constituent preferences. They acquire the ability to enrich themselves and their supporters or pursue policies that would otherwise lead to their electoral defeat.”
