This is another installment in my critique of “Ten Conservative Principles” by Russell Kirk, one of the most influential “conservative” writers.
(Earlier installments are at these links: Overview, Principle 1, Principle 2, Principle 3, Principle 4,Principle 5, Principle 6, and Principle 7.
Now it’s time to tackle the eighth “principle.” (You can read all ten of them HERE.)
A foreword
Before we examine this “principle,” I want to single it out for special opprobrium. It is the most deceptive and dangerous of Kirk’s ten “principles.” It is the complete opposite of what it seeks to portray.
It presents itself as praising local and voluntary government. In actuality, however, it promotes faction and tyranny as a means of gaining and maintaining power.
This “principle” is the costume that power-hungry “conservatives” wear in public. It is such a convincing lie to people who don’t know the truth about Madisonian democracy, and it is so effective as a smokescreen, that even many “conservatives” actually believe it.
But it is more destructive than the other baseless “principles” that Kirk created to buttress his false ideology.
The “principle” of local and voluntary control
Here is Kirk’s statement of the “principle.”
[C]conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism. Although Americans have been attached strongly to privacy and private rights, they also have been a people conspicuous for a successful spirit of community. In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily. Some of these functions are carried out by local political bodies, others by private associations: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of those affected, they constitute healthy community. But when these functions pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority, then community is in serious danger. Whatever is beneficent and prudent in modern democracy is made possible through cooperative volition. If, then, in the name of an abstract Democracy, the functions of community are transferred to distant political direction—why, real government by the consent of the governed gives way to a standardizing process hostile to freedom and human dignity.
For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed. A central administration, or a corps of select managers and civil servants, however well intentioned and well trained, cannot confer justice and prosperity and tranquility upon a mass of men and women deprived of their old responsibilities. That experiment has been made before; and it has been disastrous. It is the performance of our duties in community that teaches us prudence and efficiency and charity.
“Conservatives” cherish this “principle” perhaps more than any of the others. It is the source of catch-phrases like “small government,” “local control,” and “states’ rights.”
Before getting to the detailed consideration of this “principle,” I want to point out that it contradicts the portentously pessimistic “principle of imperfectability” Kirk introduced in his “sixth principle.” Suddenly, and without accounting for the “conservative” belief in the ineradicable defects of human nature (see Principle 6), Kirk conjures up idyllic small communities of virtuous citizens, locally governed democracies in which everyone participates voluntarily and accedes cheerfully to the general will.
In political philosophy, this sort of fantasy is classified as a myth of the golden age. No such age ever existed, and neither do Kirk’s imaginary “conservative” utopias. We might imagine early New England towns that governed themselves as direct democracies. Everyone would meet in a single place to discuss matters crucial to the public welfare. They would decide controversies by mutual consensus. It sounds ideal.
It was not ideal. Direct democracies like this have existed, but they are only manageable at all if the number of people involved is limited to a few hundred. Beyond that, it is impractical for everyone to have a say. At that point, it is necessary to establish voting as a substitute for group consensus.
Even in direct democracies, however, the pleasant voluntarism Kirk imagines does not exist. Wealthy citizens can pay poor ones to adopt the positions of the rich. Violent citizens can threaten fearful ones to speak for the interests of the strong. And when the number of citizens increases so much that voting is necessary, buying people off and intimidating them become endemic unless a strong government enacts and enforces voting laws.
So the virtuous direct democracy never existed and can never exist. From time to time, people attempt to establish such communities (think of the communes that sprung up during the 1960s), but it does not take long before they dissolve because the more selfish individuals can’t resist trying to get their own way. Attempts to live the myth of the golden age always fail—based on Kirk’s own “principle” of imperfectability. (See our examination of Principle 6.)
What is the purpose of praising a myth that cannot exist according to one’s own beliefs? Isn’t it just transparent nonsense?
Like all “conservative principles,” it is nonsense. But “conservatives” hope it is not transparent. They need it to appear solid in order to hide the ulterior motive behind it. Just as the “principle of imperfectability” hides an ulterior motive—preventing the change and reform that “conservatives” fear, so too does this “principle of voluntary and local government” hide an ulterior motive—establishing and maintaining “conservative” political dominance and power.
Since this “principle” is intended to hide the thirst for power—the most threatening “irritable mental gesture” of all—“conservatives” must paint it in the most glowing and inoffensive colors possible.
Let us proceed to a detailed consideration of this “principle,” where we will uncover the unsavory truth behind the inoffensive language. The placidity of the rhetoric masks very dangerous political instincts.
Detailed consideration of the “principle of voluntary and local control”
We begin, as always, with the initial statement of the “principle.”
[C]conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.
We have already seen in the consideration of Principle 7 that “conservative” opposition to involuntary collectivism has no sufficient basis. It is not redistribution of wealth that harms societies but authoritarianism and its logical extension, totalitarianism. Since there is no good reason for opposing collectivism, this “conservatives” stance is merely an individual choice, deserving of no more consideration than a person’s preference for strawberry over chocolate ice cream.
The same cannot be said about the “conservative” stance on voluntary community. This is not merely a personal preference. It is deception that hides an immoral attitude toward government.
The phrase “voluntary community” has a positive valence. What could be more reasonable and open-minded than allowing someone “voluntary” choice? What could be more nurturing and cooperative than living in a “community”?
The rhetorical trick here is to get the reader to agree that voluntary community is intrinsically good. Once that is accepted, objections won’t even arise in the reader’s mind.
The truth, however, is quite the opposite. It is very possible for voluntary community to be bad. It is good only to the extent that it rests on good will. Where good will does not exist, voluntary community is actually a nightmare.
In political life, good will takes the form of sustaining the common good. Bad will, on the other hand, arises when citizens care more for their own private goods than for the common good. When people become indifferent or hostile to the common good, the heart of voluntary community is broken.
When citizens harbor political bad will, they try to withdraw their support for the common good in many different ways. They try to stop paying taxes. They try to exclude citizens of good will from public deliberations or deter them from voting. They try to monopolize political power and keep citizens of good will out of the councils of government. If they can achieve that, they then pass laws that benefit themselves and harm others.
It is fatuous to call a government dominated by citizens of bad will a voluntary community. When citizens of bad will infect a voluntary community, they destroy it from within. The bad will of such citizens kills the spirit of community—the justice that springs from concern for the common good—and leaves behind only the husk, only the structures, the institutions, the forms. They use the remnants for self-serving ends. And the less they are prevented, the more audacious they become. This is not genuine community at all.
In such a debased community, there is no voluntary participation. Citizens of bad will tyrannize citizens of good will. And citizens of bad will are tyrannized by their own vices, which compel them to plumb new depths of depravity in order to maintain power. Anyone who knows about the Salem witch trials, anyone who has read The Scarlet Letter, anyone who has seen Mississippi Burning knows just how viciously tyrannical “local and voluntary control” can be.
The Framers knew this too. Madisonian democracy rejects this simple-minded notion of virtuous local control—as Madison himself tells us. Here is his condemnation of it from Federalist 10:
[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
The remedy for the tyrannical nature of pure democracy is, Madison tells us, republicanism—the system of representational democracy he and his fellow Framers worked into the Constitution. You can read Madison’s reasons for rejecting pure democracies and preferring democratic republics in Federalist 10 HERE.
I want to make the following perfectly clear because it seems to have escaped everyone: “local control,” “small government,” “little voluntary communities,” and pure democracies are unconstitutional. The United States is a democratic republic, and the Constitution guarantees that all the states will be democratic republics as well (Article IV, Section IV).
All this was so obvious that the Framers did not even pretend the United States could be a voluntary community. Instead they relied on checks and balances to temper the bad will that would inevitably arise within the three branches of government as each struggles to dominate the others. They relied on the rivalries of societal factions to temper the bad will of the different national interests as they struggle to dominate one another. Madison and the other Framers devised a republican form of government that could combat the factional injustice of pure democracy.
This is the reason that the federal government must “guarantee” that the several states be republics, not pure democracies. The Union was dedicated to establishing the justice found in republics (the second purpose enumerated in the Constitution’s Preamble). It cannot allow its component parts to harbor the injustice, the factional despotism, found in pure democracies.
So why do “conservatives” want such a dysfunctional system of government? Why do they prefer it so much that they elevate it to a “principle”? There can be only one explanation. They want a system that affords them the opportunity of factional control. They want despotic control. They want a system in which they can wield power without being checked.
They just don’t want to own up to it. So Kirk obligingly created this pleasantly disingenuous, blatantly anti-federalist, and explicitly unconstitutional myth for them to hide behind.
If you need any more evidence of this fact, just look at the current political situation. Having gerrymandered themselves into invulnerability, “conservatives” are rabid to exercise their power with absolute impunity. Despite overwhelming public outcry to stop their depredations of women’s rights, their callous disregard for the victims of assault weapons, their attacks on voting rights, their white supremacist bigotry, their book-banning, and their hysterical viciousness toward LGBTQ+ people, the states in the iron grip of Republicans like Tennessee, Idaho, Texas, and Florida are running roughshod over policies favored by majorities in their own states. Tyranny of the majority is not enough for them. They’ll even accept tyranny of the minority.
So Kirk’s self-contradictory image of a utopian voluntary community is both intellectually bankrupt and highly deceptive. It is merely a smokescreen concealing the “conservative” lust for power. As such, it deserves no serious consideration from citizens of good will.
Although Americans have been attached strongly to privacy and private rights, they also have been a people conspicuous for a successful spirit of community. In a genuine community, the decisions most directly affecting the lives of citizens are made locally and voluntarily.
It is true that decent Americans, citizens of good will, display communal spirit. But indecent Americans, citizens of bad will, do not.
It is also true that in a genuine community, the best decisions are local and voluntary. The good will of all the citizens makes the decisions at every level of government sound and supportive of the common good.
But such utopian communities do not exist, as we have seen. Bad will is endemic in politics and, as the American framers wisely understood, can only be managed, not wished away.
In actual communities that must contend with bad will, the decisions most affecting the lives of citizens may have to be made distantly and involuntarily.
It is of course possible that distant lawgivers and judges will substitute their wills for the will of more local communities. This would be the case when people of bad will have been elected as lawgivers or seated as judges—like the current “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court. But it is not a foregone conclusion that a substitution of a distant will is tyrannical, as “conservatives” seem to think.
Where local communities are controlled by factional interests that disdain the common good—that is, by citizens of bad will—substituting the will of distant lawgivers and judges is a necessary correction to the bad will of the local factions. The hue and cry from the local factions will be blood-curdling, but they deserve to be overruled since their will is unjust.
The great genius of the Constitution in regard to justice is its two-tiered court system. Each American holds dual citizenship, as it were. We are all citizens of our states and at the same time citizens of the United States. As such, we have rights and responsibilities in two jurisdictions, the local jurisdiction of our state and the distant jurisdiction of the nation.
This dual citizenship means that every American has some recourse from the injustices committed by local communities infected by bad will. Injustices committed on the local level in the states and counties and municipalities by citizens of bad will can be overturned by federal courts. The bad-will local actors can be forced by distant federal judges to cease practicing injustice, and even to recompense citizens of good will for past suffering.
This is possible precisely because the distant courts are not subject to the parochial bad will on the local level, making it easier for them to weigh issues dispassionately and rationally—provided, of course, that the judges are not corrupted by utterly false “conservative” doctrines like the “principle” of local and voluntary control.
History is full of examples.
In Brown v. Mississippi (1936), states were forced to stop using torture to extract confessions from suspects.
In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), segregation was declared unconstitutional and segregationist states were forced to stop the practice.
In Loving v. Virginia (1967), states were forced to stop banning interracial marriage.
In Roe v. Wade (1973), states were forced to stop restricting access to abortion.
In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), states were forced to stop banning consensual same-sex sexual activity.
In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), states were forced to stop banning same-sex marriage.
These were all cases in which local and supposedly voluntary communities dominated by citizens of bad will were unjustly oppressing other citizens. They had to be forced from a distance and against their will to be just rather than unjust.
In the more recent cases, we see that “conservatives” still hate being forced to be just. They have managed to undo the protections of women granted by Roe v. Wade. Now they are proliferating state laws to regain the power they once had to oppress women in their little local fiefdoms. And they are straining their vicious little minds to find ways to force other states to be just as unjust as they are.
They did this by working for forty years to seat judges who love the “local and voluntary control” fallacy because they too want the power to be as unjust as they wish. Blatantly sophistical judges coming from the Federalist Society and the First Liberty Institute, for instance, were trained precisely for this purpose. Decent Americans failed to see that the success of these forces has been importing the bad will of local and so-called voluntary communities onto the federal bench.
Kirk’s deceptive “principle of local and voluntary control” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It manages to look innocuous while it tears ravenously at the heart of legitimate community—political good will.
Some of these functions are carried out by local political bodies, others by private associations: so long as they are kept local, and are marked by the general agreement of those affected, they constitute healthy community. But when these functions pass by default or usurpation to centralized authority, then community is in serious danger. Whatever is beneficent and prudent in modern democracy is made possible through cooperative volition. If, then, in the name of an abstract Democracy, the functions of community are transferred to distant political direction—why, real government by the consent of the governed gives way to a standardizing process hostile to freedom and human dignity.
This is all nonsense. What we have just said about the deceptiveness of “local and voluntary control” applies to all these statements. There is nothing inherently healthy about it. There is nothing inherently beneficent and prudent about it. There is nothing inherently free and dignified about it. On the contrary, unchecked by powers that can control citizens of bad will, local and voluntary control becomes unmitigated tyranny.
For a nation is no stronger than the numerous little communities of which it is composed. A central administration, or a corps of select managers and civil servants, however well intentioned and well trained, cannot confer justice and prosperity and tranquility upon a mass of men and women deprived of their old responsibilities. That experiment has been made before; and it has been disastrous. It is the performance of our duties in community that teaches us prudence and efficiency and charity.
If one just takes the first sentence of this passage, it is difficult to understand the delusional mindset that could imagine making such a statement.
No little community is a strong as a great nation that looks out for the common good. The little communities that are wiped out in horrific weather spawned by “conservative”-fueled climate change would be destitute if the United States did not help them. They would all be speaking German now if the United States had not stood up to the Nazis.
But as one reads on, one discovers that Kirk is not talking about financial or physical strength. Much more astonishingly, he is talking about moral strength. He actually expects us to believe, as Madison did not, that little local communities are paragons of moral excellence!
We have already seen that the opposite is true. There are no utopian local voluntary communities. All communities, no matter how small, are riven with bad will, with citizens who care more for their own goods than for the common good.
Contrary to Kirk’s claim, it is not a central administration that removes responsibilities from citizens of bad will. It is their own selfishness. This is what sets them against the common good. And while it is true that no central administration can make people responsible, it can stop them from being irresponsible—from a distance and against their will.
The “experiment” Kirk mentions is, of course, communism or socialism. As we have seen, either is disastrous when combined with authoritarianism or totalitarianism, but this is not because of centralized government itself.
And finally, it is not the performance of our duties in community that teaches us to be responsible. We learn to be responsible by repeatedly being restrained from not performing our duties. Then, once we begin to perform our duties, we learn more fully that these duties convey great benefits upon us. This is true both of children as they grow and of citizens as they mature. In Kirk’s imaginary little utopias, learning would not be necessary because there would be no citizens of bad will trying to resist the duties of sustaining the common good. But such communities do not exist, so we need not waste time arguing an impossible hypothetical.
Conclusion: The “principle of local and voluntary control” is a shield for extreme injustice
When “conservatives” talk about “small government” or “local control,” or “states’ rights” they are channelling this “principle.”
Since the entire posture of virtuous local control is a sham, decent Americans should never accept anything that “conservatives” say about this topic.
We need to make the case everywhere that pure democracy is literally unconstitutional. It was rejected by the Framers as politically, morally, and judicially inferior to republicanism—which “conservatives” fight at every turn because it is inherently inimical to their craving for absolute power.
We need to fight every last vestige of this political heresy with as much vigor and vehemence as we would fight to save our family from falling into the clutches of tyrants.
For that is precisely what will happen if “local control conservatives” manage to destroy our republican form of government.
Be sure to keep an eye out for the final two “principles.” It doesn’t end well for “conservatives.”