The Advantages of Federalism
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tion. The United States would then have, at best, what is called plebiscitary
democracy—that is, rule by a single man or a narrow clique of administrators, endorsed perhaps by a national ballot at intervals, yet allowing the
public no share in decisions beyond the opportunity to vote ‘‘yes’’ or
‘‘no’’ against the dominant regime. (And often, in such centralized systems, the voter is discouraged from voting anything but ‘‘yes.’’) To put
all this another way, a federal structure provides means for representative democracy to operate in both regional (State) and national affairs.
For this reason, federalism is an important feature of political liberty.
(3) In his famous work On Liberty, the nineteenth-century English
political philosopher John Stuart Mill presented a powerful argument
against centralized bureaucratic government that illustrates the advantages of federalism from another perspective. Federalism, he observed,
encourages independence and self-reliance. Because of federalism,
Americans are in every kind of civil business; let them be left without a
government, every body of Americans is able to improvise one, and to
carry on that or any other public business with a sufficient amount of
intelligence, order, and decision. This is what every free people ought to
be; and a people capable of this is certain to be free; it will never let itself
be enslaved by any man or body of men because these are able to seize
and pull the reins of the central administration. No bureaucracy can
hope to make such a people as this do or undergo anything that they do
not like. But where everything is done through bureaucracy, nothing to
which the bureaucracy is really adverse can be done at all.
No less significant, he concluded, is the fact that decentralized government releases the creative force and genius of a free people. The absorption of all the nation’s energy and ability into the central authority, said
Mill, ‘‘is fatal, sooner or later, to the mental activity and progressiveness
of the body itself.’’ It destroys self-reliance. Government must aid and
stimulate individual exertion and development or it will stultify and retard a society. ‘‘No great thing can really be accomplished’’ if there is a
monolithic government which ‘‘substitutes its own activity for theirs;
when, instead of informing, advising, and upon occasion, denouncing, it
makes them work in fetters or bids them stand aside and does their work