Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities

It has increasingly become a central tenet of social-democratic thinking that all democratic systems must employ a “one man, one vote” framework. This, however, is just one more tool states use to undermine the benefits of political decentralization.

Rather, “one man, one vote” works to diminish the power of electoral groups within specific regions or populations of a polity. The effect is to politically homogenize a voting population, further crippling the ability of under-represented minority populations to combat the imagined “national will” of the majority. “One man, one vote” is not a clearly defined concept, but one central characteristic of this type of system is that it does not allow for schemes of representation employed in federal systems like those in Switzerland and the United States.

In the United States, for example, a central institution of federalism is the US Senate in which each member state is given an equal vote. This allows for relatively greater representation for regional interests that cannot hope to compete in terms of raw voting numbers within the national population overall.  

The US is not alone in using such measures. The Australian Senate, for example, allots twelve members to each state. The Senate of Canada is composed of appointed members who represent regions rather than individual provinces. Regional representation of this sort is not based on population size as in the House of Commons. In the Swiss Council of States, each canton is represented by two members, regardless of size.1

Other non-majoritarian methods are used as well. The American electoral college system is one example. Another example is the Swiss method of “double majority,” in which some legislation requires approval by both the overall Swiss population (using a “one man, one vote” principle) but also by a majority vote in a majority of the cantons.

The purpose here is to make it easier for national minorities to veto or impede legislation desired by the majority. In other words, democratic power is decentralized among numerous jurisdictions rather than in a single jurisdiction. Without this form of decentralization, a simple majority of the whole would be all that is necessary to maintain political control in a democratic state. This method of allotting political power becomes problematic, however, because it often renders minority interests essentially powerless.

For example, it might be the case that in the US House of Representatives—which employs a “one man, one vote” representation scheme—a small number of populous and urban states can easily pass legislation that is unfavorable to farmers. When political representation is based only on population, the outnumbered farmers cannot hope to defeat this legislation. In the US Senate, on the other hand, where all states receive equal representation, the relatively numerous low-population states can muster up enough votes to defeat the legislation. 

The reason schemes like these are employed is to lessen the odds that certain portions of the country—and their economic and cultural interests—becomes a “permanent minority” in which voters are at the mercy of a voting majority from other parts of the country. Those who created the US Congress feared that a significant minority-majority imbalance would lead to national division, political instability, and even civil war.

Naturally, systems like these give power to a relatively small number of voters from small cantons, provinces, or states which allows them to exercise some degree of veto power over majority-supported legislation. For example, if a double majority system were employed in US presidential elections, a president could win an overwhelming majority in the popular vote, but be defeated by a coalition of small-state voters who are able to deny the needed majorities from twenty-six of the fifty states.

Those who support “one man, one vote” schemes oppose these anti-majoritarian measures.

Why Big and Powerful States and Regions Must Be Restrained

Switzerland, however, provides us insights into why simple majorities tend to be a problem. The Swiss confederation is a conglomeration of regions and cities with varying interests depending on the linguistic, religious, and cultural preferences of the population in each area. Some areas are majority Catholic and some are majority Protestant. Some areas are French speaking, and other areas are German or Italian speaking.

These differences were even more significant in the past, so the confederation was designed with some anti-majoritarian measures to prevent any small number of highly populated regions from steamrolling over the rest of the country. If, say, the German-speaking cantons became very populous, then a system based on simple majorities would mean that the German-speakers could force their preferences on everyone else. The same might be said if one religious group gained a majority.

What the “one man, one vote” advocates would have us believe, however, is that there is no need to balance these interests. In their view, if there are more pro-German voters in Switzerland, then so be it: everyone must now do what the German-speaking majority says.

Applied to the US, we see this frequently pushed by Progressives: the federalist measures designed to provide additional voting power to smaller states are denounced as “undemocratic” and we’re told that if Californians and New Yorkers have an overwhelming number of votes, then that’s just tough luck for everyone else. The minority must do what the majority says, even if those people have very different interests from the majorities in New York or California.

The way the Left shunts the anti-majoritarian argument aside is by insisting that there aren’t any real differences between people in, say, South Dakota, and people in New Jersey. We are all “Americans.” If there are differences, we are told, it is because people in South Dakota are backward troglodytes and their opinions shouldn’t matter. This problem is solved by forcing “one man, one vote” on everyone so that South Dakotans’ “unacceptable” political views are neutralized by far larger majorities in faraway cities.

Historically, such majoritarian claims would have been regarded as out-of-touch with reality. In the early twentieth century, for instance, no one denied that there were significant cultural differences between the prohibitionist Protestants of New England and the “wet” Catholics and Lutherans of the Great Lakes region. Even setting aside religious or ethnic differences, various regions of the nation had very different economic needs depending on what industries—agricultural, maritime, or manufacturing—were dominant in the region. It was recognized that agricultural areas ought to be able to offer legislative resistance to new laws designed to favor manufacturers at the expense of farmers. In case an accident of history occurred by which one group became more populous than the other, many thought it would be prudent to put safeguards in place to prevent one region from dominating the other.

Chinese Voters Would Out-Vote Everyone Else

This fundamental principle can be more easily illustrated in a hypothetical confederation with China as a member. Suppose that in twenty years, some groups of elites in eastern Asia suggest it would be a great idea to form a confederation of states from the region: the United States of East Asia (USEA). It would include China, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Indonesia. This new union could be put together to facilitate free trade, free migration, and to generally increase economic prosperity and peaceful multilateralism.

How should the governance of this organization be organized? Using a unicameral legislature predicated on “one man, one vote” presents an obvious problem: the Chinese would obviously out-vote all the other countries on a regular basis. Even if South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Japan all voted together as a block, their relatively small population sizes could not possibly allow them to veto pro-China measures pushed by a majority of Chinese voters. Because of China’s size, any other members of the confederation would quickly realize that the USEA was really just a union dominated by China most of the time.

On the other hand, a remedy could lie in creating requirements for double majorities or in assigning equal representation to all members in a senate. This would moderate China’s power. If these steps were taken, though, the “one man, one vote” advocates would object and insist that China’s dominance is perfectly fine because all the voters deserve equal representation and it would be “unfair” to give Japanese voters the same number of votes in the USEA senate as China.

Moreover, the “one man, one vote” advocates—were they to use the same arguments used in the US—would claim that the people of Japan and Indonesia might be unwilling to live by “the will of the majority” among “all voters” in the USEA. Insisting on anti-majoritarian measures, we may be told, just illustrates how backward and undemocratic those Japanese and Indonesians are. “Democracy” demands that every voter, whether Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese must count equally.

Clearly, such a situation would quickly lead to the dissolution of the USEA, whether peacefully or through violence. Yes, it’s true that the cultural differences between people in New York and people in Utah are not as stark as the differences between the Chinese and the Japanese. But the fundamental principles behind the need for federalism in the USEA and in the USA are the same.

The French Example

Nevertheless, the “one man, one vote” idea endures, and has done so for centuries. It is tied to notions of a “general will” and the idea that “the people” (vaguely conceived) embodies the lifeblood of a nation-state. This can be traced back to the French Enlightenment and the radicals of the French Revolution.

Unlike liberal democratic notions of a decentralized, varied, and largely autonomous group of independent populations, the French revolutionary ideal of mass democracy required a version of democracy that was centralized, authoritarian, and heedless of the needs of various minorities. This became feasible in France thanks to centuries of political centralization imposed by French monarchs in the decades and centuries before the Revolution.2  Due to the fact that France already had a strong and centralized state, French democracy was national in nature, and was based on the ideal of a single, democratic mass. Few constitutional provisions survived to check the power of the central state. Elections thus became a high-stakes matter of seizing control of a state apparatus over a single vast territory.

Rousseau’s Model of Mass Democracy

It is a great irony that much of the inspiration for France’s national democracy came from Switzerland itself. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who exerted great influence on French ideas of democracy and the “general will,” formed many of his ideas about democracy from his experiences in the relatively democratic Republic of Geneva. Born in Geneva to a family with voting rights, Rousseau appears to have internalized a somewhat idealized view of how Genevan democracy worked. Genevan democracy, of course, functioned on a very small scale, and it worked fairly well.

In his essay “The Background of the French Revolution,” Lord Acton discussed how Rousseau’s idealized views of democracy were affected by his positive experiences in Geneva:

Rousseau was the citizen of a small republic, consisting of a single town, and he professed to have applied its example to the government of the world. It was Geneva, not as he saw it, but as he extracted its essential principle....The idea was that the grown men met in the market place, like the peasants of Glarus under their trees, to manage their affairs, making and unmaking officials, conferring and revoking powers. They were equal, because every man had exactly the same right to defend his interest by the guarantee of his vote. The welfare of all was safe in the hands of all, for they had not the separate interests that are bred by the egotism of wealth, nor the exclusive views that come from a distorted education. All being equal in power and similar in purpose, there can be no just cause why some should move apart and break into minorities.3

 To assume, however, that the same situation is achievable at the scale of the French republic with nearly 30 million people is a blunder of impressive size. The reasons for this are well explained by Acton:

Now the most glaring and familiar fact in history shows that the direct self-government of a town cannot be extended over an empire. It is a plan that scarcely reaches beyond the next parish. Either one district will be governed by another, or both by somebody else chosen for the purpose. Either plan contradicts first principles. Subjection is the direct negation of democracy; representation is the indirect. So that an Englishman underwent bondage to parliament as much as Lausanne to Berne or as America to England if it had submitted to taxation, and by law recovered his liberty but once in seven years. Consequently Rousseau, still faithful to Swiss precedent as well as to the logic of his own theory, was a federalist. In Switzerland, when one half of a canton disagrees with the other, or the country with the town, it is deemed natural that they should break into two, that the general will may not oppress minorities. This multiplication of self-governing communities was admitted by Rousseau as a preservative of unanimity on one hand, and of liberty on the other.4

Acton understood that protection of freedom lies in division, decentralization, and the liberation of minorities. For Rousseau, however, his ostensible federalism was no match for the idea of a national will of the people. Any idea of Swiss-style federalism collapsed under the fervor for a single national legislature that could impose the wishes of all the “French nation” to every corner of the Republic’s jurisdiction.

After all, why divide up the democratic mass if “the people” as a whole are never wrong? “Rousseau’s most advanced point was the doctrine that the people are infallible,” Acton wrote. “[French churchman Pierre] Jurieu had taught that they can do no wrong: Rousseau added that they are positively in the right.”

Unfortunately, this ideal has never lost its appeal to many, and it continues to plague American politics with the idea that a “will of the people” can be realized in large scale elections across populations of tens of millions. After all, the abandonment of locally-based democracy is not just a problem at the federal level. The state of California today has more people than all of France during the revolution. New York, Texas, and Florida are not far behind. All of these states are controlled by unitary governments lacking provisions that temper democracy and protect minorities. Such a state of affairs would be unrecognizable to the Americans of the nineteenth century. By their standards, the US has become a country of mega-states, mass democracy, and enormous republics that Rousseau might have looked on with approval.

• 1Into the mid-twentieth century, individual US states often employed non-population-based apportionment in their own senates. In some cases, each county was represented by one or two senators, regardless of the county’s size. Eventually in the federal courts, the “one man, one vote” principle was instrumental in ending this system. These rulings essentially turned state senates into little more than smaller versions of each state’s house of representatives. See the US Supreme Court ruling Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964).
• 2Murray N. Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2006), p. 201. Rothbard credits French absolutism with laying the groundwork for the French Revolution by centralizing French political power in the hands of the central state, controlled by the monarch. Rothbard writes:
  The sixteenth century French legalists also systematically tore down the legal rights of all corporations or organizations which, in the Middle Ages, had stood between the individual and the state. There were no longer any intermediary or feudal authorities. The king is absolute over these intermediaries, and makes or breaks them at will.
• 3John Dahlberg-Acton, “The Background of the French Revolution,” in Essays on Freedom and Power, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1949), p. 264.
• 4Ibid., p. 265.