Essays From West of 98: Subsidiarity, Localism, and You

The philosophical underpinnings of pothole repair

First, an announcement! As I’ve written previously, I’m a big fan of bookshop.org, an online bookseller that supports independent booksellers. When you purchase a book at Bookshop, a portion of the proceeds are given to the independent bookstore of your choosing. I’ve heard from several bookstores that these checks are a meaningful portion of your proceeds and they are appreciative of customers choosing Bookshop over the predatory Amazon.

Recently, I discovered that Bookshop has an affiliate program similar to Amazon. Given the number of books that I recommend, I immediately signed up. If you make a purchase through the Bookshop links in my newsletters from today forward, Bookshop will pay me a small commission. I’m not sure if these fees will be enough to buy me an Allsup’s burrito and a Tallsup, but we will try it out. I am also setting up a Bookshop storefront with all my classic recommendations and new books I find. Any money that is generated from Bookshop will help expand the West of 98 project through written and audio mediums

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I’m taking a slightly abstract turn today, so buckle in. I am going to get philosophical with you, but I’m not merely pondering big words for the sake of it. There’s a method to the madness, at least this time. Today, I want to introduce the idea of “subsidiarity” with you.

This philosophical principle states that social and political decisions should be handled at the most local level possible, because people closest to a situation are best-suited to make informed decisions about the situation and solve problems. Fundamentally, this makes a lot of sense. Given my personal interests and role in the local community, here’s a simple illustration of subsidiarity:

If you have a pothole in town, who should be in charge of fixing the pothole, the local mayor or the federal government?

A person who sees the pothole every day is far more equipped to understand its impacts than a bureaucracy that cannot find the town on a map, much less track down the pothole itself. Subsidiarity is not merely a defense of local government, although that’s certainly a byproduct. These principles date back centuries, into the writings of the likes of 13th century Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas and writers from the Middle Ages. The Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which defaults power to the states and their people in the absence of a delegation to the federal government, is an expression of subsidiarity.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that decentralization of government by subsidiarity is valuable “since it increases the opportunities for citizens to take interest in public affairs…and from the accumulation of these local, active, persnickety freedoms, is born the most efficient counterweights against the claims of the central government, even if it were supported by an impersonal, collective will.”

I believed in the idea of subsidiarity long before I even knew the word itself. Over the last couple of years, studying the ideas that underpin rural revitalization have led me to a course of understanding these philosophies. As I have previously written, we cannot merely throw unlimited sums of money at rural communities and expect it to solve 75 years of rural decline. Too much prosperity is being sucked out of our rural communities, hence the rural decline, so adding another big pile of money would only make the problem worse, not better, and serve as a gigantic transfer of wealth to those enriching themselves at the expense of rural America.

In a powerful scholarly study entitled “The Principle of Subsidiarity and the Agrarian Ideal,” Professor Joshua P. Hochschild observes that the fundamental notions of subsidiarity are essential to the foundations of America and the ideals proposed by Thomas Jefferson himself. In his autobiography, Jefferson writes:

“But it is not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but by their distribution, that good government is effected. Were not this great country already divided into states, that division must be made, that each might do for itself what concerns itself directly, and what it can so much better do than a distant authority. Every state again is divided into counties, each to take care of what lies within its local bounds; each county again into townships or wards, to manage minute details; and every ward into farms, to be governed each by its individual proprietor. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread. It is by this partition of cares, descending in gradation from general to particular, that the mass of human affairs may be best managed for the good and prosperity of all.”

Jefferson wisely saw the dangers of centralizing powers. Like any objective philosopher, he also saw that what was bad for the goose was also bad for the gander, so to speak. The problem was not centralizing power in the hands of the wrong people, it was that centralizing power was bad. Period. No asterisks. No exceptions for putting the good guys in charge. Lord Acton famously wrote that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So it is with centralizing power, no matter whether we agree with the people in charge or not.

No matter who is at the controls, with unlimited centralized power, we would ultimately want for bread at their hands. And they sure wouldn’t fix the potholes, either!

This is a multi-week topic, so buckle in for a ride that leads us through Adam Smith (two of them, actually!), Wendell Berry, G.K. Chesterton, and the future of rural America.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.