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I find this in a letter to the
editor written by Terrence Richardson of Glastonbury: “People generally don’t
understand that the issue” –central to the Supreme Court draft decision
on Roe v Wade – “isn’t about what we want. It’s about which
authority is best suited to make the decisions: SCOTUS [the Supreme Court of
the United States], 50 independent state legislatures, or one U.S. Congress.”
That is a brief description of
the Principle
of Subsidiarity, an indispensible vein of liberty that runs through all
governments everywhere, but most glowingly here in the United States.
The animating idea of
subsidiarity is that public functions should be exercised as close as possible
to the citizen. The doctrine, originally a principle of social organization
within the Catholic Church, holds “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from
individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and
give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a
grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher
association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social
activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body
social, and never destroy and absorb them.”
Political decisions in a
multi-level government should be made at the smallest and most intimate level.
In this way, important political decisions are NOT restricted to a single tier
of government, and policies are decided by the governed through their elected
representatives.
The doctrine, deeply woven into
what has been called “the American experiment in self-government,” recognizes
that every political decision is bifurcated. Or, to put it another way, every
political decision seeks to answer two interdependent questions. The
first question may be put this way: There is a problem that admits of a
political solution -- what must be done to solve the problem?
The second question, equally
important, is – who decides what shall be done?
The U.S. Constitution provides an
irreducible answer to the second question. The doctrine of the separation of
powers means, if it means anything at all, that, to assure the liberty of the
person, it is necessary to avoid a concentration of power in the hands of
political saviors or autocratic political parties. The further removed
political decision-making is from the people affected by such decisions, the
greater becomes a sometimes irresistible drift from a representative republic
to an always more efficient and forceful central government. Benito Mussolini,
the father of totalitarian fascism, really did make the trains run on time.
Mussolini’s definition of fascism
– everything in the state, nothing above the state, nothing outside the state –
was as simple and brutal as the ensuing reality of fascist governance. Just now
there is a discussion brewing among scholars touching on the question: Is the
system of governance in China fascist or communist? The very first victim of totalitarian
governments, whether fascist or communist, is the doctrine of subsidiarity. Its
second victim is the liberty of the person.
So then, the proximity of
decision-making will determine both the liberty of persons and the nature of
governance itself.
It is this principle, inseparable
from self-government, that stands between Acton’s absolute power corrupting
absolutely and the liberty of the person yelling “Stop!”
Aristotle begins his Politics with
a discussion of “the household” as a political unit,
moving to “the village” and onward to “the polis,” the city state from which
the word “politics” is derived.
Indeed, the family is to politics
at a micro level what the state and the larger federal government here in the
United States is to our multiform political system. If one concentrates upon
the genealogy of political power in the United States, one finds it flowing
from free persons through various muni-governments – those mentioned by
Aristotle – to municipal governments, then state governments, then an
overarching federal government. And the genius of the American experiment in
representative government, of all governing forms the most fragile, is that
governance has been organically framed in the United States to preserve and
strengthen rather than displace such "lesser" political power
units.
We’ve just emerged, sort of, from
a contentious quarrel between “the family” and “the municipality” – Aristotle’s
“village” -- centering on the question who should decide what should be done
about a sexualized curricula that many parents found inappropriate for very
young children. And the struggle, yet ongoing, revolved around the
question who is to decide what is to be done?
Such quarrels are always fierce
because the general public, without quite naming it, fully understands the
indispensability to republican rule of the doctrine of subsidiarity.
American governance rests on the
notion that responsibility for the future of children belongs by nature to
fathers and mothers, and that American government was formed not to displace
the various forms of political power displayed everywhere in a functioning
republic. On the contrary, it was formed, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration
of Independence, to form rather than to displace a perfect, preexisting
organic union.
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