States Rights v. Federal Power: Two Approaches Against Oligarchy that use Oligarchy

 

Thomas Jefferson once said, "Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories."

Besides a distrust of monarchies, there was also an early unease of oligarchies or rule by small collectives of people or factions. James Madison made this clear throughout Federalist Paper # 10, where instead of small elite ruling groups, he anticipated that a multitude of variant voices were needed to truly check the fewer voices of majoritarian oligarchs, thus achieving real representation of the people.  

In the mindset of our framers, oligarchs could be centralized rulers either in less than representative government, or corporations like those that functioned as quasi-governments like the Virginia Company or the East India Company. In either case, interests centered around power and wealth, which ruled. The idea of a representative government that welcomed views from all over the country was to prevent too few voices ruling the masses. 

In time, political parties formed as big tent umbrellas for many voices, but with that came the potential for oligarchical group think. In the South, aristocrat-slave owners became the oligarchy that controlled the economy and they tended to couch their power as matters of states' rights. After Reconstruction, business magnates like bankers, steel producers, and oil tycoons became powerful voices that steered politics, so they occupied a different sort of oligarchy. Both political parties began to lean toward either private industry or strong federalism as the primary center for power.

Much of the states' rights side of American political debates began as a defense of state authority against federal overreach or the defense of private economies -- slavery. Eventually, laissez faire capitalist free-market elitism displaced the slave oligarchies in the private world. 

On the other hand, from Reconstruction on, to defend the rights of the marginalized, the federal government became more dominant and began to steer toward government-centered oligarchies. Therefore, the struggle between states' rights and federal centralism is really a battle between oligarchies. Each serves as a check on the other, but neither are what Madison envisioned and both powers jeopardize real representation of the people.

So, when it comes down to political fear of big government or big business, both are risks to our freedoms, but both exist -- ironically -- as checks against the severity of the other.