Most Americans resonate with two seemingly contradictory ideas:

1. We like local power. We like regional flavor. We think different places should experiment with different solutions. We don’t want Washington, DC to micromanage things.
2. We like equal protection. We think everyone in the country should have the same rights. We hear about states’ power and we think about slavery and don’t ever want to go back there. We want our federal government to help ensure we don’t.

Power too centralized is scary. It can lead to autocracy and authoritarianism. Concentrated power is ripe for abuse and can cast us to the weird whims of whoever is in charge. Boo to homogeny, hegemony, orthodoxy, and overreach. Yay local.

Power too decentralized is scary. Unchecked, it’s even easier for authoritarianism and weird whims to emerge at a smaller scale. We could fracture and fizzle and feud our way to feudalism. Boo to fiefdoms. Yay equal protection.

How can we balance the two? How can we get a national power strong enough to guarantee equal protection without sliding into authoritarianism? How can we get local power without fiefdoms?

The answer involves a renewal of both constitutional imagination and of democracy itself.

The framers tried to specify a precise relationship between central government and distributed authority by enumerating – hard-coding if you will – the powers of the federal government and leaving everything else to the states. The Tenth Amendment consecrated the idea:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution… are reserved to the States… or to the people”

The intent, and for many years the effect, was a decentralization bias. The union had significant authority, but state authority was the default. Yes, there was more central power than in the Articles of Confederation, but still, Washington had a fairly short rope.

This limitation included, notably, the protection of freedoms. The First Amendment, for example, prohibited the US Congress from making laws that abridged freedom of speech, but it didn’t stop Georgia or Vermont from doing so. Consider Madison’s first draft:

The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.

The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.

The people shall not be restrained from peaceably assembling and consulting for their common good; nor from applying to the legislature by petitions, or remonstrances for redress of their grievances.

Madison’s draft was expansive and grandiose. After congressional churn, the verbiage was tightened considerably to what would become one of the country’s best-known paragraphs:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So much was cut, it’s easy to miss what was added: “Congress shall make no law”. Madison’s original text reads as a statement of entitlements of the people. The final First Amendment was specifically a limitation on the US Congress and only the US Congress; it made no restraint on what the states could do. Madison said freedom of the press was inviolable. The amendment said it was inviolable by Congress. For well over a century, the Constitution provided no guarantee of free speech, only a guarantee of speech free from federal congressional strictures. That’s enormously different.

With time, a gruesome war, and a few more amendments, things changed. As with the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment’s opening phrase was crucial.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Here, for the first time, the phrase “No State shall” appears in a constitutional amendment. No longer are we restricting only Congress; now we’re restricting states. With this crucial expansion of scope, the equal protection clause prohibited states from treating people unequally. Obviously, that was quite new.

What’s more, over time the Fourteenth Amendment gradually altered the interpretation of many other parts of the Constitution. Americans were now entitled to equal protection of, for example, their freedom of speech, including from state restrictions. More and more rights were “incorporated” into the realm of federal protection. Power was centralizing.

Then the Sixteenth Amendment gave Congress more power to tax, which gave the federal government the capacity to grow and grow. Presidents of both parties assumed more and more authority. All politics became national. Today, the federal government’s power, while not limitless, towers over that of the states. Clearly the United States now has a centralization bias.

So the framers tried to hard-code for state power and nonetheless created a federal government that would eventually move power to the center. They denounced monarchy even as they created a presidency that today boasts dramatically more power than any historical English king.

No one whose only knowledge of our nation came solely from reading the Constitution would imagine that our state and national governments relate as they do. It still reads as a document with a decentralization bias. The nation in fact has a centralization bias. The map no longer resembles the territory.

We see such centralization patterns repeating around the world. The world’s largest national governments are all already autocratic or moving in that direction. In order of population we have:

1. India, increasingly considered a democratic autocracy
2. China, long under one-party rule, now even more centralized under Xi Jinping
3. the US, where the long trend of power centralization is accelerating
4. Indonesia, another arena of major democratic backsliding

Then we have Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, Russia… Where are we to look for evidence that large-scale electoral systems can durably resist the trend to centralize power? If you answered the European Union, consider that the entity is a mere 32 years old and already centralizing. It’s no autocracy, but it’s early days. The power-seeking dynamics of electoral politics (or for that matter of any oligarchic or monarchic system) are not always swift, but they're relentless.

There is little reason to hope that an electoral system can resist autocratic tendencies at a large scale.

To achieve a healthy, durable balance between centralized and decentralized power, we need an entirely new approach to nested governance.

Multi-level governance is the standard term for the distribution of authority between local, regional, state, national, international, and global governing bodies. Due to its Russian doll quality, I sometimes call it nesting. The federal government nests state governments.

Even with a more approachable term, it’s hard to make nesting sexy. It mostly involves thinking about jurisdiction, which dramatically complicates governance conversations. Weighing jurisdiction means we have to decide not only what policies we support, we have to think about who should enforce them. Most of us are not in the habit of principled jurisdictional thinking. If we like a policy, we’ll go with anyone who’ll agree to implement it. Jurisdiction can seem like pencil pushing. But there’s far more to jurisdiction and nesting than bureaucracy.

Consider this. We face a vast array of global challenges. Our technologies are rapidly evolving and we have profound questions about how we as a species will relate to them. Much of the AI race is motivated by a fear that others will develop faster than we do and employ the new intelligences to dominate us; it’s a problem of planetary dimensions. We want healthy oceans, healthy air, a stable climate, and stable geopolitics. There is clearly a desperate need for some kind of global governance.

And there is also a very reasonable fear that our existing patterns of nested governance will not serve us on the global scale. Surely no system that has proven so vulnerable to authoritarian takeover should be implemented on a planetary level. We don’t want global power to centralize the way US power has. The spectre of planetwide hegemony is utterly terrifying. So is the defeatism that says no global problem can have a global answer.

In other words, a new approach to jurisdiction that reliably guards against autocracy is a mandatory prerequisite for wise, restrained global governance. If you see no defense against a steady drift towards global domination, of course you oppose efforts to enable global decision-making. Embracing planetary governance requires a viable solution that would let humanity tackle problems of global scale while offering impenetrable protection for national sovereignty and cultural independence.

So we’re talking about a vital missing ingredient for a framework that could help humans to thrive on Earth. Jurisdiction is sexy, right?

The standard pattern for resolving jurisdiction disputes in the US is top-down. All jurisdictional debates are settled by the nester, not the nested. Questions of federal vs state jurisdiction are resolved by some combination of the federal executive, the federal legislature, and – should any issue remain – the federal courts. Similarly, state vs. local questions are answered by the state. This is so straightforward to most of us that it may seem a little strange to point it out; obviously the larger, more powerful government decides; who else would?

The top-down approach doesn’t mean that the nester always decides in the nester’s favor. Federal courts sometimes decide, for example, that the federal government has overstepped. Some such rulings cite the aforementioned Tenth Amendment (the one about powers defaulting to the states) as a reason to rule in favor of state governments, as in “anti-commandeering” rulings that the feds can’t force states to enforce federal policy.

But in all cases, the nester makes the call, and nesters have indisputably gained more and more power over the years. Governments have a bias, however subtle, towards expanding their own power. The top-down jurisdiction settlement is almost certainly related to centralization bias that has evolved in the US government.

How, then, do we tackle it all? How do we balance centralization and decentralization? How do we get local flavor without risking local fiefdoms? How do we manage a globally connected world without opening the door to global domination?

We won’t solve it all in a couple of paragraphs, of course, but two key aspects of any viable solution are apparent.

First off, we should embrace genuine democracy. By that I mean empowered representative, deliberative assemblies selected by democratic lotteries. I suspect most readers who reach this point know the idea well, but if you’re new to such assemblies, it’s well worth an exploration. Lottery selection, or sortition, is the only viable way to achieve descriptive representation at any scale. Responsibility can be distributed through many bodies, each able to learn and deliberate extensively without the venomous influence of electoral politics. And because they neither concentrate authority nor reward ambitious power-seekers, sortition systems guard against centralization. No deliberator needs to serve a long term, no one assembly needs to possess great power, and no citizen needs to trust in the forbearance of an overpowered leader.

Secondly, jurisdiction decisions should not always fall to the larger, nesting government. Nesters will always tend to pull power inward. Nested governments must have some way to pull power back outward again. For that there must be a distinction made between the whole (the nester) and the sum of the parts (the nested). Only assemblies representative of the whole should ever set policy for the whole. But enough assemblies representative of the parts should be able to override the whole and pull power out to the parts again.

In future posts I’ll try to add more meat to these bones and explore both (a) how we can employ democratic lotteries at great scale and (b) how we can create systems with effective counterweights to the centralization bias. Despite the difference in scale, the key to both preserving local flavor and enabling global governance may be solving these same two puzzles.