Devolution Revolution: Americans Returning Power to the People

Sometimes a boundary is just a line in the road. But sometimes it’s a gate from one world to another. 

Contrast Los Angeles with some of its suburbs

Driving due south from downtown Los Angeles through what was once the thriving center of Black L.A. now takes travelers through miles of dystopia that look like Mumbai on a bad day: potholed roads, vacant buildings, and mostly Latino young people – and older African Americans – hanging out with seemingly no particular place to go.

Then, about 18 miles in, you enter Paramount, a predominantly Latino city of over 50,000 residents which is still part of Los Angeles County but not the city proper. Suddenly, the ubiquitous graffiti is all but gone; the streets are smooth, and businesses, from steel fabrication to small service businesses, appear to be bustling.

 The same is true in other South L.A. county towns like Downey, South Gate, and Bellflower, which also boast vibrant downtowns with attractive restaurants and shops. Crime has hardly disappeared but is far lower than in adjacent parts of the City of Los Angeles, which have long been plagued with violence, pervasive theft, and homelessness.

Good governance v. bad governance

The common denominator that sets these communities apart from the city is good governance that starts by paying attention to little things that locals care about – like parks, urban space, and landscaping, even subsidizing flower beds and white picket fences. Most towns have programs that let citizens report graffiti, which is then removed within 24 hours. Paramount has grown its population by over 40% since 1975, even as Los Angeles County’s population has dropped. As the city of Los Angeles grapples with huge deficits, Paramount has become less debt-burdened.

Like the neighboring towns, Paramount’s success is especially remarkable because it has achieved it in the face of daunting odds. Once described as “an urban disaster area,” Paramount was hit hard by the economic downturn of the 1980s, when aerospace and automobile manufacturers pulled out of the region.

Pat West, the former Paramount city manager and a guru to a generation of those now running these cities, believes this success stems from a web of essentially personal and profoundly apolitical mindset that can be forged when the distance between citizens and City Hall is small. “In places like Paramount, people get things done because that’s where they live,” West quips. “In LA they have meetings.” 

This shorter distance between “leaders” and residents changes the very nature of government. People generally look out for their families, children, neighbors more than the abstract “people” or “community” cited by activists from NGOs often funded by very rich people far away. 

The old academic models are failing; enter devolution

The success of South L.A.’s independent cities – and similar communities across the country – offers a counterpoint to influential urban activists who draw their views from academic thinkers and regional political as well as business elites. For decades, top-down planners, who focus almost entirely on political advocacy and finding ways to access funds from state and federal government, have dominated the debate about city life. Informed by thinkers such as the Marxist theorist Mike Davis, they argued these cities and other working-class communities were essentially doomed to become “hardscrabble slums.” A 2024 article in The Atlantic described such places as a Ponzi scheme where minorities are left “holding the bag” for the dysfunction whites created and then fled from. 

But the veracity of those claims and the power of those who espouse them are being quietly challenged and undermined by the organic movement of citizens driven not by ideology but by the search for a better life, a wide-scale phenomenon called devolution. Devolution – which combines the conservative ideals of small-town life with the old left-wing vision of people’s communities – is the restoration of power to smaller, more responsive entities. This naturally includes the embrace of smaller local governments; it involves but also reflects an even more fundamental devolution of power that strengthens the basic units of life, notably the family, the neighborhood, associations and churches, whose concerns are often ignored by bureaucracies as well as huge corporations.

Power to the People – devolution in action

Political devolution is not much celebrated by the political class, whose power is magnified by large-scale governance. On the left, particularly in big cities, leftist progressives and Democratic Socialists are ascendant; their goal is to centralize power in the hands of activists so they can experience what New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani calls “the warmth of collectivism.” Traditional ideas such as the separation of powers, local control, political diversity, and the primacy of family, even the pledge to remain non-violent, lack pride of place in their playbook. 

In many ways, the Trump administration also embraces a similarly authoritarian, big-government approach, seeking to concentrate power in the executive branch and nationalize elections rather than emphasizing local concerns and solutions. In their own way, increasingly powerful tech moguls are trying to build a future that pays lip service to libertarianism but in practice stresses centralized power and uniformity. 

As South L.A. demonstrates, bigger is not only not better; it is often demonstrably worse. 

Migration to smaller jurisdictions

Of course, not all small cities are thriving, and not all big cities are failing. But as RCI has previously reported, a host of factors are driving people – especially the high cost of living in low-performing big cities – to choose to migrate to smaller jurisdictions. Core cities have been losing their share of metropolitan residents for decades. According to a recent M.I.T. study, suburbs and exurbs constitute roughly 80% of the nation’s metropolitan population, while barely 8% live in the urban core.Even most millennials, who tend to be mobile and are often portrayed as immutably attracted to dense environments, are heading to the suburbs, particularly as they start – albeit belatedly – families. 

This trend has accelerated since the pandemic and the increase in remote work. Demographer Wendell Cox notes that from 2020-2024, the urban core counties lost 3,259,000 net domestic migrants, which was three times the rate of loss in the previous decade. The Census Bureau reports that since 2020, growth has shifted to peripheral areas 20 miles or more from the central core, while areas within 10 miles declined markedly. Indeed, a small, and likely brief, post-pandemic recovery in large metro populations reversed in 2024, the Brookings Institution has found. 

Bigger Isn’t Better

The embrace of centralized power – which has its roots in Herbert Croly’s 1909 progressive manifesto, “The Promise of American Life,” and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal – made sense a century ago. Vast technological changes, huge population increases, rampant racial discrimination, and various economic crises showed the limits of America’s highly decentralized system that gave great authority to the states and localities. And for many Americans, at least till the 1970s, cities exercised a great appeal, as places of cultural and economic vitality. 

 But today, the gap between what’s available in large and small cities, and even small towns, has diminished greatly. And while the federal government is necessary for certain functions, like controlling the border, national defense, and regulating interstate commerce, in areas such as education, law enforcement, and roadbuilding, smaller localities may prove more responsive and efficient than the larger units. As Aristotle noted, “a great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.”

For years, proposals to merge or abolish smaller governments have been based on a “bigger-is-better” assumption. Studies show that merging governments historically drives costs up while diminishing the influence of individual voters in favor of well-organized and financed interest groups. Too often, the advantage of local democracy is overlooked. 

Consolidation brings few efficiencies and leads to big spending

Extensive research indicates that consolidation of local governments – long part of the progressive agenda – saves little money and tends to lead to higher spending. Evidence of this surfaced as early as the 1980s, well before the rise of digital technology, in states as diverse as Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Illinois. In Pennsylvania, for example, local general government expenditures per capita have long been the highest in the two largest cities. As recently as 2019, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh combined for only 14% of the state’s population but account for over one-third of all municipal spending in the state. 

Special-purpose districts – another example of devolution

Local governments also tend to be far more responsive to local needs in ways that could help invigorate America’s fraying democracy. Rather than being directed from Washington, key infrastructure like major roads and utility grids could be the responsibility of broad, often ad hoc regional agencies. This is not a new idea. Many of the greatest achievements, like the Golden Gate Bridge, were commissioned locally and using a special district built by private firms ahead of schedule and under budget.

Today such special purpose districts – 39,262 in 2022 – tend to specialize in providing a particular service such as fire and emergency services, water and sewage supply, drainage, libraries, parks, and recreation.They often perform these tasks in concert with private companies that bid for local contracts.

Many South L.A. municipalities are “contract cities” that often secure services from either the county, notably the Sheriff’s Office, or from private firms. “The secret sauce” for cost-effective governance, suggests 35-year-old Bellflower City Councilman Victor Sanchez, lies in picking and choosing what services are best provided regionally or by private companies rather than trying to run everything from a centralized city hall. “Sometimes,” suggests Paramount’s John Moreno, “the private sector does things better.” 

The Secret Sauce of Devolution

Devolving governance fits with the well-documented dispersion of population, whereby big city dwellers migrate to smaller communities with often more efficient and responsive governance. In his 1967 address to the American Political Science Association, eminent political scientist Robert Dahl proposed the division of metro areas into federations of self-governing areas with 50,000 to 200,000 residents – small enough for meaningful civic participation and large enough to enjoy economies of scale. 

Today, access to technology makes smaller communities even more capable of doing things that only large cities once could accomplish  – and do it better. For example, most of the South L.A. cities allow residents to ping the city if they see graffiti. And it goes down quickly. As one council member explained: “We better do it or I won’t be able to get a peaceful cup of coffee.”

Cities like Los Angeles, of course, have similar technical abilities, but lack the resources and the focus to respond quickly. The real “secret sauce” lies in cutting the distance between the governed and the government with far higher levels of trust for state and particularly local governments as opposed to the federal level. The Pew Research Center, for example, found that while two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the federal government, a majority had favorable opinions of state governments, while two-thirds approved of local ones. 

Central government more powerful but less trusted

A central paradox is that central government has acquired more power even as the people’s faith in its effectiveness has withered. In the 1960s, trust in Washington was at nearly 80%; it has since plummeted to near 20%. Few elected officials – from recent presidents to senators, members of the House, state governors, and big city mayors – are widely admired. 

The decades-long rush to centralize power has become an invitation to interminable conflict between two parties dueling to see who is the most unpopular. Both seem fine with deconstructing political competition through lawfare or redistricting, something the vast majority of voters, independent and those in both parties, abhor. 

Nixon’s revenue sharing model

One method of promoting decentralization could be a return to federal revenue sharing devised by President Richard Nixon. The basic principle was to push down decision-making and federal funding to local levels. It was destroyed by a combination of deficit hawks and the natural tendency of national leaders, both right and left, who benefit from turning states, as political scientist Ruy Teixeira notes, into “instruments” of Washington, shamelessly panhandling for their funds. 

Yet no feat of computer-driven map-making can develop a common ground between places like Portland and those in conservative eastern Oregon or harmonize California with Alabama. Certain basic standards need to be maintained, largely to protect individual and property rights, but only decentralization offers the promise of more democratic and responsive governance.

The data suggests that localized and specialized structures are more congruent with local sentiments and needs. This is a traditional American strength. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “the habits of self-government” are only acquired through civic association. It’s in local venues that democratic citizenship is most keenly felt, and where we can build an American future more in keeping with the ideals of our founders. 

Education in Vanguard of Change – a clear example of devolution

Devolving authority, as seen in South L.A., appears to offer a better alternative. A clear example can be found in education, which until the 1950s was largely a local matter. Back then, federal and state intervention may have been necessary to battle segregation. Today, given the miserable results of many public schools in recent decades, parents are increasingly revolting against the idea that large public institutions, notably union-dominated urban school districts or edicts of the Department of Education, offer the best solution. 

Many parents clearly have a hunger for an education based on values and basic learning rather than those traditionally imposed by the federal Department of Education or state bureaucracies. Enrollment in private Christian schoolsshot up in recent years, increasing 12% between 2019-20 and 2020-21. In the 2019-20 school year, 6% of all American students, some 3.5 million, attended religious schools. There has also been a shift towards Jewish day schools, expanding not only in the Orthodox community but also among Conservative and Reform Jews. 

After decades of decline, Catholic education is on the upswing. During 2021, parochial schools experienced an increase in enrollment of almost 4% and now attract close to 2 million students. This number – for all the religiously oriented programs – will likely grow as school choice programs in places like Texas, Florida, and Iowa are poised to expand their footprint. 

Religious schools – and not only Catholic or Hebrew schools

At the grassroots level, religious schools offer a successful alternative to secular, usually union-dominated schools. Tulane sociologist Ilana Horwitz found that overall, students attending Catholic schools easily outperform public schools, with average scores among fourth-graders in Catholic schools standing about one-and-a-half grade levels ahead. The differences are particularly marked among African American and Latino students. 

The shift to schools not operated by the state has expanded well beyond the Catholic Church. At Houston’s The Saint Constantine School, built around the Orthodox Christian faith, children run free in the seven-acre yard, learning to garden and organize their own play. Lives that might have been squashed by a dysfunctional public school system are now immersed in an education that includes instruction in Greek, Latin, or Arabic from an early age. 

Since 2015, enrollment has increased from 115 to 450 students in comparison to Houston’s troubled Independent School District, which has lost 12% of its students since 2016. Made up largely of Middle Eastern Christians, Russian and Greek Orthodox, the school focuses not just on academics, but also on shaping the moral character of its students. “We are trying to raise saints,” jokes Megan Mueller, head of strategy and public relations for the school. “Education is important, but building character is more so.” 

The homeschooling revolution – the ultimate in devolution

An even more radical departure, homeschooling, has become one of the fastest-growing corners of the school choice movement, notes the Fordham Institute. In the 2023–24 school year, nearly 6% of children ages 5-17 received academic instruction at home, up from 5.2% in 2022-23 and 2.8% in 2019. This is, among other things, a reaction to often violent school environments, lack of moral instruction, poor academic quality, and a profound disrespect for the primacy of the parents over their own offspring’s education.

Perhaps most consequential has been the growth of public charter schools. They are up roughly 15% over a recent six-year span even as traditional public school district enrollment has declined. This shift has been catalyzed by the superior academic performance seen in such schools, particularly in poor and minority communities.

This is not to say that public schools cannot succeed. People with children tend to seek out districts in small towns and suburbs, where public education is not controlled by massive bureaucracies as in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. In stark contrast to the dysfunction plaguing Los Angeles’ massive school district, districts in the archipelago of smaller cities in South L.A. have generally made considerable improvements. Paramount’s local school district, for example, has seen remarkable improvement. As current City Manager John Moreno notes, graduation rates have risen from 71% to over 90%, a success he attributes to strong community spirit and parental involvement. 

Families Are Crucial

Shifting power from Washington, D.C., and state capitals represents just one part of the devolutionary agenda, part of a broader effort to restore human agency. Rather than concentrating power in bureaucracy, it taps the energy of basic human institutions, from the family and church to local communities. 

Devolving power, whether in school or at City Hall, ultimately relies on the flourishing of families. Restoring family cannot be dictated from above, nor can it be easily justified by mere material benefits. Attempts in increasingly childless Italy to lower taxes on diapers and incentives for childbearing have barely moved the needle. In social democracies like Sweden, generous handouts to families and greater societal acceptance of children out of marriage have failed to boost fertility. 

In the end, governments and markets, notes demographer Nick Eberstadt, “do not cure social pathologies.” More promising would be a rekindling of the familial values that have long buttressed society. A potential return to faith might help with birthrates, whereas the decline, notably among Catholics, has had a devastating effect on fertility; some religious subcultures, like the Amish, Mormons, evangelicals and Orthodox Jews, enjoy far higher birthrates than secular and more mainstream religious communities.

Material prosperity isn’t everything

But familialism cannot be restored by the faithful alone. Studies show a need to focus less on visions of divinity and more on transcending a single-minded focus on material well-being and efficiency. The good news is that some parents are getting the point: remarkably, the time spent with kids is now twice what it was 50 years ago. Mexican immigrant children, for example, surrounded by a wide family network, experience appreciably fewer psychological problems than other populations. Irrespective of income, married women with children tend to be happier than those who are single and childless. 

G.K. Chesterton once described the family as “the factory that manufactures mankind.” The trend, however, has been in the opposite direction. But as the family has been deemphasized as the nurturer of values, the state and the digital world have moved to fill the breach – to the detriment of what is left of civilization. The so-called loneliness epidemic is just one key data point in a world where people are increasingly held together not by ties of kinship, or proximity, but by their training, ideology, cultural preference, or even hobbies.

Work Matters

As it weakens the family, ideologies and technologies that support central power and authoritarianism are also undermining another pillar of society: the value of work. From the very beginnings of humanity, work defined the individual, for those who were not enslaved, a sense of place and purpose, albeit sometimes with backbreaking labor. But jobs gave people a sense of agency, that they could provide their families and communities with something of value. It was essential to people’s self-regard and often helped define communities from auto-oriented places like Detroit to Hollywood and Silicon Valley. 

Now we are entering an era where technological elites seem determined to replace humanity and the dignity of labor, except for an elite of software whizzes, tech managers, and investors. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei sees a future where much of our needs – and our tasks – will be replaced by “Machines of Loving Grace.” Who needs human effort, connectedness, and creativity when you can have “a general labor substitute for humans?” Amodei adds: “It cannot be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.” 

In the future, Elon Musk suggests, work will be optional. “You could have a job if you wanted to have a job for personal satisfaction,” he predicted in 2023, “But AI would be able to do everything.” 

AI as the chief threat to devolution

The future now unfolding could shift power away from localities or families, in favor of an AI-powered state or under the aegis of the tech oligarchy, or a lethal combination of the two. Free market competition, which has long proven the best means to prevent overconcentration of power, will give way to AI-empowered oligopolies that can kill competition with what one writer described as “algorithmic firing squads.”

These trends could likely accelerate our already serious shrinkage in workforce participation. Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” envisioned a world in which people will no longer be sources of values, but instead mutated into indolent masses who need to be drugged or amused. As Marc Andreessen said to The American Prospect, human beings struggling to make ends meet will be kept in check as long as they have the new opiates of the masses, “OxyContin and video games,” to keep them quiet, and hopefully docile. 

Andreessen was half-kidding, but it’s a worldview many elites have embraced – and it may be the most powerful assault on agency today. It goes against the very idea of human worth. Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi points out that unemployed people, even if their material needs are met, still have a “desire to be useful, to produce, to transform, to add value – these are the fundamental human drives that people satisfy by various forms of labor.”

Licentiousness

Once this part of existence is excised, al-Gharbi adds, people naturally shift to “licentiousness, and other forms of hedonism, or playing games or consuming ever more entertainment just to fill up their hours… Spending one’s life just killing time is a horrible way to live – empty and unsatisfying.” 

In this imagined future, aspiration is made moot by control from above. Having nothing to add to society by their labor or creativity, the big issue becomes how much cash should be dispersed from the owners of the machines. Some, like the peasants after the Middle Ages, who lost their traditional place in a changing social order, could embrace a “revolutionary millennialism.” At the very least, politics will evolve into a contest over how to divide the spoils, whether the ultra-rich hold onto more of their relentlessly higher level of wealth or we enter a fantastical era of “fully automated luxury communism.”

Human-Scaled Communities

Ultimately, Americans have to ask: what kind of society do we want? Today, family and community suffer from what Harvard’s Robert Putnam defined as the curse of “pervasive busyness.” It takes far more time and effort to build human-scaled community than to develop an algorithm or app that erases the need for direct connections with those around us. 

Family, neighborhood, and church have rarely appealed to authoritarians or oligarchic “masters of the universe.” Socialism, Friedrich Engels believed, would engender a “social revolution in which the hitherto existing economic foundations of monogamy would disappear.” Adolf Hitler in “Mein Kampf” saw it as the responsibility of the state, not the family, to educate “every little national and racial comrade” so that “the young sapling” would become “a valuable link in the chain of future reproduction.”

Only intimacy between actual people, most notably in the family or community, can combat this technological intrusion, whether in schools or in the operations of government. Some may mourn that Americans are less satisfied with our democracy than most Europeans or East Asians, but that at least indicates they may prefer new human-scaled and human-controlled ways of living and governing our lives. 

Reviving our society, and democracy, relies less on “resistance” or brilliant policies from technocrats or oligarchs, but on encouraging open conversation between people who know each other not on the net, but at the coffee shop, the sports field, the parent association, the church, or just in the neighborhood. 

Devolution is necessary to the salvation of the Republic

Grassroots democracy, oriented towards local residents and families, is critical to reviving our tottering Republic. It embraces the preference for decentralization inherent in our Constitution. When it comes to issues about keeping the streets swept, removing graffiti, you need not ideologues or influencers but people, however different their political orientation, who can share a “civic friendship” based on familiarity and proximity, people who share the same local air.

South L.A.’s success was driven not by political activists but by a bottom-up effort among citizens. In Downey, a city sometimes jokingly called “the Latino Beverly Hills,” progress came from locally generated leaders, not from DSA or MAGA. In places like Downey, Republicans and Democrats work together. One key player, long-time councilman Mario Guerra, a staunch Republican, works closely with local Democrats in the interest of the city he loves.

Reinvention

“We had to reinvent ourselves,” Guerra recalls in his downtown Downey office. “But we don’t let partisan politics get in the way. People here back each other up. We all want the streets clean, and the graffiti gone.” Downey residents, he adds, share a common pride in being home to the world’s oldest McDonald’s, a place that manufactured key parts of the Space Shuttle, and now sports a lively downtown. 

“People come here because they feel safe,” suggests Mario Trujillo, a former mayor, current councilmember, and a prominent Democrat. “People migrated from East L.A., Boyle Heights, and Chavez Ravine. It’s a ‘move up’ place that we have made for ourselves.”  

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.