"So long as libertarians withhold their consent from conservative politicians, those politicians can't win."

--Ryan Sager, columnist and blogger for the New York Post and RealClearPolitics.com

In the American political theory classic, Federalist 10, author James Madison proposed controls on the effects of factions:

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote.
...
Either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression.

Unfortunately, the bipartisan scheme of oppression most Americans live under today arose as the result of the single-member district plurality voting systems that underlie almost all elections in the United States, which has yielded two dominant political factions. Combined with the advent of "log rolling" -- a technique through which legislators poorly monitored by voters behave in ways that are costly to citizens -- the two-party system has managed to defeat the U.S. Constitution's checks and balances against "the interested combinations of the majority."

A modern example of the majoritarian erosion of constitutional barriers is the receipt of "significant income" from government programs by more than half of all Americans. In other words, the tax eaters -- both from the political left and political right -- outnumber the taxpayers.

How might those who champion the cause of liberty restore the free America envisioned by its founders; an American society as described in Federalist 51 "broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority"?

In the The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, authors Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom cite examples of decentralized organizations prevailing over institutions based on the command-and-control model.

Brafman and Beckstrom also claim that normally decentralized organizations can be attacked by centralizing them. Similarly, political observer Ryan Sager suggests that libertarians were persuaded to "fuse" or "centralize" with conservatives through promises, false or not, that reducing government is one of their central tasks.

Well, as morally uninhibited (MP3 file) as most elected Democrats have proven to be, when it comes to reducing government the tenure of George W. Bush has shown that most elected Republicans are worse.

In Utah, most registered voters are not affiliated with either branch of the bipartisan political cartel. Libertarians and independents can deny political power, legitimacy, and relevance to the Party of Lincoln and the Party of Jackson by voting for candidates nominated by other parties, or not voting at all.

And liberty lovers in Utah, and elsewhere, can help decentralize political power -- from the federal level down to local school districts -- by advocating more competitive and representative electoral systems that break up the two-party duopoly into a multi-party, democratic, constitutional republic.

Modern electoral systems can more fairly and fully reflect the diversity of Utah residents, as compared to the distorted, fun-house mirror effect seen in the current membership of the State of Utah's Legislature.

Decentralizing democracy would not, in and of itself, deny all power to the members of the self-dealing, political class.

But to paraphrase America's founders, along with economist Tyler Cowen, the main purpose of democracy is not to produce so-called "public goods," but to "prevent very bad ideas and very bad leaders."

Yours in liberty,

Rob Latham, Chairman
Libertarian Party of Utah