What does governance need to become?: Subsidiarity advocates
New to public policy
The altitude principle
In 1931, Pope Pius XI articulated what Catholic political philosophy had been circling for centuries: it is a grave evil to assign to a higher association what lesser organizations can do. Not decentralization — subsidiarity. Decisions at the lowest level competent to make them. The emphasis falls on both halves. A village should not defer to a nation on matters it can handle. A nation should not defer to a village on matters requiring national coordination.
We watch the American culture war with the detached grief of people who diagnosed the disease before symptoms appeared. The United States has spent seventy years nationalizing every policy question through federal regulation and judicial decree. The result: 330 million people with radically different moral intuitions must reach consensus on questions that never required consensus. Abortion policy in Mississippi and Massachusetts could differ. Instead, the Supreme Court made it national in 1973 and again in 2022, and the country tore itself apart both times.
The digital democracy camp builds tools for mass participation. More participation in decisions at the wrong altitude does not produce better governance. A national citizens’ assembly on zoning is an absurdity — not because citizens lack competence but because zoning is a local question.
Ostrom — whom the polycentric camp claims and we claim with equal justification — documented communities governing resources effectively for centuries through locally calibrated rules no national legislature could have designed. The American founding was, in one reading, a distorted memory of this principle.
Where we concede ground: Climate and pandemics involve externalities crossing every boundary we could draw. The principle points past existing institutions.
What would change our mind: Radical subsidiarity producing systematic minority oppression — not aberrant officials but predictable outcomes of local majority rule.
Read the full synthesis: What does governance need to become?