Maybe the World Needs a Narrow State

Before I read Foreign Policy’s Shallow State article, I thought it was going to describe a future world where Know-Nothing governments like Trump are not only encouraged, but essential, for democracy to function in a complex global economy. Brexit seems to favor this thesis. Britain’s entrance into the EU in the 1990s was supposed to be yet another step towards our global, integrated future. That they would retreat, in 2016, not by force, nor by crisis–Britain has gained the most economically from EU membership–throws the modernist narrative for a loop. Likewise, the U.S. economy has recovered miraculously from the Great Recession and even improved under Barack Obama, which according to historical trends, not to mention favorable polls, should have made Hillary Clinton’s victory a landslide.

But it’s precisely this classical liberal wording that belies why a shallower state, or rather, a narrow state, is essential. The economies of both Britain and the U.S. improved, but that wealth accumulated towards the top 1%. For the bottom half of Britons or Americans, their economic prospects are down. A wide, globalist state just doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to switch between macro- and micro-scales. Brussels and D.C. only have enough attention span to worry about GDP, not water quality in Flint or the Algerian ghettos of Paris.

The only states’ rights argument that I ever liked in my ten years living in libertarian Austin, Texas, was that local control was more efficient than national. It’s an argument that appeals to the…