Madisonian civil disobedience

At Real Clear Politics Michael Barone analyzes some of the concepts written about by Charles Murray in his new book "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission."

The cultural uniformity that people remember from the post-World War II decades is the exception rather than the rule in American history. We were a religiously, ethnically and regionally diverse nation in James Madison's time, Murray says, and we are once again. The uniformity temporarily imposed by shared wartime and postwar experiences is no more.

In addition, the assumption that centralized regulators would have unique expertise has proven unfounded. Government bureaucracy is increasingly a kludgeocracy (a word coined by the liberal political scientist Steven Teles), mindlessly enforcing absurdly precise rules by threatening ruin upon anyone who resists.

But regulators are actually thin on the ground, unequipped to deal with mass -- and subsidized -- civil disobedience. When a spotlight is shined on their tyrannical behavior, even courts will rebel.

...The Progressive push to give politically insulated bureaucrats power to impose detailed and often incomprehensible rules was a product of the industrial era, a time when it was supposed that experts with stopwatches could design maximally productive assembly lines.

That idea is out of date in an information era, when expertise is widely dispersed and readily accessible to citizens acting on their own initiative and inspiration. Bureaucracy's time has passed, Murray argues, and its tyranny is ripe to be overthrown by creative Madisonian civil disobedience.