Democracy depends on the losers.  When Thomas Jefferson lost the close race for President to John Adams in 1796, Jefferson accepted the largely ceremonial role of Vice-President and (relatively) quietly prepared for a rematch four years later.  Of even greater consequence, Adams narrowly lost that rematch in 1800 and quietly handed the presidency to Jefferson.  The foundation of American democracy substantially rests on Jefferson, and then Adams, accepting electoral defeat.

American democracy has only broken down once, in 1860 when Southern elites refused to accept their defeat by Abraham Lincoln and thus precipitated the Civil War.  For them, the stakes were too high – as they saw it, the threat to their slave-dependent way of life permitted them no alternative to victory.

Today there is no single issue that, like slavery, is so encompassing as to make losing unacceptable.  But increasingly each side in our political struggle is convincing itself that it cannot afford to lose.  In part, this may be a function of inflamed rhetoric, amplified by social media, casting the other side as communists, fascists, Nazis, or haters of America.  But behind the vulgar, incendiary discourse of our political class, it may also be that the stakes in national politics are indeed becoming too high.  There is simply too much power to be won and lost in our national elections.

There’s too much at stake in Congress.  It’s common to deride Congress’ inability to act, but Congress now spends over $6.5 trillion ($6,500,000,000,000) annually. Congress can, if it chooses, regulate essentially every aspect of ordinary life (or give that power to the President).  Congress can make or break anyone’s economic plans with its multitudes of taxes and tax loopholes.

There’s too much at stake in the Presidency.  The President has the world’s most powerful armed forces to command, essentially at the President’s discretion. The President has the vast workforce of the federal government, including its law enforcement and regulatory personnel, largely (though not entirely) at the President’s command. As with Congress, there’s essentially no person and no activity the President cannot reach, if the President chooses.

There’s too much at stake in the federal courts.  The courts claim power to resolve the nation’s most important social issues, from sexual activity and identity, to firearms regulation, to education policy, and beyond. One might think the courts can and should check the power of other branches of government, but their immense power instead enhances the stakes elsewhere: if judges are powerful, it matters intensely who chooses the judges.

And there’s too much at stake in federal administrative agencies, with their vast regulatory and enforcement powers.  They may be beyond the effective control of other parts of government or even of the electorate, again making who chooses them a matter of great consequence.

No one wants – or, increasingly, can afford – to be a loser in this system.  To be clear, this is not an argument that there’s too much government (though one could make that case).  It’s an argument that government is too concentrated at the national level.  The immense power of, and thus focus upon, the national government has eclipsed state and local politics, except to the extent they have become merely reflections of and adjuncts to the struggle for national power.

Nor is this an argument, for the most part, about constitutional law.  True, some of the concentration described above results from relaxation of the original constraints imposed in the Constitution.  But more, it arises from a widely shared conviction that all problems must have a national solution, and thus all power must go to the single national government – which then becomes the prize in an electoral contest in which losing becomes not an option.

There is not space here for specific recommendations, but these thoughts suggest the broader approach of rededicating ourselves to local government and local solutions.  If the national government does not try to do everything, it matters less who controls it. To be sure, some problems, like slavery, call for national solutions, and conflict over them may be inevitable.  But national power should not be the default.  Jefferson and Adams, and their supporters, could accept defeat because they knew that ultimately the national government mattered relatively little in ordinary life.  We cannot, of course, return to that time, but we can look for ways to reinvigorate local politics and local solutions while diminishing our faith in the power of the national government and recognizing the threat that its power poses to American democracy.