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Great piece. A little OT perhaps, but it made me wonder about the role of Substack and other external-to-mainstream-media/academia outlets. Looking at your footnotes, I wonder for how long scholarly articles critical of the top-down-ness of the federal government will be allowed in the presses and publications of any college or other mainstream institution. Would a university press, in 2023, publish a book asking the questions that your piece does?

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Feb 24, 2023Liked by The Evolved Psyche

Thanks for that historical context of US federalism! I had no idea.

As for the EU, the familiar talk about a "democracy deficit" perhaps campuflages the problem of degrading communities and a profound disconnect between citizens and their *national* manegerial class. More "democracy" would just shift power from those national elites a bit more towards the EU elites--but these are all part of the same club anyway. In practice, what this means is that if a new law under discussion is unpopular in a nation state like Germany, it gets shifted towards the EU, then the national politicians can say they have no choice implementing it. With more democracy on the EU level, this procesure would only seem more legetimate.

In the "anti-federalist" model of community first, this would not happen as much. But then, what community? If something is broken culturally, spiritually, drifting aimlessly and divided, can there be any political solution before that changes?

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