American policy doesn’t miscarry the will of the polity. There may be disgruntlement about the execution of policy, often with justice. And there is, as there as been from the earliest years of the Republic, an often sizable current of feeling and thought coloring as immoral the exercise of American power. Even together though those are usually weaker than the abiding substrate of feeling that America is right, not perfectly so, but right enough to persevere in forceful action.

I do think, from a slightly different direction, the observation that size matters is on to something. Since America has grown to be first a peer and then a superior of other global powers, it has assumed a proportionately larger share of responsibility for maintaining a global order as good, from our point of view, as we can get it – market-driven, stable, and progressively more tolerant of human rights. There is of course a lot hooey written about, “American Exceptionalism,” but in at least one sense since 1945 and until today we have been exception, exceptionally large.

So Americans have realized that if challenges to a world order that we favor, and which I would characterize as inherently moral when contrasted with the alternatives, are to be met, we will have an exceptionally large share of the burden for doing so. And to date, by and large, our allies and their publics have realized the same.

With the rise of the China, Russia, and others, all this seems to be changing in these two important respects. Our relative power has declined and others are less committed to the values upon which we thought a world order should be based. Fortunately, the ultimate source of wealth and thus strength of these emerging global forces are the market-driven, consumer oriented economies of the West and of their own economies. Presumably that’s clear to most elites in the emerging powers who will appreciate that the maintenance of a functional world economy driven by consumers depends upon a stable world system at least roughly like the one we’ve underwritten the last sixty years.

But “roughly” means there will be rough edges. The inability to forge a working consensus on Iraq in part is probably a reflection of this changing alignment of power and tactical as opposed to strategic interests. American “leadership” now will mean helping to smooth out this new balance of players and agendas as a peer in a chamber ensemble rather than the conductor of the orchestra.

I share this anti-democratic sentiment but it does make me wonder how this type of thinking fits into a paleo-libertarian perspective. Time and time again the electorate makes horrible electoral decisions that elect horrible leaders who implement disastrous policies.

How do you address this issue? I should note that I am not sure subsidiarity or any other devolution of power from the federal government to the states would answer this question. On the one hand, it would reduce the ability of any one group of electing one person to do horrible things to our entire country. But on the other you have terrible decisions made by a host of smaller entities.

The federal government is merely the failure of democracy writ large, the states is the failure of democracy writ small. I sometimes wonder if the fundamental issue is two party system we have and whether creating additional political parties would help to address this issue.