George Kennan and American Fragmentation

Quoted from an Op Ed (with a URL too big to post) in the Arizona Republic:

Not quite. In a globalized economy transformed by technological innovations hatched by happily unguided entrepreneurs, history seems to be driving one nail after another into the coffin of the big, which is why the Obama planners and their ilk, even if they now ride high, may be doomed to fail. No one anymore expects the best ideas to come from the biggest actors in the economy, so should anyone expect the best thinking to be done by the whales of the political world?

A notable prophet for a coming age of smallness was the diplomat and historian George Kennan, a steward of the American Century with an uncanny ability to see past the seemingly frozen geopolitical arrangements of the day. Kennan always believed that Soviet power would "run its course," as he predicted back in 1951, just as the Cold War was getting under way, and again shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, he suggested that a similar fate might await the United States.

America has become a "monster country," afflicted by a swollen bureaucracy and "the hubris of inordinate size," Kennan wrote in his 1993 book, "Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy." Things might work better, he suggested, if the nation was "decentralized into something like a dozen constituent republics, absorbing not only the powers of the existing states but a considerable part of those of the present federal establishment."

Kennan's genius was to foresee that matters might take on an organic, a bottom-up, life of their own, especially in a society as dynamic and as creative as America. His spirit, the spirit of an anti-federalist modernist, can be glimpsed in an intriguing "megaregion" initiative encompassing greater San Diego County, next-door Imperial County and, to the immediate south of the U.S. border, Baja California Norte.

Go search the article by Paul Starobin, and inform him that 1024 words of URL is nonsense. Otherwise a good review except he misses the information revolution.