"When governments become large, voters cannot exercise close oversight, otherwise known as political power"
About this Quote
Gallagher’s line is built like a civics lesson, but it lands like a warning shot: bigness doesn’t just make government clunky, it makes democracy thinner. The key move is the quiet redefinition of “political power.” It’s not rallying, donating, tweeting, or even voting in the abstract. Power, in her framing, is oversight - the granular ability to watch, understand, and correct what officials do. When scale increases, that feedback loop breaks, and the citizen’s role slides from supervisor to spectator.
The subtext is a familiar conservative and communitarian critique dressed in plain language: modern states drift toward managerial rule, where expertise, bureaucracy, and distance replace local accountability. “Large” does a lot of work here. It gestures not only to budget size but to complexity - sprawling agencies, opaque regulations, layers of delegation. The claim isn’t just that people become uninformed; it’s that they become structurally unable to know enough to govern their governors. That’s a sharper accusation, because it implies the problem isn’t civic laziness but design.
Context matters: Gallagher rose as a prominent writer in late-20th and early-21st century culture-war America, where arguments about federal reach, family policy, and the legitimacy of centralized authority were constant. The sentence echoes a Madisonian fear of concentrated power while flipping the usual technocratic boast - that big government is more capable - into a democratic liability. Its effectiveness comes from that compression: oversight equals power; scale kills oversight; therefore scale kills power. It’s less an observation than a moral accounting of distance.
The subtext is a familiar conservative and communitarian critique dressed in plain language: modern states drift toward managerial rule, where expertise, bureaucracy, and distance replace local accountability. “Large” does a lot of work here. It gestures not only to budget size but to complexity - sprawling agencies, opaque regulations, layers of delegation. The claim isn’t just that people become uninformed; it’s that they become structurally unable to know enough to govern their governors. That’s a sharper accusation, because it implies the problem isn’t civic laziness but design.
Context matters: Gallagher rose as a prominent writer in late-20th and early-21st century culture-war America, where arguments about federal reach, family policy, and the legitimacy of centralized authority were constant. The sentence echoes a Madisonian fear of concentrated power while flipping the usual technocratic boast - that big government is more capable - into a democratic liability. Its effectiveness comes from that compression: oversight equals power; scale kills oversight; therefore scale kills power. It’s less an observation than a moral accounting of distance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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