Trump, Musk, and whatever the hell this weird Doge-libertarian-techno-utopian movement is—they actually have a point: our government is bloated, dysfunctional, and riddled with inefficiency. Anyone who’s had to navigate the Kafkaesque maze of bureaucracy knows exactly what I’m talking about—and that’s literally everyone. But instead of acknowledging this deeply felt frustration, Democrats often come across as defenders of the very systems people despise. That’s a horrific mistake.
I say this not as a Republican, nor a libertarian, nor a technophile—but as a lifelong progressive who has grown disillusioned by how out of touch the Democratic Party has become with the everyday lives of the common American.
My wife and I are now in year three of an excruciating legal immigration process that has cost us more than $10,000 (which, speaking as a scientist recently out of grad school, is an exorbitant sum to us) and robbed us of the most formative years of our life together. We should be building a home, raising children, starting a family. Instead, our lives are frozen by the senseless bureaucracy of the U.S. government. I now fully understand why people immigrate illegally. When love and family are on the line, arbitrary laws and borders start to feel like moral absurdities. Bureaucracy doesn’t feel like law and order—it feels like violence by a thousand paper cuts.
And here’s the deeper truth: the system isn’t just broken—it was never built right to begin with. The architecture of modern federal bureaucracy is fundamentally misaligned with how humans evolved to live, relate, and govern. It clashes with our deepest biological instincts as a eusocial species—wired for cooperation, mutual care, and reciprocity within tightly knit communities, not anonymous, heavily-individualized megastructures. For 99% of our evolutionary history, humans lived in small, interdependent, egalitarian groups, embedded in their ecosystems and guided by direct social relationships—not by distant authorities or abstract rules meant to benefit the ruling class. As Jared Diamond points out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, even as recently as 500 years ago, only about 20% of the world was organized into the kind of centralized, bureaucratic states that now dominate the globe. In evolutionary terms, the modern state is not the norm but rather the exception—and we’re paying the price for this evolutionary mismatch every day.
Dismantle the System—But Do It Intelligently
So here’s my radical suggestion to Democrats: lean into it. Stop defending the monolithic, centralized state apparatus. Let Trump and his cronies scream about “draining the swamp”—even though we all know they’re just pumping in more elitist sewage. Instead of reflexively propping up a broken system, offer something better. Something human. Something actually functional. Let them stumble over themselves trying to destroy federal agencies. Instead of clinging to the old machinery, offer a better alternative: a rebirth of decentralized, local, polycentric governance.
Decentralization isn’t a right-wing idea. It’s a fundamentally human idea, founded in the latest science. And ironically, the left is far better positioned to do it well.
Political scientist Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, spent her life studying how people actually manage resources and govern themselves—not in theory, but in practice. Her work shattered the long-standing myth of The Tragedy of The Commons: that only centralized authorities or privatized markets can effectively manage shared resources. What she found, time and again, was that local, participatory, and self-organizing systems often perform better than top-down bureaucracies or market-driven solutions.
Ostrom didn’t draw her insights from Ivory tower abstractions—she drew them from real communities, many of them Indigenous and traditional societies, who had preserved humanity’s oldest and most enduring forms of governance. These communities had not only sustained forests, fisheries, and farmlands over centuries—they had preserved something deeper: our evolutionary cultural heritage. They had kept alive the ancient human wisdom of how to live in reciprocal relationship with one another and with the ecosystems that support life.
Her research demonstrated that when people are given ownership over their own commons—whether it’s a water system, a local school, or a communal grazing field—they tend to manage it responsibly. Why? Because that’s how we evolved to live. Our ancestors didn’t survive by deferring to distant, faceless, bureaucratic institutions. They survived—need I say thrived—through networks of trust, cooperation, and mutual obligation within tightly knit egalitarian communities. Such social dynamics are not vestiges of some primitive form; they are the biological and social substrates that support human flourishing, in all its forms.
Ostrom’s Core Design Principles capture this ancestral logic in modern terms. They show how small, self-governing groups—when empowered with a strong social identity, autonomy, inclusive decision-making, equitable distribution of benefits, and mechanisms for accountability—can manage even the most complex collective challenges without resorting to heavy-handed central authority. The CDPs are so much more than just a theory of how to govern effectively; it’s a rediscovery of how we are wired to live. Think of them as a kind of social technology, grounded in the latest science, that offers an evolutionary blueprint for how we can begin restructuring our social systems and institutions once again.
If we want a democracy that actually works, we don’t need to scale bigger—we need to scale smarter. We need to return to the principles that have always sustained human life: cooperation, community, and stewardship rooted in place. Ostrom didn’t just offer a critique of centralized governance—she offered a blueprint for a new (or rather, ancient) way forward.
What Dunbar’s Number Tells Us About Human Social Organization
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar arrived at a remarkably similar insight, but from a very different angle. His research into primate and human social behavior led to what’s now famously known as Dunbar’s Number—the cognitive limit to the number of stable, meaningful relationships a person can maintain, which hovers around 150. This number isn’t arbitrarily concocted—it’s rooted in the evolution of our neocortex and reflects the group sizes within which our ancestors lived for the vast majority of our species’ history.
For tens of thousands of years, humans lived in intimate, interdependent, and largely egalitarian bands and small tribes—typically composed of around 150 individuals, but sometimes expanding into loosely connected groups that rarely exceeded a few thousand. In these communities, the core principles later formalized in Ostrom’s Core Design Principles—trust, cooperation, shared norms, and mutual accountability—weren’t lofty ideals; they were essential tools for survival. Everyone had a role. Everyone had a name and place. Everyone was known. Social cohesion wasn’t a luxury or a moral aspiration—it was the foundation of human life. It was the glue that held the group together, the invisible thread that made everything else possible.
This is why massive, centralized systems often fail at the human level. They overwhelm our cognitive and emotional capacity for sociospiritual connection. When decisions are made by distant institutions or faceless bureaucracies, trust erodes. Alienation grows. Corruption creeps in—not always because of bad actors, but because the very structure exceeds what our social minds were built to handle. In short, centralized bureaucracy is a profound evolutionary mismatch.
And here’s where the insights of Dunbar and Ostrom come together in profound harmony. Ostrom’s work with small-scale traditional societies revealed how they intuitively matched the scale of governance to the scale of social connection and ecological carrying capacities. These communities didn’t need complex theories of evolutionary psychology—they simply preserved the commonsense wisdom of living within naturally-imposed human limits.
In fact, you can still see this logic alive today in communities like the Amish. While not often thought of as a model of political innovation, the Amish get something right that modern society so often gets wrong. Most Amish settlements tend to hover around—surprise—150 people. When a community grows beyond this threshold, they simply split off and form a new one. There’s no centralized bureaucracy, no masterplan, no grand philosophical treatise about Dunbar’s Number. They likely don’t believe in the underlying science at all. But they live it, implicitly and organically.
There’s a certain irony here: secular scientists labor for decades to uncover the cognitive architecture of human social organization, while communities like the Amish have quietly been living by those principles all along. They don’t need a theory to know that small is beautiful, and that community only works when people can actually know and care for one another. It’s not ideological—it’s ecological.
Meanwhile, the modern world keeps pushing us toward scale, speed, and abstraction—toward bigger governments, larger institutions, and denser populations. But what if real progress means going the other way? Not toward more complexity, but toward intelligent simplicity—toward right-sized communities, resilient local systems, and nested governance that actually fits the grain of human nature.
If Democrats truly want to build a society rooted in justice, equity, and belonging, they need to start from this fundamental truth: humans evolved for community, not higher-level state-run bureaucracy. What’s needed now isn’t nostalgia for the past or naïve utopianism, but a radical reimagining of governance that draws on both cutting-edge science and the ancestral Indigenous wisdom that’s been hiding in plain sight.
The Future Is Polycentric
A healthy society doesn’t need to choose between chaos and control. It needs polycentricity: a system of overlapping, semi-autonomous networks of governance that allows decisions to be made at the most local level possible, while still maintaining coordination across broader scales when necessary. It’s not about abolishing higher-order governance altogether—it’s about aligning authority with proximity, trust, and context. And it’s the only kind of system that truly fits the way human beings are wired to live and cooperate.
Elinor Ostrom spent her life proving that polycentric governance isn’t some fringe theory—it’s how real people, in real communities, have successfully managed shared resources for centuries. Her research showed that when communities are given meaningful autonomy, they tend to produce better outcomes than centralized bureaucracies. And not just better outcomes in economic terms—but better outcomes in terms of social trust and cohesion, long-term ecological sustainability, and human dignity.
In other words, Ostrom didn’t just describe a form of governance—she described a living system. A network of communities organized like ecosystems: distributed, diverse, adaptive, and interdependent. Like nature itself, polycentric societies thrive not through monoculture and central control, but through pluralism and relationality.
And Robin Dunbar’s research gives us the biological rationale for why this works so well. Human beings are not designed to function as anonymous cogs in megasystems. We are evolutionarily adapted to face-to-face networks of trust and reciprocity. Dunbar’s Number is a map of our social architecture. It defines the boundaries of our emotional bandwidth. When political systems ignore that bandwidth—when decisions are made in distant capitals by people we’ll never meet—the result is predictable: alienation, resentment, disconnection, and decline in civic engagement.
Polycentricity, by contrast, grounds political power within the scale of meaningful relationships. It reflects the intuitive wisdom you see in communities like the Amish—who, despite rejecting modern science, have organically preserved the exact social scale that science now tells us is optimal. There is no bureaucracy, no master algorithm—just embodied knowledge passed through generations about how to live well together.
This is the kind of thinking the Democratic Party should be championing—not defending broken bureaucracies or doubling down on abstract technocratic fixes. Instead of propping up lifeless institutions like the DMV, DoD, DoE, or the IRS, Democrats should be asking: what comes after it?
They should be building the next generation of governance—one rooted in community empowerment, ecological balance, and evolutionary logic. That means investing in and scaling what works: local cooperatives, community land trusts, municipal broadband, local food systems, participatory budgeting, neighborhood councils, community-led education, and citizens’ assemblies. It means crafting policies that empower local governance while ensuring equity and coordination across regions—not through federal micromanagement, but through federated cooperation.
In a truly polycentric system, schools are shaped by the communities they serve. Health initiatives are locally driven and culturally attuned. Immigration policies are guided by regional realities and grounded in human empathy. Housing decisions are made not by distant corporate developers, but by the people who actually live in the neighborhoods affected. And most importantly, people begin to feel connected—to each other, to their communities, and to the decisions that shape their lives. They stop feeling like passive subjects of a distant, indifferent system, and start becoming active co-creators of a society that reflects their values, needs, and hopes.
A truly polycentric system isn’t just one political philosophy among many—it’s the only kind of system that aligns with how humans are fundamentally wired to live and govern. Why? Because it reflects a deep evolutionary truth: human beings are inherently pluralistic. We differ in our cultures, values, needs, and ways of life, and any attempt to impose a uniform structure from the top down inevitably breeds inefficiency, resistance, and alienation. There is no one-size-fits-all model that can govern effectively beyond the scale of the community. Our political lives don’t fit neatly along a one-dimensional spectrum—or even a two-dimensional grid. Real societies are more complex, more adaptive, and more context-dependent than any rigid ideological model can account for. Polycentricity, for comparison, embraces this diversity—nay, it encourages such diversity. It empowers communities to shape their own futures while remaining connected to a broader, cooperative whole.
And here’s what the science tells us: when people feel rooted in place, when they experience real belonging in vibrant local communities and live in a reciprocal relationship within their ecosystems, an extraordinary thing happens. Social pathology begins to dissipate. Alienation recedes. Violence declines. Ecological destruction slows. Mental health improves. I predict—and the evidence increasingly supports—that simply reconnecting people to one another and to the land they live on will do more to address issues like mass shootings, rising depression and anxiety, and environmental degradation than any top-down policy ever could. This is what I refer to as “a spiritual society”.
This isn’t a retreat from progressive values—it’s a radical renewal of them. Real equity doesn’t come from scale; it comes from access, voice, and agency. Justice doesn’t live in bureaucracy—it lives in relationships. Democracy doesn’t thrive in abstract theory or centralized bureaucratic structures—it thrives in local practice, in local communities, in local ecosystems.
So let Trump scream about draining the swamp all he wants. Let Musk try to replace public governance with stupid private algorithms. The left doesn’t need to defend the old order—it needs to outgrow it. The future isn’t centralized—it’s polycentric and local. And if Democrats have the courage to lean into that future, they might not just win elections—they might actually start building a society that works for all.
Local Doesn’t Mean Libertarian
This isn’t about abandoning social responsibility—it’s about reimagining how we deliver it. Local doesn’t mean libertarian. It means relational. It means giving people real, tangible power over the institutions that shape their daily lives. It means shifting governance from distant bureaucrats in D.C. to neighbors, networks, and nested systems of trust. It’s about anchoring democracy in community—not abstraction. It’s about reorganizing society in a way that mirrors how our ancestors lived for millennia—how we, as a deeply social and interdependent species, were designed to live: in connection with one another and in a deep relationship with the land.
Democrats have long stood for justice, equity, and solidarity. But those values can’t thrive in a society where people feel powerless and unheard. If the left wants to win hearts—not just elections—it has to stop defending broken institutions and start building systems people actually believe in.
Let Trump try to burn it all down. Let Musk meme his way to Mars. The real political revolution won’t come from billionaires or bureaucrats.
It will come from the ground up.
So let’s lean into it.
