Belated Overseer Wrap-Up

Well, I finished Jonathan Rabb's The Overseer (more here and here) about a month ago, and I've been terribly lax on the postmortem I intended. Ideally, I was thinking about going through the actual text of the fictional On Supremacy (think Machiavelli's The Prince on meth) and pointing out all the parallels with the current Republican party, but there were just too many of them...

But there was one quote that I wanted to put up, because it was such an intriguing take on states' rights, and one that I had never seen before:

"Your politics," broke in Zander, "are supposed to be about dismantling big government, giving power back to the people, or have I missed the point? It seems to me you folks on the Right are the ones who want to tell the people what's good for them, even when they don't realize it themselves."

"...[D]o you think we're giving up power by doing that? We're simply letting the states deal with the petty quarrels. 'Get government out of your backyard.' It's a clever slogan, isn't it? Keeps them preoccupied with the minutiae. Actually, we're taking their minds off the federal government, giving them something smaller to play with so that they leave us alone to handle the larger issues.

"Let government do what it's best designed for - turn a maximum profit without having to worry about the few who can't make it on their own. The more we focus the people's interest on state government, the less they focus on the federal, the less they get in our way. Once you create a thoroughly disjointed electorate - a group of people concerned only with their own backyards - you can achieve great things."

Chilling.