I think it&#x27;s more in the increasing centralization of power. The central power is bigger and thus harder to move by sheer inertia, more risk-averse, and also more able to simply implement whatever it likes regardless of what anybody else thinks because it is isolate from the trenches.<p>I think one of the top-3 issues facing the US right now is we need a lot more power devolved back to the states... not out of a &quot;state&#x27;s rights&quot; sense of the argument, but out of a sheer engineering argument that trying to run a large and diverse country from one city is not working in practice, and there&#x27;s no theoretical reason why it should work. Diversity and central control are, if perhaps not necessarily &quot;incompatible&quot; in the strictest sense of the term, still at great odds with each other; the central authority is forever tempted to homogenize diversity to make central control easier.