Tempering the tyranny of the majority.

For my first post, I thought I'd revisit what I wrote in Democracy in America about administrative centralization (better yet, the lack of). In early America, one of the ways that the "tyranny of the majority" was tempered was the lack of administrative centralization. Most of the administration of government was done at the town level. This had the effect of limiting the most "advanced instruments of tyranny," i.e. central government administration of policies. I'll leave you to judge where we are now on the scale of local vs federal administration/control.