Abolish States

[Nevilledog]

https://theap.substack.com/p/abolish-states?r=1fwc7

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We of the commentariat are all running out of novel ways to say that the right considers only certain Americans to be legitimate participants in democratic politics, and that this consideration makes it futile to try to persuade or shame them into rejecting their antidemocratic tendencies or even admitting that that is the game they are playing. People who wish, for example, to give malapportioned state legislatures the power to appoint that state’s presidential electors also believe that malapportioning state legislatures is necessary to “correct” for the fact that too many people live in cities and vote for Democrats. It is not just that conservatives in power are guiding us toward some form of government the political scientists call “managed democracy” or “competitive authoritarianism”; it is that they have basically already implemented it at the state level in various places. The subgovernment form of “state” is, currently, the most effective tool for preventing actual democracy in the United States, and that fact is why conservatives are so dedicated to preserving the power of the states.

Oftentimes, conservatives, especially of the “respectable” columnist variety, will argue that the right has a preference for “smallness” over “bigness,” or something like that, basically saying it is authentically democratic and traditionally American to believe that the state government is closer to The People than the massive federal bureaucracy or out-of-touch Congressional leaders. Federalism is often defended in these small-vs-big terms; surely, they say, the government of Wyoming has a better sense of what is good for Wyoming than some Washington regulator or big-state senator.

Here’s a sort of boilerplate version of that argument I found on the website of the Congressional Western Caucus1:

A fundamental principle of our Constitution is the belief that local governments are better suited to deal with local issues than a distant, out-of-touch federal government. State and local governments are closer to the people, more responsive to citizens, and better equipped for representing their constituents on many important issues. The Tenth Amendment explicitly states, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Recently, however, this tradition of constitutionally established local control has been seriously eroded due to usurpation of power by the federal government.

Or this from Ilya Somin in 2019: “This is what the battle over federalism looked like in the United States for many decades: Conservatives sought to limit federal power over state and local governments, and liberals tried to expand it.”

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