This critique is largely correct, as far as I can tell, and is in keeping with the spirit of the Fallacy of Chesterton's Fence.
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.British settlement of the colonies was haphazard. Colonies were granted to proto-corporations (the Virginia Company) and religious dissidents who had well-connected parents (William Penn), among others. Each colony established its own means of governance, and these established power-holders jealously guarded their prerogatives throughout the Revolutionary Era. The resulting compromises created the United States and its constitution. So my friend is on solid ground, as far as I can tell from the history: historical defenses of federalism are not enough, considering federalism's accidental origins. To be persuasive, we must dispense with the constitutional, historical argument--as much as I like them in general--and look for more modern sources of legitimacy.
So, with this discussion in mind, I have devised a list of seven reasons to support federalism whenever we can. None of these rely on the history of federalism or a tradition: they are positive arguments in favor of federalism on the merits. (All of these concepts could be expanded out into longer, more researched pieces. But for a blog post, I think this is a reasonable starting point.)
1. The states produce the Electoral College, which forces our presidential candidates to appeal more broadly.
People often criticize the Electoral College because it limits our elections to ten or twelve competitive states, rather than allowing everyone's votes to "count." After all, if you're not in Ohio, or Florida, or Virginia, or Pennsylvania, your vote is meaningless, because your state is uncompetitive.
I believe that this perspective is a case of being overwhelmed by the foreground and then losing the key background. The "unseen" element of the Electoral College is how it forces a presidential candidate to be more inclusive than she would be otherwise. Imagine a world where a candidate could spend their entire campaign simply focused on major cities. She could offer lavish housing subsidies, transit subsidies and other policies, funded on the backs of rural voters. (One could argue that we have this now, with the Democrats' focus on urban voters and the Republican focus on rural voters. But this would overstate the case substantially; Democrats still win in less urban places like Vermont and Wisconsin, and Republicans still win majorities in places like Phoenix and Fort Worth.)
The reason why is because there would be little risk in "going for broke" after any constituency; so long as you could get your 50%+1, you would win elections. But the Electoral College forces a more subtle approach. States have broader interests than narrower geographic constituencies, and thus serve as a safeguard from this sort of single-interest pandering. A full-on rural strategy for the GOP would risk current GOP strongholds like Arizona and Texas. Likewise, a full-on urban strategy for the Democrats would risk places like Vermont and Iowa. This forces the parties to create broader platforms.
Thus, campaigning in swing states rather than in target areas forces a candidate to have a broader appeal. Your vote matters as a threat if you live in one of those other states; it is the Electoral College that prevents candidates from going extremely hard for one group at the expense of all others. This is not direct representation, but for the greater good, it is probably a more useful impact than having one meaningful vote out of 130 million cast.
(Generally, I would throw this argument into one of many that I would make about the dangers of pure democracy and the importance of small-r republicanism. Democracy without safeguards is dangerous.)
2. Independent, strong states can serve as "laboratories of democracy" that offer us the chance to experiment with different methods to solve complex problems.
Louis Brandeis' famous dissent in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932), I think, covers this argument better than I ever could (for liberal ends, even!). So I'll excerpt it at length:
There are many men now living who were in the habit of using the age-old expression: "It is as impossible as flying." The discoveries in physical science, the triumphs in invention, attest the value of the process of trial and error. In large measure, these advances have been due to experimentation. In those fields experimentation has, for two centuries, been not only free but encouraged. Some people assert that our present plight is due, in part, to the limitations set by courts upon experimentation in the fields of social and economic science; and to the discouragement to which proposals for betterment there have been subjected otherwise. There must be power in the States and the Nation to remould, through experimentation, our economic practices and institutions to meet changing social and economic needs. I cannot believe that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, or the States which ratified it, intended to deprive us of the power to correct the evils of technological unemployment and excess productive capacity which have attended progress in the useful arts.
To stay experimentation in things social and economic is a grave responsibility. Denial of the right to experiment may be fraught with serious consequences to the Nation. It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country [emphasis added].Brandeis was writing about experimentation as a way out of the Great Depression, in a year before most people thought of using the federal government aggressively to combat it. But we can extend his overall logic to other issues. It is good that individual states could have the power to try new things. We don't necessarily have the answer to every problem we face, and having 50 "laboratories" to test things out will give us much more information than minimizing the potential of the states and moving closer towards one-size-fits-all centralization and standardization. If something fails, it has only affected one state rather than all of them. (This is one of many reasons why conservatives found PPACA to be so much more dangerous than Romneycare: the level of change threatened to destroy what was good in American health care, while Romneycare was quarantined to one state.)
3. As smaller entities, states have a better chance to grasp the peculiarities of their particular circumstances than a distant federal government.
This one is sort of a truism, but I'll propose it anyway: different states are different. The needs of Minnesota differ dramatically from the needs of New Mexico, which differ from the needs of New Hampshire, which differ from the needs of Florida. If we accept this proposition, then there are two ways to address these differences: either have federal employees and the Congress determine what is fair and appropriate for each state, or have the states decide themselves. Broadly speaking, I think we are more likely to serve the needs of those states by delegating the control of those issues and the setting of priorities to the individual states.
This comes up for me all the time living out in Oregon: it really is different out here, and I find it staggering that someone in Washington, DC, living 2,800 miles from here, can possibly be qualified to make many decisions about the daily lives of Oregonians. Even representatives from the state, if they serve for any length of time, will lose touch with a state like Oregon. It is just too difficult to fly out here on weekends. (Perhaps it is different if you live in Delaware, or Virginia, or somewhere near the Beltway. But Oregon is just SO far away.)
4. Increasing the scope of the central government means that it is more likely to struggle to do key functions well.
Every time we expand the role of the federal government, another piece of paper hits the president's desk. His day, however, does not get longer. It remains the same length. There are only three ways a president can address this problem:
- Sleep less.
- Spend less time on every problem.
- Delegate less important tasks to staffers/Cabinet.
All of these things can result in governance problems. If President Obama's only job in 2013 was to deal with the Syria crisis, is it likely that he would have mucked it up as badly as he did? Impossible! If Obama could have managed the development of the PPACA website full-time, could it have failed so spectacularly? Doubtful.
In my judgment, a big reason for executive failures over the last couple of decades has been because presidents have been expected to do and manage so many different things. The more we increase their responsibilities, the more potential failure points exist: the day remains 24 hours long, and we really need more than 6 hours of sleep to function effectively. Limiting the role of the federal government to the things that we think are truly important will decrease the time problem. Delegating more duties and responsibilities to the states is one such way to do this.
5. People prefer to help a friend than a stranger.
I recently saw something very horrible happen to an animal while I was driving in town. It was incredibly sad, and the image stuck with me for several weeks. And yet I eat meat six days per week and think little of the treatment of the animals that I eat. (That treatment is inhumane, almost invariably and inexorably. In theory, I could purchase meat from humane farmers, but even that treatment--and the harvesting of living beings for food--is a fraught, difficult idea.)
I liken this to our public posture in dealing with the disadvantaged. Most of us would help out close family members with money if we knew that it was the difference between their life and death, or their being homeless or in a warm bed. We might even help our neighbors or friends out. But we are unlikely to help people out in other parts of the country, and almost never will help out people living in other countries. (If we are all rationally concerned about welfare maximization, we would give almost all of our money to people in the world's poorest countries, where it would go a lot further. We don't.)
This seems to be a fact of human nature: we support those who are closest to us, and provide less support to those who are furthest away, even if their circumstances are substantially more horrifying. So we should work with that reality: if we aim to be humane and decent to those around us who struggle, we are more likely to have broad support if we localize our charity. The more local our donations are, the more that the donors can see the suffering and the impact of their donations. Bringing things to the local level would convince more people to support programs to assist those in great need. We should appeal to people's instincts to help those who are near, rather than appealing to their intellects to help people who are far away. This is more likely to be successful at the state level than at the federal level, where programs make the victims seem distant by definition. Federalism gives us more opportunities for this sort of local program and community engagement.
6. In a true federal system, states that struggle at governance will see a depletion of their revenues as people and businesses relocate.
Although much discussion of federalism hinges on the "laboratories of democracy" argument, the real strength of federalism is much like the real strength of capitalism: competition allowing for failure. States don't compete for profits, though; they compete for tax dollars. Michael Greve has more on what he calls competitive federalism:
This federalism relies on exit and mobility—of capital, and of labor—as a means of disciplining government. Very roughly, competitive federalism is the federalism we had from the Founding to the pre-New Deal period. Its general theory and contours are straightforward. Matters that are genuinely national should be committed entirely to the federal government. National defense, the regulation of network industries (such as airlines or the internet), and perhaps large-scale redistribution (such as Social Security) are the classic examples. The assignment should be exclusive, so as to avoid the regulatory duplication, gamesmanship, and intergovernmental collusion that characterize our federalism. On the other side, lots of things should be left exclusively to the states—exclusive of any federal regulation, and exclusive of any federal funds. This principle limits the federal government and, more importantly, forces state competition. Each state’s citizens will have to tax themselves for whatever level of public services and redistribution they want. When a state offers a lousy mix of taxes and services, productive citizens and businesses move to a more hospitable jurisdiction. Over time, one hopes, states that don’t give citizens their money’s worth will learn their lesson.Greve's broader argument is that we have moved away from competitive federalism towards something called cartel federalism, which could also be Potemkin federalism. In cartel federalism, the federal government actually suppresses the type of competition that federalism should actively promote with its policies of conditional grants and mandates. But that does not mean we should discard federalism entirely; it means we should get back towards a competitive environment.
If a state's policy environment is bad, people and businesses can move out, depriving those state governments of potential revenues. Thus, those state governments are incentivized to establish better environments. (Even a place like California, which has a pretty miserable public policy regime, survives, in my estimation, because the conditions are so great in terms of weather and lifestyle that the costs of bad governance are accepted by residents. North Dakota, for example, could not survive under similar governance.) The power of exit is essential in terms of human freedom and flourishing. America allows for free travel between states, with no papers, as Captain Ramius informs us in The Hunt for Red October. But if the states are all uniform, such freedom is less tangible and meaningful. True "exit" from the policy regime then requires things like visas, passports, and learning a new language. Thus the federal government has no comparable competition as do state governments; we can say that we're "moving to Canada" when the election doesn't go our way, but in reality, that's difficult. It is much easier to move from New Jersey to Pennsylvania.
Moreover, again, much like in the case of the Electoral College, the benefits of this particular feature are somewhat unseen. Even poorer people who cannot afford to relocate would benefit from the effects of the competition between governments, if government becomes more efficient. (And the federal government could, in theory, assist this process with relocation assistance for the long-term unemployed.)
7. The major weakness of federalism has been (appropriately) addressed by the federal government.
I think now that we have addressed the most grievous legal racial inequities in this country, we should support federalism on other issues even more strongly, in that its key weakness was its inability to address longstanding racial prejudice, with a particular emphasis on states with a long history of slavery. The federal government has established that it has an important role to play in the enforcement of legal equality in the realm of race relations. This was a good, necessary change to our federal structure. And while structural and social racial inequities probably still exist, these are less likely to be responsive to government intervention than was a direct change in the legal regime.
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