I'm in the liberals-should-rediscover-federalism camp, myself. The way I see it is this: we can continue to have progressive societies in the states where the people want that. *Or* we can find that the entire country has turned into Texas.

It's a question of abandoning 60 million people or losing the entire 280 million, as far as I can see.

Maybe that's unnecessarily defeatest, but seriously - I expect the Republicans to control the Congress for a generation. Federalism is the *best* available tactical counter to that.

To legally justify that would also legally justify rolling the civil rights movement back to the 1950s, if not the 1850s. I can't accept that.

Well, heck, let's do county rights, then. If I could find a map of high enough resolution, I might push for city rights. Or neighborhood rights. Welcome to the United Specks of America.

Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger has an article advocating a retreat to gated city-states.

It's a very different set of civil rights this time. Condoleeza Rice proves that it's not color or gender; it's just them that have and them that don't.

Part of the question is whether you believe in top-down or bottom-up social change. Top-down validates the next leader who wants to impose a vision on the nation. And that's why, if I have to choose between two, I'll pick state's rights. But, frankly, I'm in favor of the Specks. State divisions based on geography are another 18th century artifact that it would be nice to shed.

P.S. Did you know that your software requires a person to write "gender" instead of "s" and "e" and "x"? Weird.

I could have sworn I’d fixed that, but with several thousand entries in the spam pattern list, something’s bound to slip through.

What rights we’re talking about isn’t the point. The legal and legislative victories of the civil rights movement, not to mention the environmental movement and the New Deal, are founded on the idea that the nation as a whole has the duty, and the power, to protect citizens from their state and local governments.

Lose sight of that principle and you lose a lot more than you gain.

Unless you’re daydreaming about a Balkanized USA in a Heinlein future, which I personally am not.

And what do you do when the states are more enlightened? Look at places like California on the environment. Look at states that're arranging to buy drugs from Canada. Do you stifle innovation for the sake of a strong federal government? I always liked the theory of a decentarlized U.S.: Fifty states trying different things and learning from what works.

Of course, the problem with the theory seems to be that an awful lot of states are determined not to learn, or every state would be pretty much like Minnesota. But then, Minnesota ain't what it used to be.

Another part of the question is whether you move faster by forcing things down people's throats. Too often, they tend to miss the superiority of what's being shoved and only see that you're shoving something.

I dunno. No easy answers.

We seem to be on a similar political wavelength about many things, Mr. Moles (cf. "WHAT DO WE WANT?" "GRADUAL CHANGE!!!" "WHEN DO WE WANT IT?" "IN DUE COURSE!!!" :-> ), but I don't understand entirely the impassionedness of your conviction here. True, segregation and slavery were Bad Things, and the use of force by the federal government was justified in ending them. But then, the Dred Scott decision runs the other way, doesn't it? Allowing the northern states to ban slavery, early on, was arguably an exercise of states' rights. Are you sad the Soviet Union broke up?

Maybe that last is a specious example (bordering on Godwin's law, perhaps), but what I mean to say is, it doesn't follow from the fact that centralizing power has occassionally helped do good things, that it will always do good things.

Now, I think the current left-wing "we'll just retreat to the cities then" meme is stupid and short-sighted -- at least as a strategy for the Democratic party. It overreacts to the Republican electoral victory of 2004, ignores the fact that Bill Clinton won 12 "red states", and creates this fiction of a homogenous urban Left and a homogenous rural Right which plays into the hands of Bush & co. It forgets that Bush was re-elected by an extremely fragile coalition -- a lot of people who voted for him did so gritting their teeth.

There may be something to the meme as a way of thinking about what Democrats stand for, however. Republicans have been able to articulate a sweeping vision that captures the imagination of rural voters. The Democrats ran this last campaign mostly on negatives -- we're not going to destroy civil liberties, we're not going to invade countries willy-nilly, we're not going to write homophobia into the Constitution, we're not going to pay off the rich, we're not going to balloon the deficit... but then again, don't worry, we're not going to go back to Johnson Great-Society liberalism or radically change the social contract either. We're just going to govern cautiously and well, do somewhat better at the things everyone's already talking about like health care and education, and not do the dumb stuff Bush is doing.

Democrats have thus become what Republicans were during the period from Hoover until Reagan -- the party of caution, of not performing radical experiments on the American social weal, of protecting the status quo. Reagan created the Republican Big Idea (or maybe Goldwater created it, but it wasn't ready to win), and since then Republicans have generally been the small-r radicals in mainstream US politics, and Democrats the small-c conservatives.

So if the Democrats are going to come up with a new Big Idea which is not the New Deal-through-Great Society idea -- an idea which is absolutely entrenched now in practice, and unpopular in theory -- then maybe the focus on urban life, and what comes with it -- civilization, tolerance, urbanity -- might be salutary. Not as a way of alienating rural voters, but as a way of constructing a coherent ideological core.

However, none of this has much to do with states' rights. Myself, I think states should generally have a lot of power, and intervention by the federal government should be controversial, and done with care. The defense of constitutional liberties is one such case (both the liberties I like, such as the first amendment, and those I think are stupid, such as the second, because you have to play fair). But the federal government is, to my mind, way too big and unwieldy. It should be a guarantor of individual liberties -- no state should be able to segregate by race, or restrict free speech, say -- but I would define those liberties pretty narrowly. If states want to teach Creationism, or legalize marijuana, I'm not sure that's any of my business as a citizen of a different state. Standardization increases efficiency, but diversity of systems increases robustness.