November 24, 2004
1:21 PM, Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Now that my temper has cooled down . . . Ben Rosenbaum makes a comment that deserves attention — and, Will, maybe my reply to it will answer you, too.
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.
Ben,
I guess I’m in favor of federalism and local autonomy in theory, because I’m not sure it’s any of my business, either — but in practice, when I look over the last couple of centuries of American history, it’s hard for me not to feel that, on the big issues, the Feds have more often than not been right and the states more often than not wrong. As a historian, I have to admit that America isn’t my area and the 19th and 20th centuries aren’t my period, so I may be missing something important — Dred Scott is a good point. But when I’m called on to salute the flag or stand up for the national anthem and I’m trying to think of reasons to be proud of my country, it’s moments like the 101st Airborne protecting the Little Rock Nine that come to mind; and I identify a lot more strongly with “Marching through Georgia” than with . . . whatever the California state anthem is. (I just looked it up. And all I can say is: Eh.)
Again as a historian, I also can’t help seeing the current situation in historical terms. I think the reason the Democratic party is currently out of power is that the last of the Dixiecrats have finally moved to the GOP side of the aisle. The Dixiecrats, in turn, you can trace back through segregation to Reconstruction to the Civil War.
And everyone says the South could have won if they’d dedicated themselves to decades of guerilla warfare instead of trying to meet the Union in open battle. So I wasn’t kidding when I brought up McClellan and the 1864 election. I think abandoning federal supremacy over the states is, in a very real sense, capitulating to the Provisional C.S.A. and declaring defeat in a 140-year war of attrition. That’s where the impassioned conviction comes from.
On a more practical level — Rob, if I’m wrong, I expect you to tell me why, since you’re the armchair legal history scholar in the crew — it sounds good to say that the federal government should be a guarantor of individual rights and nothing else, but where’s the line? I’m with you on fairness requiring that we defend the Second Amendment (and maybe even the dopey, non-inflation-indexed twenty-dollar threshold in the Seventh); but shouldn’t we also defend the implicit right to privacy that underpins Roe v. Wade — or the First Amendment right to freedom from established religion that underpins case law on school prayer and teaching Creationism? And if we say that, legally, the federal government doesn’t have the power to overrule the states on those issues — let alone issues nearer to our own hearts, but with less established Constitutional clarity, like gay marriage or medical marijuana, where the Feds clearly are in the wrong — then aren’t we also saying that the federal government doesn’t have the power to do the things it did in the service of the New Deal and the civil rights movement?
Finally, an anecdote: My mother teaches ESL at a community college in the Bay Area. She gets a fair number of students from places where “federalism” has a very different history, like the former U.S.S.R., or Yugoslavia, or India, or even (I suppose) Switzerland. They look at the U.S., with all these states, and quite naturally what they want to know is: Why don’t they get along? What ethnic or religious or linguistic or cultural enmity divides California from Arizona, or Indiana from Illinois?
And she always has to answer, gently, that it doesn’t work that way here.
I’d like her to continue to be able to do that.
