What a federal America would look like

A real, federal America — an America that adhered to its Constitutional structure — would look very different than today’s America.

Instead of enforcing one public policy for the entire country, a federal America would allow the several states to develop their own unique solutions to local problems while still guaranteeing the basic rights outlined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It would be these common freedoms that would unify Americans.  Meanwhile, the problems of the day could be debated, discussed, and eventually implemented at the state level.

This would implement the genuine will of the people and lead to democratic growth in a variety of ways:

• People in any given state, be it Kansas or California, would have forty nine other examples of how a state might address any given issue.   A clash of policy perspectives, like the clash of truths, would allow states to compare and contrast the different ways to solve a problem — and like convergence in nature, eventually they might come to the conclusion that any specific problem may only have one or two actual solutions.  So all Americans would be able to witness an organic sense of community problem solving that is now absent.

• People would be much closer to the actual mechanisms of power. Sacramento or Albany, as unglamorous as such places might be, are nonetheless much easier to contact and get to than Washington D.C.   And if power were decentralized even further down to cities and counties, people might only have to go a short distance to meet with a local council member to really affect the quality of their lives.  Contrast this with the situation today, where the average citizen knows nothing about their state or local government, because such entities have relatively little power to do anything substantive.

• Taxes could be considerably lowered. The current tax system takes money from the states and redistributes it to further federal agendas in education, energy, agriculture, the military, and other Congressional pet and pork projects.  By devolving power back to the states, the federal government would give responsibility back to the states to take care of these problems, obviating the need for tax money.

• Perhaps the most important effect of a genuinely federal America would be an increase in freedom. Freedom means responsibility, and by making states take care of their problems, be it health care or homelessness, real power would be placed in the hands of everyday citizens to tackle these problems.  In other words, the social ills of the day would no longer be someone else’s problem — they would be our problem, and it would be up to us to fix them.  This is a scary concept for a lot of people and one of the primary reasons why many individuals are scared of local power.  They are scared that one day they might have the power to actually do something.  For many people, it is easier to be helpless than to be free.

The more that government does, the less the citizens feel obligated to do.  And so citizens sop caring about anything other than their own individual (and often petty) desires.

It bears repeating than in a federal America, the federal government would still play a pivotal role in defending basic rights for all Americans.   And in fact, the federal government would do a much better job at doing just that instead of attempting to impose a common policy over fifty very different states and thousands of local communities.  The executive and the federal judiciary could concern themselves with enforcing the Bill of Rights while Congress would not have to meet as often and write so many new laws.

To make this more concrete, consider the issue of the legalization of drugs.  Currently, the federal government imposes one blanket policy over the entire country, when in fact it ought to be the right of the states, and communities within those states, to implement their own policies with regard to drug use, including for medicinal purposes.  Same with the issues of assisted suicide, the drinking age, and even climate change and health care.  But what would never change would be the federal government’s role in, for example, keeping all speech free, or in ensuring the rights of the accused are protected, or enforcing the writ of habeas corpus:  liberties and protections that are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights but which are rather precariously situated at the moment.

This is not some utopian ideal.  Rather, this is the way the American Constitution is supposed to function.  Federal power was always intended to remain limited and restrained in favor of state and local regulation.  The Tenth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, explains quite clearly that, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people.”   A federal America is enshrined by the law of the land, and is not some political fantasy.

For real democracy to sprout in America, there is no need for any new laws.   The Constitution, in its current form, is a great guarantee of rights and liberty.

What needs rethinking is the balance of power between states and the federal government.   Americans should consider the harsh fact that the federal government is far larger today than it was ever intended to be, and that government, at heart, is only legitimate to the extent it expresses the will of the governed.  Americans have extraordinary powers as citizens to make changes to the country.  But for any change to happen — real, meaningful change, not the fake “change” peddled by politicians — it will require that citizens look to each other, instead of the government, in implementing creative solutions to problems.  This is an empowering thought, and all it requires is adherence to the federal structure as outlined by the Constitution.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Alternative Living, Featured Post, Freedom and Democracy and tagged with america, federalism, real change, the bill of rights, the constitution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.