Demand More

A real, federal America — an America that abided by 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 — the Bill of Rights (remember that?). It would be our common freedoms that would unify Americans, and not our mass media or our gargantuan military. 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 we would witness an organic sense of community problem solving that is totally absent in modern America.

• 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 little power to do anything substantive.

• Taxes could be considerably lowered. The current tax system takes tax 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 actually a scary concept for a lot of people and one of the subconscious (or even conscious) reasons that many individuals are scared of local power. They are scared that one day they might have the power to do actually do something, instead of remaining lazy. In other words, many people would choose their current helplessness over actual freedom, because it is easier to be helpless than to be free.

This last point is really the crux of the issue that comes up when we hear libertarian candidates like Ron Paul advocating small government. The fact of the matter is that the more that government does for us, the less we, individually, feel inclined to do. And so we stop caring about anything other than our 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. Congress and the federal judiciary could concern themselves with enforcing the Bill of Rights while the president, instead of making laws, could busy himself or herself with enforcement of the will of Congress — e.g., the will of the people.

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 illicit drugs (including medical use). 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 habeas corpus, things that are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights but which are rather precariously situated at the moment.

What I am describing is not some utopia, but the way our Constitution is supposed to function. For some reason we have forgotten the strict Constitutional directives to keep federal power restrained and allow local government and community life to flourish. The Tenth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, tells us 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.

If we want democracy in America, we don’t need any new laws. The Constitution itself is a great guarantee of rights and liberty. Rather, what we need is a real rethinking of what has happened to this country, especially the balance of power between states and the federal government. We do not have a federal government that is following its Constitutional mandates. It is doing the opposite, overstepping its bounds whenever it gets the chance and increasingly granting despotic powers to the Executive Branch. We need to remember our federalist roots and think back to how much power we as citizens would have if we could implement policy at the level of the states. It is an empowering thought, and all it requires is looking back to our Constitution.

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