Tag Archives: American Federalism

History Does Repeat Itself

16 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by in American History, Federalism, The Passing Scene

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Oregon State Capitol in Olympia

Way back in the mid-1970’s, I and my fellow classmates at Russellville Junior High School were blessed with an unusually gifted and dedicated 8th grade history teacher named Mary Alexander.

Mrs. Alexander, now long deceased, loved pointing out the irony of history, particularly in terms of how facets of it – whether these happened to be political or cultural  ideals or ways of doing things – often re-expressed themselves at times when we least expected them, even when we thought that they had become discredited or simply had played out.

I never forgot her lesson. Indeed as an avid reader of history I am reminded of this on a frequent basis. Just when we think that some ideas have been discredited or forgotten and, consequently, consigned to history’s ashbin, they return with a vengeance, even with the sense of vibrancy and relevance that had distinguished them in previous decades or even centuries. 

The rekindling of American federalism and even, perish thought, states rights, serves as an unusually timely example. I grew up at a time when federalism expressed as states sovereignty seemed throughly discredited.  What seemed to have been an inexorable march toward human progress, LBJ’s Great Society programs, locked arm and arm with the civil rights struggle and the federal courts’ efforts to expunge the stigma of racial discrimination, seemed to have dealt, if not a fatal blow to states rights, at least a searing defeat that would leave this constitutional doctrine in what amounted to a semi-comatose state.

We were assured by teachers at every level of public education that states rights was a relic of the past – not just a quaint but even a disquieting one. I recall several political science courses in which the professor, a Great Society liberal, likened federalism to a marbled cake.  The federal government was the cake, though states provided measure of enhancement, sort of like chocolate marbling.

Yet, history seems to be repeating itself with a vengeance. In the face of American federal impasse and national division, states, large and small alike, are reasserting the themselves. As I have pointed out on numerous occasions on this forum, it started more than a decade ago when then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger began characterizing his state as something resembling a nation within a nation. He successor, Jerry Brown, even began conducting a kind of incipient foreign policy related to climate change.

Recently, a prominent GOP leader, Allen West, has lobbied for a secession vote in the Texas State Assembly, a move that at least one GOP leader in another Western state characterizes not only as a positive move but also one that bears close watching.

More recently in Oregon, state Sen. Jeff Golden (D-Ashland) has proposed legislation that would reintroduce a state bank concept for Oregon, primarily with the aim of serving as a backstop for community banks and credit unions.

Golden holds up the Bank of North Dakota as the model for his efforts, stressing the role that this bank played in minimizing foreclosures during the Great Recession.

The Washington Post reports that small businesses in North Dakota, compared with their counterparts in other states, were ably served by this model. In fact, they secured more Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans relative to the state’s workforce than other states, with more than $5,000 per private-sector worker as of May 8, 2020.

Yet, why is all of this surprising? States, by their very nature, possess the accoutrements of nationhood. And this is as much a matter of practicality as a historical fact.

As a student of constitutional history, I not only find this fascinating but also instructional in terms of how it underscores the increasing inefficiency of centralized federalism. If developments  such as these demonstrate one thing, it’s that no central government, certainly one so big, bloated and overextended  as the imperial behemoth in Washington, possesses the omnicompetence to manage a polity of the scale of the United States.

The late Mrs. Alexander was spot on: History does repeat itself.

Flummoxed by Secessionism

20 Saturday Feb 2021

Posted by in American Federalism, Federalism, Imperial Decline, secession

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President Ronald Reagan at his inauguration in January, 1981. Shortly thereafter he made an impassioned call for returning to federalism but faced opposition even from GOP governors.

To repeat a phrase that I have employed several times in this forum, the American Empire simply is too big to succeed.

Indeed it is the reason why an awareness of the increasing likelihood of secession is becoming the proverbial elephant in the living room, certainly among the growing numbers of us ordinary Americans in the red heartland who perceive what our malignant ruling class ultimately has in store for us.

Yet, I have been intrigued by how mainstream conservative commentators, recently Podcaster Dan Bonjino, have been absolutely flummoxed by this emerging  phenomenon. It undoubtedly is as readily evident to them that secessionist sentiment is spreading, yet they hold steadfastly to the same hidebound argument that a return to federal principles will resolve all of this.

Notions of American exceptionalism inevitably will die hard, but then, conservatism in America is deeply rooted in this mindset. And given that so much of what passes for conservatism on this side of the Atlantic is rooted in propositional nationhood, this really isn’t all that surprising.

Interestingly, conservatives seem to have forgotten that previous attempts to restore old-time federalism have proven futile. Incoming President Reagan, way back in 1981, undertook a concerted effort to return to bona federalism, offering to return welfare policy back to the states. Virtually all the governors balked, stressing that  their states lacked the revenue base to support a safety net that dates all the way back to the New Deal and that people, blue and red alike, expect as matter of course.

That is why I am convinced that the political dynamics in this country ultimately will necessitate a secessionist movement that ultimately takes on regionalist rather than state unilateral action, as the late diplomat and political thinker George F. Kennan portended in his own writings.

We will likely see states banding into regional compacts, forming what could be described as incipient federations. These conflicts ultimately will prove essential to preserving some facet of the social safety net to which virtually every American has grown accustomed over the past century.

Whatever the case, to borrow a line from the late Betty Davis, “Fasten your seat belts – it’s going to be a bumpy ride!”

Negotiating the American “Gorbachev Moment.”

31 Monday Aug 2020

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Thousands rallying sound the Russian “White House” in Moscow in defense of Russian sovereignty during the post-Soviet “August Coup” in 1991.

A perversely interesting read, and, frankly, I find it fascinating that this scholar made no mention of Mikhail Gorbachev’s furious efforts to negotiate a new union treaty that would have transformed the post-communist Soviet Union into a union of sovereign states.

The fact is, the United States is also fast approaching a similar inflection point – its own Gorbachev moment – the point at which it dawns on most everyone that existing constitutional arrangements simply are not equipped to handle the stressors playing out around the country. This partly stems from the fact that the hard left is banking on full-blown hegemony and has little use for the Madisonian protects that once safeguarded American liberties.


Meanwhile, the right, for it’s part, is so invested in flag waving and nationalist rhetoric that it can’t summon the courage to admit that everything is falling apart and that the most viable solution lies in the radical decentralization of federal power that would better address all of the cultural rifts playing out in this country. So what we face, as a result, is an impasse, a dangerous impasse, that resembles in some respects the late Soviet Union. Either we find some constitutional means of dealing with these cleavages, namely by returning power to regions of the country with strong cultural and historical affinities, or we face something even more horrendous: authoritarian leftist political and cultural hegemony or civil war or outright dissolution, with all the domestic and geopolitical upheaval this entails.


Yet, I would venture to day that most of us on this group are roundly convinced that the feds will never acceded to this, so the ultimately solution will be states, clusters of states, acting unilaterally, much as they did in 1776,

If California Wants to Go, Let It Go

23 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in Devolution, Federalism, The Passing Scene, Uncategorized

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Yes_CaliforniaA year or so ago a liberal friend of mine implied that I was a right-wing kook and crypto-racist for even broaching the idea of disaffected states one day seeking a path out of the Union.

Just this weekend, though, none other than the chief legal officer of the nation’s largest state, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, offered a remarkably tepid response regarding California’s continued formal ties with the American Union.

“California is the economic engine of the United States of America, we on our own, as a state, could be the sixth economic power in the world,” Becerra stated yesterday in a Fox News Sunday interview.

“The U.S. needs California as much as I believe California needs to be part of the United States.”

Talk about a full-throated endorsement of American unity!  It sounded to me more like a Catalan official affirming unity with Spain.

If Bercerra’s statements aren’t intriguing enough, consider the yawning apathy all of this California separatist talk has generated in the nation’s broad red-state hinterland.  More than one friend of mine has stated they they would stand at the Nevada border happily waving off a new California Republic.

I think that goes for a lot of us here in the red heartland.  If our experience with rising levels of divorce over the past 50 years has driven home one thing, it’s that acrimonious marriages are better off terminated.  And, frankly, these federal bonds, which Lincoln extolled as “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land,” seem increasingly and irreparably frayed.

America is coming to resemble a bad marriage, marked increasingly by acrimony and recrimination.

And all of this is likely to get even more complicated. Indeed, political activist and former presidential Chief of Staff Stephen Bannon is right to compare this growing secessionist sentiment in California with the South Carolina nullification crisis of the 1830’s.

Bannon recently argued that if the federal government fails to stop California’s sanctuary state efforts, California’s leftist leaders  “are going to try to secede from the union” in the next decade to 15 years.

While we may have thought this vexing issue was settled more than 150 years ago, California may be serving up a 2.0 version of secession. We really seem to be closing a very wide and contentious historical circle.  And contrary to my liberal friend’s fulminating, I really think that California may be the portent of a cascading effect among several states.

California presents this union with a special set of challenges- it arguably always has.  We’re talking about a state with several unique characteristics: for starters, its longstanding geographical separation from the other major population centers of the United States  and its location on the Pacific Rim, facing the region of the world where the overwhelming bulk of global economic growth is likely to occur over the next few decades.  Add to that California’s demographic transformation, one factor among many driving its return to its historical legacy as a region intimately linked with the cultural and economic the fortunes of Mexico and Latin America.

Under the circumstances, should we be surprised that California is evolving its own views of law and governance and that it’s begun to strain at its federal leash?

If California wants to go at some point,  let it go peacefully.  And that goes for any other state where a significant segment of the population has concluded that they are better off separate from than a part of the American Union.

Freedom of association should characterize our federal relations every bit as much as it should other facets of American life.   It is integrally bound up with living in a free society.