I’ve been struck by how much of our recent political debates has focused on the question of who, if anyone, is out to destroy American liberty. Aside from the fact that I am not sure anyone is actually TRYING to destroy liberty, I have noticed that there are several arguments on this question going on at once. In this post, I am going to comment on one: which is safer for liberty? The federal government, or the states?
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution were unquestionably most worried about the federal government. They feared the establishment of a new American monarchy, and did not want the federal government to be able to abuse American rights and liberties. They limited the new government’s power, created the system of checks and balances, and quickly added the Bill of Rights in an effort to ensure that the federal government could not abuse its powers.
For most of the Framers, states were likely to be more representative than the federal government. Residents would likely know their state and local representatives in ways that they would not know federal ones, and could approach and address their concerns with state and local officials in church, in their businesses, and along their daily paths of life. The Framers felt, accordingly, that it would be harder for local leaders to abuse citizens’ rights and liberties since those leaders would have to see the effects of their actions in their everyday lives. In addition, local control would reflect local biases, and while those biases might be profound, people in the area would likely share the same ideas, religion, cultural practices and social norms and so laws that reflected local bias would not be tyrannical–they would be democratic. The federal government, by contrast, was seen as a threat because it would impose its preferences on local regions, thus enacting tyranny. Federal = threat.
Unless, of course, you were a slave. Or a political/social outsider. Or someone of a different religion. Or someone the corrupt machine politics of the 19th century (and 20th–thanks, Chicago!) chose to ignore/abuse while stealing all your tax money.
Which is where the pro-federal government argument begins. Every major action government has taken to expand and protect human rights since the Civil War has been undertaken by the federal government–often at loggerheads with the states. The ending of slavery took a war, and the expansion of labor protections took federal action and intervention. The federal government began the process of destroying the party machines, and it took federal action to create the New Deal and support the Civil Rights Movement. Absent action by the federal government, millions of Americans would be living under what, for them, would be highly repressive state governments.
Which brings us to the crux of the tea party debate. Tea partiers and most political conservatives are convinced of the Framers’ arguments that state control is best, and that federal action, even to overcome historical bias, is inherently tyrannical. (States’ rights, after all, were the central demand of the segregationists in the 1950s and 60s.) For them, the balance of suffering–minorities enduring limits imposed by democratic, state legislatures versus majorities compelled by the federal government to pay taxes/change laws or social practices, etc.–requires respect for states’ rights.
Liberals and anti-tea partiers see it the other way. Rights are rights and are not subject to the vagaries of democratic opinion. This is true whether the issue is the rights of African Americans, or women, or gays–or health care. Your rights are your rights and if the states abuse them, the federal government ought to force them to change.
222 years of experience have conclusively proved that individual rights have been protected far better by the federal government than by the states. The Framers’ fears of a rampant federal government were overblown, while their confidence in non-tyrannical state consensuses rested on willful inattention to the problem of slavery as well as on their ignorance of the kinds of class-based cleavages that would come to America with the Industrial Revolution. Yet their suspicion that citizens would be skeptical of policies and laws seemingly imposed from afar has been prescient.
On balance, I believe that state governments pose far greater threats to individual freedoms and liberties than does the federal government. Which, of course, will do precisely nothing to change anyone’s mind!
Next up: democratic capitalism, or capitalist democracy?
politicalprof posted this