The United Not-States

posted by Alan Greenblatt

There's been a debate of sorts in recent days in the liberal blogosphere on the question of whether states should be eliminated.

Matthew Yglesias, in a post entitled "The Trouble With States," says that citizens have national concerns in common and certainly have issues in common with fellow residents of metro areas, but "we don’t really live our lives 'at the state level.'

And insofar as co-residents of a single state do have idiosyncratic issues in common that tends to be because important fiscal and regulatory powers have been allocated to state government rather than because it actually makes sense for them to have been allocated this way.

Ezra Klein, a blogger for washingtonpost.com, goes further. He posits that only low-population states such as Alaska and Montana are true communities of interest.

That arrangement might be good for Montanans, but it doesn't make a lot of sense for the country. I've occasionally argued for a more proportional Senate, only to be asked "what do you have against small states?" Well, nothing in particular. I just don't consider states to be a particularly useful political unit. Why not apportion Congress by race? Or population density? Or income? All of those options seem a bit nuts, but the only reason that states make any sense to us is because it's always been thus. All of those options make a lot more sense than organizing representation around the boundaries of Missouri.

And it's not as if there was some high-minded reason for state-based representation a few hundred years back. Rather, states were given a lot of power because that was the only way to entice them into joining a union. It was a coldly political compromise. It's good we got that done, but some of the structural concessions that were required don't make that much sense in the 21st century. Not that "does this make sense?" is a particularly powerful consideration in our system.

Josh Patashnik, at The New Republic's "The Plank" blog, rushes to states' defense in a high-minded way, quoting Madison and Sandra Day O'Connor. Although he's sympathetic to centralization of power in Washington, he's sensible about the states' role in our system:

Maybe it's just me, but the bait-and-switch Ezra apparently envisions seems pretty unconscionable.  Back in the day, states were concerned that at some point in the future the federal government would try to usurp their sovereignty, so they wrote very strong protections for themselves into the Constitution.  Now, in 2009, along comes a chorus of voices proclaiming that, from a national perspective, that arrangement doesn't "make sense," so we should consider changing it.  Well, of course!  That's precisely the concern the states had back then.  The underlying premise of our federal compact is that we're not concerned solely with what "makes sense" for the nation as a whole; the interests of each state deserve independent respect. On one level a Vermonter and a Californian are equal as Americans--but on a different level, a Vermonter and a Californian are qualitatively different, and we don't simply tally up which group has more people.

Comments

[Marc]

Of course leftists like Klein and Yglesias want to do away with states. That way there would only be one, distant source of power for elites to dominate, rather than 1+50.

Members of Congress (of both parties) are already effectively beyond popular control, safe in their gerrymandered districts. Do we want to give them even more power by eliminating states?

[S. Spacek]

U.S. States are hopelessly and culturally disunited.

[Bob]

Notwithstanding pejorative namecalling or attribution, perhaps the more pertinent issue should not be whether states should be eliminated in favor of a federal state, but should be whether the states as we know them should be re-ordered, to optimize commercial, environmental, cultural and other concerns for the betterment and protection of the individuals in those unions. Although overbroad on some points, consider the arguments made in Joel Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America. For example, would the interests of individuals who are now residents of California be furthered by splitting the state into several independent components, perhaps in some instances combining with adjacent regions, to advance governmental administration and to protect the economic and political interests of individual citizens? Would the interests of citizens of Rhode Island, founded essentially on the notion of religious tolerance vis-a-vis the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies prior to the founding of the USA, be advanced by combining somehow with Connecticut, Massachusetts and/or other combinations of New England and/or Northeast states? Or should states as we know them look more to interstate compacts to protect the interests of their citizens through economies of scale and other means?

[jason]

I am a resident of Chicago, which makes me a resident of Illinois by default...but I rarely think about what goes on south of I-80. Culturally, economically, politically, geographically, Chicago has much more in common with places like Milwaukee, Madison & northwest Indiana than Cairo or Springfield.

The states as they exist were based on land surveys carried out on foot, and the county borders were drawn so a person could ride a horse across them in a day. This makes zero sense in the internet age.

I don't see an "end" to states, but a reorganization. And rather than centralizing power in Washington, I think this would devolve power to regional centers. The "United" States would continue to share cultural and historical ties, as well as a need for a common defense, but I foresee a system of government much more akin to what was set forth in the Articles of Confederation. All it will take is one region to go on it's own, and it doesn't even have to be in the US...Quebec and/or Alberta perhaps.

[Timothy Rood]

Whether it's a good idea or not, IMO the institutional powers reserved to the states under the Constitution are too strong to be overcome. To see what the US would look like as 50 states of equal population, see http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/

[jim]

I live in Philadelphia, less than 2 miles from the border with NJ. I can't on my fingers the number of times in my life I've been to Harrisburg or Pittsburgh. You'll find me in DC or NYC a few times a year and in NJ a few times a week (my office is there). Not only do we have little to nothing in common culturally or politically with the Appalachian folks in Central PA but there is also a sense of animosity between the two geographies.

The "state" that I live in would make much more sense redrawn along the boundaries of the Delaware River watershed. At the very least it should be redrawn to cover the metropolitan area. If Delaware and Rhode Island and can function as city-states (the cities and hinterlands around Wilmington and Providence) within the context of the federal system it shouldn't be too hard to make it work for other metros.

[John]

If we were to consider eliminating states as a political unit, each state would have to be allowed the opportunity to opt out of the nation and form a separate sovereign nation.

Oh this would be fun! Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

The mere fact that such a conversation is taking place is overwhelming evidence that our bloated central government has taken too much control from states and reduced them to slaves, victim to the threat of withheld federal funds should they dare to act independently.

Let's just get the federal government sized down to its real purpose.

[John]

The Metropolitan governance at the regional level should replace governance at the State level. It makes more sense to address 21st century challenges and opportunities at the regional level for both urban and rural regions.

[Rex]

Hey, look at the mega cities site
America 2050

see the U.S.A in a brand new way...

[Rex]

and another thing... send a doctor into a place and you get back reports on medical problems, send in a plumber and you get the point....

the problem hidden in the hyperb above is an earth dying of urbanism...

draw that line in the sand and watch state pols laugh at you...

[Thomas]

I agree with Jason that the Federal government's central powers should devolve to more regional based control. The federal government should concern itself more with checks and balances of states than absolute control. This country gained independence in the first place because we here thought we could locally govern ourselves better than those on the other side of the atlantic. I see no reason why a centralized, bureaucratic, and distant power would be able to govern such a huge nation equally any better now than England could then. If anything should come of the information revolution sped on by the internet I would hope it would be decentralization and deliberate regionalism not globalized luke-warm homogeneous cities and suburbs governed by a few ultra-large bureaucratic world governments.

The state lines function to a great extent as they are, I completely doubt any form of redrawing now would result in anything other than complete gerrymandering.