[A-List] US Left Re-Discovers Federalism

["Anne Williamson" <annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

      March 6, 2005ESSAY
     The Joy of Federalism
     By FRANKLIN FOER

     obody would ever confuse the Massachusetts liberal Barney Frank with
the South Carolina conservative Strom Thurmond. But when the tart-tongued
Frank appeared on Fox News Sunday last winter, it sounded as if an aide had
accidentally slipped him some of Thurmond's talking points from the 1950's,
when he was a states'-rights segregationist. ''Should the federal government
say no state can make this decision for itself?'' Frank asked. He had
ventured onto Fox to assert each state's right to marry gay couples.

     Frank isn't the only supporter of gay marriage to sing the praises of
federalism. Last December, Andrew Sullivan argued in The New Republic, ''The
whole point of federalism is that different states can have different
policies on matters of burning controversy -- and that this is O.K.'' That
same month, Paul Glastris, the editor of The Washington Monthly, posed the
question, ''Why shouldn't the Democrats become the party of federalism?''

     In some respects, they already have. Liberal energies once devoted to
expanding the national government are being redirected toward the states.
New York's attorney general Eliot Spitzer, declaring himself a ''fervent
federalist,'' is using state regulations to prosecute corporate abuses that
George W. Bush's Department of Justice won't touch. While the federal
minimum wage hasn't budged since the middle of the Clinton era, 13 (mostly
blue) states and the District of Columbia have hiked their local wage floors
in the intervening years. After Bush severely restricted federal stem cell
research, California's voters passed an initiative pouring $3 billion into
laboratories for that very purpose, and initiatives are under way in at
least a dozen other states.

     These developments may look like a desperate reaction on the part of
some liberals to the conservatives' grip on Washington. But in fact the
well-known liberal liking for programs at the national level has long
coexisted alongside a quieter tradition of principled federalism --
skeptical of distant bureaucracies and celebratory of local policy
experimentation.

     To understand liberal federalism, however, it is first necessary to
understand its nemesis, Herbert Croly. A shy, obscure writer on
architecture, Croly rose to fame in 1909 with ''The Promise of American
Life,'' a long-winded manifesto calling for a strong national government.
The book fell into the hands of Theodore Roosevelt and, with the Bull Moose
as its promoter, it attracted a crowd of high-powered admirers, including
the benefactors who bankrolled Croly's new magazine, The New Republic.

     Croly had a tendency to swing wildly and hard. His big target was
Thomas Jefferson, a man of ''intellectual superficiality and insincerity.''
The sage of Monticello, Croly argued, had created a government suited for a
bucolic era. But modernity, the birth of the corporation, the closing of the
frontier and technological advances had reshaped America and rendered
Jefferson's governing vision obsolete. What America needed was
centralization and efficiency, not antiquated state governments. The
inefficiency of state governments, he said, was ''one of the most
fundamental of American political problems.''

     Croly generally gets lumped together with the early-20th-century
progressives, but his book often savaged these supposed comrades as outdated
and stupidly old-fashioned. Croly accepted concentrations of power --
corporations, as well as a strong central government -- as immutable facts
of modern life. Many of his fellow reformers, he charged, were clinging to
an outmoded Jeffersonian affection for competition and equality. They wanted
to dismantle the trusts and return to a marketplace dominated by small
business. What's more, Croly claimed, these reformers continued to harbor an
irrational attachment to state governments; instead of building a modern
centralized nation, they focused on renovating the old state machinery.
Progressives in the West, for instance, created the referendum, allowing
citizens to vote specific laws up or down. Croly, an unabashed elitist,
preferred handing power to experts.

     In his polemical mode, Croly unfairly skewered the reformers' motives.
The turn-of-the-century debates over the future of corporate capitalism
resembled the current conflagration over gay marriage. There was no national
consensus on the regulation of business then, just as there's no national
consensus on same-sex unions now. Rather than wasting breath trying to
persuade obstreperous Southern congressmen to back federal labor laws, the
progressives plunged forward and passed reforms in the Northern and
Midwestern state legislatures. Beginning with Robert La Follette's 1900
gubernatorial victory, Wisconsin raced farthest ahead in the nation,
slashing railroad rates and passing laws on corruption and conservation.

     Devout believers in the new social sciences, the progressives invested
near mystical power in empirical data, and this faith guided their
federalism. As Louis Brandeis wrote in a famous 1932 Supreme Court dissent,
states could serve as ''laboratories of democracy,'' control groups to test
the value of particular policies. Progressives believed that once the nation
saw how successful these state-level reforms were, it would eagerly mimic
them. Indeed, La Follete's administration became a trendy model. ''Outside
the state, the 'Wisconsin idea' was rapidly becoming a program and
inspiration,'' Eric Goldman wrote in his 1952 history of American reform
movements, ''Rendezvous With Destiny.'' The Badger State had become a
national guinea pig.

     It's not surprising that Brandeis coined liberal federalism's
signature slogan. A Kentucky-born corporate lawyer, whose wealth freed him
to pursue progressive causes, Brandeis was the doctrine's sincerest
believer -- and, for a time, Croly's intellectual adversary. And just as
Croly had said, Brandeis continued to harbor a Jeffersonian aversion to
agglomerations of power, or the ''curse of bigness'' as he called it, in
both business and government. ''If the Lord had intended things to be big,
he would have made man bigger -- in brains and character,'' Brandeis quipped
in Congressional testimony in 1911. This abhorrence of bigness led him
strenuously to oppose Croly's program, which proposed nationalizing
inefficient trusts and tolerating efficient ones.

     The Croly-Brandeis debate became the central theme of the 1912
election. While Croly was helping to conceive Theodore Roosevelt's New
Nationalism program, Brandeis met with Woodrow Wilson at a low point in his
campaign. As the late James Chace described the encounter in his narrative
of the election, ''1912,'' Brandeis instantly supplied much-needed
ideological direction to the faltering Democratic candidate. ''After his
first meeting with Brandeis, Wilson spoke with new fervor.''

     For conservatives, ''states' rights'' often seems just another way of
asserting their libertarianism, their dislike of government in any form.
Liberal federalism, on the other hand, doesn't view the state and federal
governments as opposing forces. Brandeis may have celebrated the states but
he also stressed the importance of federal antitrust policy, and he became
the New Deal's most reliable advocate on the Supreme Court, even meeting
privately with Franklin Roosevelt. New Dealers affectionately referred to
Brandeis as ''Isaiah.''

     That's not to say Brandeis meshed perfectly with the Roosevelt
administration. He couldn't abide the president's seemingly boundless
ambition to expand executive power. He joined a majority on the court in
striking down a handful of New Deal programs, including the National
Industrial Recovery Act. He even sent a stern note to Roosevelt's
consigliere, Thomas G. Corcoran: ''I want you to go back and tell the
president that we're not going to let this government centralize everything.
It's come to an end. As for your young men,'' by which Brandeis meant the
core of intellectuals assembled around the New Deal, ''you call them
together and tell them to get out of Washington -- tell them to go home,
back to the states. That is where they must do their work.''

     Despite Brandeis's reprimand and the Supreme Court's decisions,
Roosevelt's ''young men'' didn't soon leave Washington. World War II -- and
then the cold war -- created new engines of government for them to operate.
Emerging from the war convinced that America had just fought on behalf of
equality and other liberal values, they wanted to transfer that crusading
spirit to domestic causes. Eminences like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and John
Kenneth Galbraith celebrated the ''American creed'' and ''national
greatness,'' phrases that echoed Croly's call for a ''new nationalism.'' And
even if the war hadn't propelled liberals in this nationalistic direction,
the segregationist invocations of states' rights would have. ''The time has
arrived,'' Hubert Humphrey declared at his party's 1948 convention, ''for
the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk
forthrightly into the bright sunshine of civil rights.'' Humphrey's party
adopted a civil rights platform plank, and in response, Strom Thurmond led a
white flight to a newfangled States' Rights Party.

     Nationalistic postwar liberalism flourished, but a left-wing critique
of it arose in the early 1960's. New Left student rebels shared Brandeis's
aversion to bigness, though they arrived at their aversion through a very
different intellectual tradition. Tom Hayden and other stalwarts of Students
for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.), the defining organization of 60's
radicalism, had absorbed the lessons of books like C. Wright Mills's ''White
Collar'' and ''Power Elite,'' and Paul Goodman's ''Growing Up Absurd.''
(Hayden even wrote his master's dissertation on Mills.) This literature
railed against bureaucracy, centralization and technocrats as agents of mass
alienation and conformism. ''Overcentralization is an international disease
of modern times,'' Goodman wrote in ''People or Personnel.'' Precisely the
same language can be found in S.D.S.'s 1962 manifesto, the Port Huron
statement, where the group waxed utopian about ''participatory democracy,''
a governing philosophy it described as the antithesis of managerial
liberalism.

     Over the next two decades, the raw ideas of Port Huron were tamed and
refined by communitarian scholars like the Harvard professors Michael Sandel
and Robert Putnam. These communitarians didn't particularly like the 60's
counterculture ethos, but they assimilated many of the New Left's ideas
about community, applauding civic organizations like churches and private
charities as essential pillars of democracy. And they bemoaned changes in
the political landscape that had blinded mainstream liberalism to the
virtues of these institutions. The Washington Post's communitarian-minded
columnist E. J. Dionne lamented that liberals ''came to believe that almost
all doctrines emphasizing the value of local community were
indistinguishable from the phony 'states' rights' arguments used by
segregationists.'' A strong trace of Catholic social teachings could be
discerned in these views, especially Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical on
''subsidiarity'' -- the idea that social ills are best solved by the
organizations and people closest to them. Although the communitarians didn't
spend much time integrating state governments into their vision, they spoke
of them with great respect. Sandel concluded his book ''Democracy's
Discontent'' with a call for progressives to discover the ''unrealized
possibilities implicit in American federalism.''

     By the 1970's, liberal federalist ideas suddenly had an opportunity to
break into widespread circulation and shake off the segregationist stigma.
Vietnam had stolen the swagger from nationalistic liberalism, a change that
could be witnessed most poignantly in the writings of Arthur M. Schlesinger
Jr. After spending decades advocating a strong central government, he wrote
''The Imperial Presidency'' in 1973, warning that the executive branch now
possessed dangerous concentrations of power. But liberal federalism didn't
fully get a hearing until the emergence of a new champion, Bill Clinton.

     Prodded by a Republican Congress and a conservative Supreme Court,
Clinton actually presided over the revitalized federalism that Sandel
imagined, and even spent time in the White House huddling with Sandel and
Putnam. Federalism suited his declared ambition to move beyond the era of
''big government.'' In 1995, he signed a law prohibiting the national
government from imposing new burdens on the states without first providing
funds to cover any costs. The welfare reform package he ushered into law a
year later gave states enormous latitude in remaking social policy.

     George W. Bush didn't give Clinton much credit for these achievements.
Like many of his predecessors, he entered office promising to rescue the
states from federal pummeling. Yet his administration has greatly expanded
federal power, and some conservatives have been complaining. Writing in
National Review two years ago, Romesh Ponnuru observed that ''more people
are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of
the cold war.'' State governments have their own version of this complaint.
They say the Bush administration has imposed new demands -- federal
education standards, homeland security tasks -- without also providing
sufficient cash to get these jobs done. The Republican senator Lamar
Alexander recently told The Times, ''The principle of federalism has gotten
lost in the weeds by a Republican Congress that was elected to uphold it in
1994.''

     This is hardly the first time that self-described federalists have
abandoned the cause. Strom Thurmond ran on the States' Rights Party ticket
in 1948, but throughout his long career as a senator, he never had qualms
about heaving bushels of federal money into his state. In 1982, Ronald
Reagan announced his own ill-fated new federalism proposal. But instead of
dismantling Washington, his administration imposed a raft of new health and
safety regulations on the states. Perhaps federalists have failed to reshape
American government because federalism isn't really a governing philosophy.
Its proponents describe a world that doesn't exist. In actuality, the states
and federal government aren't cut-throat competitors but codependents, with
state governments living off federal money and implementing federal
programs. Rather, ''states' rights'' can be seen as a subgenre of political
rhetoric, part of what the historian Michael Kazin calls the ''populist
persuasion.'' And like so much of the language of populism, it proves hollow
once its adherents obtain power.

     One suspects that many if not most of today's liberal federalists
haven't converted out of true belief, either. Some have adopted the rhetoric
of states' rights because it provides psychic relief from the alienation
they feel now that a majority of the nation's voters has returned George W.
Bush to office. In its most frustrated form, this alienation has manifested
itself in the ubiquitous joking about emigrating to Canada. Liberal
federalism provides a more rational outlet. Instead of retreating to
Vancouver, liberal federalists would retreat from national politics and
focus on effecting change in their own blue states -- passing health care
reforms, expanding gay rights. At the height of the liberals' postelection
angst, The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, declared: ''We can secede
emotionally, however, by turning our backs on the heartland. We can focus on
our issues, our urban issues, and promote our shared urban values.'' It's
like the path evangelicals beat after the Scopes trial, when the religious
right took a 50-year break from mainstream political activity and quietly
tended their own institutions.

     Some Democratic political strategists are also guiding liberals in
this direction. In election postmortems, they have urged the party to follow
in the Truman-Reagan-Gingrich tradition and rail against the corrupt
interests ruling Washington -- ''an aggressively reform, anti-Washington,
anti-business-as-usual party,'' as James Carville described it at a
Democratic hand-wringing session last November. Proponents of this strategy
now reside in nearly every corner of the party -- from Howard Dean, the new
chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to the Democratic Leadership
Council. Positioning the Democratic Party as the great modern-day defender
of states' rights against imperial Washington jibes neatly with this
strategy. Progressives once championed states as laboratories of democracy.
Now many of them are hoping these laboratories will produce the Democratic
electoral cure.



     Franklin Foer, a senior editor at The New Republic and a contributing
editor for New York magazine, is the author of ''How Soccer Explains the
World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization.''




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