Tag Archives: federalism

The Quest For Unity

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America right now is a divided country–there are not only major divisions between the major political parties, there are major divisions within each of the two political parties. It’s hard to find unity anywhere.

On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article titled, “Want More Unity And Freedom? Try Returning To Constitutional Federalism.” What a great idea.

The article states:

The current electoral cycle has featured a political culture in which candidates and their partisans claim to be advancing unity, but the primary form of the unity advanced is agreement among some that they want what does not belong to them or to dictate what others can do, and that they want government to “make it happen.” Unfortunately, that is not the kind of widespread unity that benefits “we the people.”

That is what recent events, from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to Joe Biden’s argument for why he was staying in, then getting out, or the race, to Harris’s promises to unify people by giving them even more federal “something for nothing” have only turbocharged.

But as long as the dominant political culture remains unchanged, and even more so if it intensifies, all those self-depictions of being unifiers will remain empty promises. If we really wanted more unity in the sense used outside current politics — general agreement, rather than some who agree to harm others for their purposes — we would be well advised to revisit the federalism designed in our Constitution, because of the limits that places on the latter usage.

At America’s creation, a decentralization of power — a federal system, rather than a national system, (more accurately termed “The States, United solely for specified joint purposes,” than “The United States”) — played a key role in protecting Americans’ liberties from infringement. That also allowed more unity at the federal level by eliminating many fights over who could exercise federal power to over-ride the choices of citizens and their governments that were closer to home.

The article concludes:

Power in American life has been increasingly taken from individuals and local self-government, to be increasingly centralized in the federal government. Federalizing everything, including plainly private and local choices, has not benefited nor unified America, as clearly indicated by the increasing intensity of the battles to control what is to be imposed on everyone. We need to resurrect the federalism of the Constitution again, leaving people to make their own decisions outside of those very few areas where their choices must necessarily be in common. 

Felix Morley (a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and college administrator) saw this clearly:

The value of federalism, in preventing the prostitution of freedom, becomes more clear … the founding fathers put restraints on government so that the governed might be free.

If America is to re-establish federalism, the liberties it protects and the far greater potential for unity it  preserves, Felix Morley’s Freedom and Federalism is a great place to begin. As its cover summarized:

A government of free men is like a strong-standing arch. The solid stones of which it is built is called freedom. Neither the building blocks of individual liberty nor the arch of freedom will stand secure without the keystone of federalism. It is federalism that holds up the arch. It is federalism that makes possible the preservation of both liberty and freedom.

That is why lovers of liberty and freedom — self-ownership and solely voluntary arrangements, over as wide a canvas as possible — need to rediscover the force of federalism in resisting the ever-growing reach of centralized political determination, which is tyranny, even when it is tyranny of the majority.

If democracy is at variance with federalism, and if federalism is conducive to freedom, it would follow that, far from maintaining freedom, democracy is inimical to it.

If the American people want unity, they need to vote for liberty.

 

As Florida Moves To Protect Young Children…

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On July 4, John Hinderaker posted an article at Power Line Blog about the law passed in Florida to protect young school children from inappropriate teaching about sex.

The article reports:

The Biden administration has taken strong exception to Florida’s anti-grooming law, which requires that public school teachers wait until kids are in the fourth grade before inculcating them with LGBTQTrans ideology. Biden intends to fight for grooming to the last man nonbinary person:

[T]he White House claims there will be federal intervention in opposition to the anti-grooming law. Moves for federal mediation include “monitoring” by the Department of Education and calls for people to file formal complaints about the law’s restrictions with the Department’s Office for Civil Rights.

Deprivation of the right to groom five to eight year old children. I suppose we shouldn’t laugh, next time there is a liberal majority on the Supreme Court, they might find such a right hidden where they have come up with abortion and others.

[T]he Biden White House claims the law is “part of a disturbing and dangerous nationwide trend” and is “cynically targeting LGBTQI+ students, educators, and individuals to score political points.”

Children in early grades of elementary school need to be allowed to be children. They need to be allowed to maintain some modicum of childhood innocence.

The article concludes:

Federalism is the forgotten value that inspires our Constitution perhaps more than anything else, and I would argue that it is more essential today than ever. With our country more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War–and in some ways, the divisions are even wider now than then–disunion is a real possibility. Another possibility is tyranny imposed by one side or the other. The Biden administration is working hard on that one. The optimal solution is to let blue states be blue and red states be red, and to preserve the constitutional powers of the states.

It’s not a perfect answer–before too long, just about everyone would want to live in the red states–but it is infinitely preferable to the alternatives.

It really is time to get rid of the federalization of education. Our schools did much better when they were locally controlled and our children scored much better on achievement tests. The federal intrusion into our schools has been a disaster and needs to end.