This is a pretty grim path to follow. If States are to go bankrupt and subject to federal imposition of what debts must be paid, then it may push States to seek further sovereignity. An example being pressure to mint their currency. This is currently banned in the constitution, but if things get dire... they could simply ignore?
The train of thought I'm on now is: why was keeping the Union together back in the civil war such a great thing?
Now we have this bloc of red states in the South who are backward, racist, intolerant science deniers, and they've managed to get just enough on the winning side of the electoral map to make the advanced, multicultural, cosmopolitan science-respecting blue states' lives miserable.
That chunk of states should be a separate country. Then they can go their own way and the rest of us can carry on without them.
The resolution you choose has some stark effects on the narrative that you will allow yourself to be convinced of. The idea of "red state, blue state" is a peculiar consequence of a winner-take-all presidential election system, and does not adequately represent reality. An underlying truth, viewed at another resolution, is that there are red and blue densities moreso than states [0]. The current (and changing) distribution of densities across the states has currently led to what you perceive as the "red state, blue state" situation, when zoomed out and with a blur filter applied
For example, take a useful look at CityLab's Congressional Density Indicator [1]. There are zero "pure urban" districts that are represented by Republicans, regardless of the state (red, blue, purple), and there are nearly none among the "urban-suburban mix" districts (again regardless of state).
Viewed through yet another lens, by percentage of landmass, Alabama is more is more "blue" than Illinois and Oregon [2]. Your characterization could use a little more thought and refinement.
You are right, and I made this simplification with full awareness that I was doing so.
On the other hand, I really like the idea of splitting apart the country in a way that frees most of us from a large enough number of the people who are holding us back. I don't think that's possible to do in a fine-grained way. It only makes sense if done for some large contiguous regions. And the states in the southeast who actually did try to break away a few generations ago seems like an obvious way forward with that.
Here is another look at some of the natural regions within the country: [1]
I'm also aware that changing the voting systems we use holds a lot of promise for some of the same underlying problems we're talking about, and am completely open to that as an alternative to, or in addition to, my suggestion to break up the country. But that too seems very difficult politically.
The challenge is that our founding fathers unwittingly created a gerrymandered situation due to both the electoral college and the senate, where 40% or less of the population is able to control the entire federal government. Now that they're stacking the judiciary with political judges, they control all 3 branches of government, and the only democratic check on their power is 50% of the legislative branch (the house).
I'm not a political scientist, but at some point the increasingly larger 60% of the population is going to take this country back. I hope they're able to do it without a war.
yeah, abolition of slavery is a noble cause, obviously, but the rhetoric at that time put a lot of emphasis on the importance of preserving the union, as if that in and of itself was a valuable thing. I propose that it wasn't, and isn't.
Humans are happier if they're grouped together with their own tribe, and not with other neighboring tribes they don't identify with. In this way it's like some of the problems in Africa and the Middle East where the groups there had borders imposed on them that didn't follow this simple principle.
I would prefer that states have more power and we further decentralize authority away from the federal government. This will limit the see-saw that occurs whenever the president switches parties.
Part of that tension is what's led to the the current situation with COVID— the federal government is where the CDC is, so there's an expectation that they're the ones providing centralized coordination and guidance for a measured, unified, national response.
If each state has its own version of the CDC (and other similar agencies), then that's fine, but they also need to have a lot more sovereignty over things like (in this case) being able to close their borders to neighbouring states whose agencies may have come to differing conclusions about what measures are needed.
> but they also need to have a lot more sovereignty over things like (in this case) being able to close their borders to neighbouring states
Commerce Clause of the US Constitution stands in a way. It (the Commerce Clause) has been a bedrock of the federal government pushing through progressive policies onto the states.
The commerce clause and related federal growth are all a result from FDR. It's why we have a war on drugs, it's why the government can seem to do anything. It once required amendments for the government to do new things - a government of enumerated powers, now it can do anything.
If you live in a house of five and each person buys their own groceries and cooks their own dinner, it does not matter how you scrimp and save. It is still cheaper on the whole to buy raw ingredients for dinner and make it for five people. The cost goes down dramatically>
Yes there is a CDC in every state. It would be utterly ludicrous spend of cash to have an independent, not cooperative CDC in each state attempting to manage and solve the same problems.
> If you live in a house of five and each person buys their own groceries and cooks their own dinner, it does not matter how you scrimp and save. It is still cheaper on the whole to buy raw ingredients for dinner and make it for five people. The cost goes down dramatically>
This makes sense, but what about one level up? I live in an apartment building, and in our building each family buys their own groceries and cooks their own dinner. It does not matter how much you scrimp and save, it is still cheaper on the whole for the building to buy raw ingredients and make dinner for all families. The cost goes down dramatically.
This also makes sense, but what about one level up? If each building buys groceries and cooks dinner for all of their homes, it does not matter how much they scrimp and save. It is still cheaper on the whole for the entire city buy raw ingredients for dinner and make it for all of the buildings and their families. The cost goes down dramatically.
This also makes sense, but what about one level up? If each city buys groceries and cooks dinner for all of their buildings and homes, it does not matter how much they scrimp and save. It is still cheaper on the whole for the entire State to buy raw ingredients for dinner and make it for all of the cities, their buildings and their families. The cost goes down dramatically.
This also makes sense, but what about one level up? If each State buys groceries and cooks dinner for all of their buildings and homes, it does not matter how much they scrimp and save. It is still cheaper on the whole for the entire Union to buy raw ingredients for dinner and make it for all of the States, cities, their buildings and their families. The cost goes down dramatically.
This also makes sense, but what about one level up? If each Union/country buys groceries and cooks dinner for all of their buildings and homes, it does not matter how much they scrimp and save. It is still cheaper on the whole for the entire world to buy raw ingredients for dinner and make it for all of the nations, States, cities, their buildings and their families. The cost goes down dramatically.
We both agree that at some point, this stopped making sense. The question is: is an ideologically divided Union of 330 million people across 50 states with their own Constitutions and governments equivalent to a “house of five”?
Not only that, if you had to buy groceries through a blind auction, and price gougers knew that you needed the exact same items and were willing to pay whatever price it took, rampant profiteering would happen.
The current system is effectively all 50 states in an eBay-style bidding war over the same limited resources.
> I would prefer that states have more power and we further decentralize authority away from the federal government.
No EPA. No DOE. No equality under the law. No EOC. No NLRB. No Amtrak. No federal enforcement of consent decrees. No voting right act. No gay marriage, etc?
Edit: Thanks for downvotes. Every single one of these is enforced by federal and not state courts. It is federal court that gave us Roe v. Wade, for example. It is a federal court that prevents Alabama from running its own little fiefdom. It is a federal courts that gave us Brown v. Board of Education.
Have you ever met a DOE program manager? Have you ever personally dealt with an EOC lawsuit? I've done both, and let me tell you neither of those organizations comes anywhere near what you seem to imply they do. I'm not convinced society wouldn't be better without them.
A major thing the DOE does is keep track of where the world's plutonium is— it's energy-related, but also a national security matter. Michael Lewis's excellent book The Fifth Risk examines some of these agency functions in the context of what was lost when there Trump administration stepped into power with essentially no transition plan or concept of how to run them.
Them having critically important functions that are different from what their names might imply is not at all the same thing as "we'd be better off without them".
Already tried that, the first constitution, the Articles of Confederation. The founders quickly discovered the federal government was too weak.
But alas, one of those founders, Jefferson, argued we should rewrite the constitution every 19 years.
And another founder, Hamilton, argued that ambition must be made to counteract ambition. And that government is a reflection on human nature, most directly its citizens.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp
Personally, it made him cool significantly on France, which is in pretty stark contrast to where he started. He ended up siding with Hamilton on expelling the French diplomat who both threatened American neutrality, and was kind of gearing up to try and overthrow George Washington. And Jefferson hated Hamilton.
Politically, it moderated him significantly. He started off as very pro-revolution, pro “watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots”, and by the end he ended up regretting France not shifting into a constitutional monarchy. This is after both witnessing The Storming of the Bastille in person (he was an ambassador then), defending the September Massacres[0], and knowing quite a few people who were executed during the terror.
There is a comfort that comes from the instability of party switches. The parties don't cooperate, which means less can get done. Anything that puts anyone in an area where one of the gangs of politicians can actually do something, is to be avoided. We've learned that the hard way in Wisconsin.
As a general rule, it's always best to split up your government as much as you can.
Less gets done means the country gets worse and people get more radicalized trying to improve things. The polarization in the US is likely a direct result of the massive deadlock.
Your strategy is one guaranteed to ruin your country.
Isn't that exactly what we're seeing now? The government has basically been in gridlock since 2010, and voters have increasingly rewarded extreme policians who seek to shift the overton window over compromise politicians who work across party lines to find a middle ground.
The book American Carnage is a fantastic deep dive on this (and extremely fair and even-handed, despite the bombastic title).
If "that" is the cause-effect relationship claimed above, no we are not "seeing" this right now. There is a huge difference between events and the narratives, accurate or otherwise, which some people use to explain those events. The system under consideration is insanely complex, with an immense list of causal factors at play. To me, in my opinion, it's obvious that the causal relationship described above is at best a tiny contributor that is, itself, dependent on other factors also being present. At worst, it's completely wrong and a distraction from understanding the real causes.
There are democratic nations with many more parties than we have, and the quality of governance in many of these nations has proven to be as serviceable as the quality of governance in the US. (Some might even argue that many of these nations have displayed superior governance to the US despite the power being split up among so many parties that they need coalitions to accomplish the little they can get done.) I've never really found myself persuaded by the skepticism against split governments.
Now there may be a point of diminishing returns. As in 5 parties are as good as 10, are as good as 15. But that's an academic question, and we're not even at 5 parties yet.
On the other end, maybe 500 parties is self defeating, as you say. But we're nowhere near that either.
It could be argued that governance is better in other countries at least in part because there are more parties. After all, it enables alternative voices to be represented better, and it reduces the power of centralised party structures.
On the other hand, too many parties becomes unwieldy, and I'd argue that 10 is already going to be too many in practice.
Historical experience in the early 20th century led many countries to develop minimum bars, e.g. parties with fewer than 5% of the vote not getting any seats in parliament.
The government has continued to spend more and more and continue fighting wars around the world; so despite their disagreements in public -- they seem to agree a whole lot.
The problem with less getting done is that it applies to all levels of government. Want to change your yard landscaping? Nope! Not when your neighbors, town, county, and state all have to separately approve it.
Yes but you would also see lots of extremely advanced states like we’ve seen with Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, and Estonia in the EU
