The Divided States of America

Why Federalism Doesn't Work

Donald F. Kettl

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691201054
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Gouvernement américain

Why federalism is pulling America apart—and how the system can be reformed Federalism was James Madison's great invention. An innovative system of power sharing that balanced national and state interests, federalism was the pragmatic compromise that brought the colonies together to form the United States. Yet, even beyond the question of slavery, inequality was built into the system because federalism by its very nature meant that many aspects of an American's life depended on where they lived. Over time, these inequalities have created vast divisions between the states and made federalism fundamentally unstable. In The Divided States of America, Donald Kettl chronicles the history of a political system that once united the nation—and now threatens to break it apart.Exploring the full sweep of federalism from the founding to today, Kettl focuses on pivotal moments when power has shifted between state and national governments—from the violent rebalancing of the Civil War, when the nation almost split in two, to the era of civil rights a century later, when there was apparent agreement that inequality was a threat to liberty and the federal government should set policies for states to enact. Despite this consensus, inequality between states has only deepened since that moment. From health care and infrastructure to education and the environment, the quality of public services is ever more uneven. Having revealed the shortcomings of Madison's marvel, Kettl points to possible solutions in the writings of another founder: Alexander Hamilton.Making an urgent case for reforming federalism, The Divided States of America shows why we must—and how we can—address the crisis of American inequality.

1

Madison’s Balancing Act

The further the American Revolution recedes into history, the easier it is to miss just how close the United States of America came to being a divided collection of competing colonies under the punishing heel of an angry Britain. The nation’s founders had first dared to declare their king a despot and then to challenge the most powerful army in the world to a war over turf. The odds of success seemed impossibly small, even if the red coats of the British troops made them conspicuous targets on the battlefield. A seven-year campaign, much bravery, a bit of luck, and the timely help of the French produced an unlikely victory. In September 1783, the promise of the Declaration finally led to the reality of independence.

But along with the triumph came a wrenching setback: the new nation’s original plan to govern itself, the Articles of Confederation, simply failed to work. The states had been determined to prevent the new national sovereign from trampling on their liberty—having defeated the king, the last thing they wanted was another one—so the Articles intentionally created a very weak government. In their eagerness to prevent tyranny, its drafters overdid it. They created a United States of America not united enough to protect itself or its commerce. If the republic was to endure, this collection of divided states needed to be rescued from the fatal flaws of the Articles.

So, in 1787, the nation’s leaders gathered in Independence Hall in Philadelphia to draft a new governing constitution. It was the same building where many of them had boldly voted to declare independence from Britain in 1776 and where they had drafted the Articles of Confederation in 1781. This time they knew they needed a more detailed constitution and a stronger national government. And they also knew they needed all the help they could get.

The founders struggled with a dilemma, one that has repeated itself many times since. The leaders of the states jealously guarded the separate identities that had emerged through the colonial times. They were proud, of course, of the new nation, but many were even prouder of the rich traditions of their own states. After all, the nation’s short eleven-year history was a brief blip compared with the century and a half during which many of the colonies had prospered—and none of the proud states wanted to surrender their own interests to a new national identity. The agriculturally oriented South fiercely opposed having Northern merchants dictate policy, and the settlers who pushed west didn’t want the big cities controlling their lives. Residents of small towns were always fearful of the reach of the large cities. The Articles of Confederation were so weak because the states were so strong, and state leaders wanted to keep it that way.

But the devotion to state power almost immediately clashed with the requirements of the new country. European powers coveted the vast, untapped wealth of the new continent. Tensions among the states threatened budding commerce, and the new nation lacked the most basic structures for making decisions. Even before Maryland became the last state to ratify the Articles in 1781, the document was obsolete.

So when the founders returned to Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the new constitution, they faced a profound dilemma. They needed to build a stronger national government without interfering with the states’ expectations that they would keep their identities and their power. No other new nation had ever attempted to have its constituent parts create a strong national government without those parts deconstituting themselves in the process. The solution they came up with was federalism, American style. It had the great virtue of winning political support from the states, by maintaining their identity. It had the great challenge of creating a new ship of state, which had to navigate especially fierce and opposing currents. American federalism, in fact, has always been much less a fixed structure than a set of rules of combat. In the centuries since, the underlying tension between national unity and state power has never gone away. Neither have the great political battles that federalism precipitates.

That challenge has become both what defines the operating reality of American government and what differentiates American government from governments in the rest of the world. It is the field of battle on which the most important American political struggles have been fought. Through the years, these struggles have sometimes threatened the very principles that brought the founders to Philadelphia the first time to declare independence from the king.

When the founders met in 1787 to write the new constitution, James Madison led the debate. He was much younger than most of his colleagues, and he had a true genius for finding the bridge between opposing factions. As Joseph J. Ellis put it, Madison was “the acknowledged master of the inoffensive argument that just happened, time after time, to prove decisive.” Madison “lived in the details,” Ellis explained, “and worked his magic … with a more deft tactical proficiency than anyone else.”¹

His tactical brilliance, in fact, helped him cobble together the two greatest institutional inventions of the founders: separation of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial branches, which prevented the country’s new president from becoming too kinglike; and federalism, which delicately balanced the powers of the national government with those of the states. Madison is perhaps best known for the first invention, but his second invention was the truly essential one, for without a plan to deal with the power of the states, the country could well have become fatally fragmented—and easy pickings for British, French, and Spanish governments eager to expand their power in the Americas. The invention of federalism allocated power between the federal government and the states in a way that gave the federal government enough strength to keep the country intact and accomplish national goals without making it so strong as to interfere with the self-government of the state and local governments. That was no mean feat.

(A quick aside: There’s often much confusion around the terms “federal” and “federalism.” In a formal sense, “federal” refers to a system of government in which power is allocated between the national government and its components, like the states. But in the United States, by long tradition, the national government is also referred to as the “federal government,” so to keep with common usage, I’ll use “federal” throughout the book to refer to the government run from the national capital. “Federalism” will refer to the American strategy for dividing power between the national government and the states.)

After they had drafted the Constitution, the founders knew just how fragile a system they had cobbled together. As they left Independence Hall on the last day of the constitutional deliberations, a lady is reputed to have asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” Franklin’s reply: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”² Keeping it ultimately depended on whether Madison’s two great inventions worked. For more than two centuries, they did, if sometimes only barely, surviving partisan conflict, a civil war, and the rise and fall of multiple political parties. In the twenty-first century, however, the two institutions have become increasingly rickety, and so did the challenge of keeping the Constitution.

Madison made Congress the nation’s first branch by putting it in Article I of the Constitution. But hyperpartisanship increasingly made Congress “the broken branch,” as Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in 2006. Six years later, after congressional norms had broken down, budget stalemates had become routine, and Congress increasingly found it difficult to pass any legislation, they sadly concluded that “it’s even worse than it looks.”³ Frictions between Congress and the presidency became deeply rooted, and writers began referring to the partisan split of what had been designed as a nonpartisan Supreme Court. All of these tensions fed a growing polarization that increased divisions in the nation. Madison’s first great institution was in trouble.

His second great invention was in even worse shape, drifting into a deepening crisis that received relatively little attention. Tensions among the states over slavery had erupted in a civil war that almost ripped the nation apart, but in keeping it intact, the North’s victory scarcely ended the battles over states’ rights. The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Education launched a generation-long assault on segregation. A decade later, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs created the sweeping War on Poverty. There were, to be sure, large pockets of rearguard rebellion, but by the end of the 1960s there seemed to be an emerging national consensus on the importance of a strong national government focused squarely on reducing inequality among the nation’s citizens—and among its states. The moment seemed to mark a profound truth about federalism: taking steps to reduce inequality in the United States relied on increasing federal power; putting more power into the hands of the states tended to increase inequality. That theme, in fact, has repeated itself constantly across the broad sweep of American history.

By inequality, I mean big differences among the states in policy outcomes that matter. We often look at inequality in income and wealth at the individual and family levels, and one of the biggest social and economic issues of American policy since the 1960s has been the growing concentration of wealth at the top of the income scale. But one of the most important drivers of this trend is the increasing inequality among the states. Some states are much wealthier than others, and their growing wealth makes it possible for them to provide better education, infrastructure, and health care to their citizens. Some states are far more aggressive in regulating the quality of the air and water, and that produces big differences in the quality of life among their citizens. Federalism was designed, of course, to allow—even encourage—policy differences among the states. But as we will see in the pages that follow, these differences, in creating growing inequality among the states, have made this a nation where the government that citizens get depends increasingly on where they live. That, in turn, is fueling political polarization in an already divided nation. There’s profound irony here: the great invention that made it possible for the states to become united has ultimately become a sharp instrument for driving them apart.

In any system where different players make decisions, of course, they will inevitably make different decisions. That is inescapable—even desirable in fact, because citizens deeply value the right to set their own course and expect their decisions to be different from decisions made by other citizens elsewhere. At some point, however, deep, profound differences in the United States have created corrosive frictions, many stemming from issues of fairness: Is it fair that some citizens have much higher incomes than others? That some kids have much better schools than others? That some communities have much cleaner environments than others? How much equality is desirable—or possible—is, of course, a matter of political values. But the story of American federalism, especially since the 1970s, is a story of a growing divide among the states that has unleashed truly deep frictions among them. Do strong pollution controls in one state hurt its competitiveness with others? Does the poorer educational performance of some states make it harder for them to fuel economic growth? And perhaps most important, do the deep divisions among the states about the power of the federal government create very different patterns of health care, which profoundly affect the quality of life of their citizens?

The debates have been wide—and often wild. They have generated vast differences in how different states have approached national problems. These differences, in turn, have often created wide gaps in the outcomes of government. Madison’s great invention of federalism, designed to bring the country together, has become one of the strongest forces driving it apart. In fact, when it comes to inequality in the United States, the federal government has been the great leveler and the state governments have been the great dividers. Federalism has always been a balancing act, but where the balance is found has constantly shifted. The debate about federalism is therefore a debate about how best to balance the respective roles of the federal and state governments. The result, as John Donahue points out, has been a remarkably “ambiguous division of authority” at the core of American federalism. Indeed, he reminds us, “the framers left ample room” for the nation’s founding principles “to take effect in different ways to meet different conditions. And they inaugurated a permanent American argument over what version of federalism—at each particular time, in each particular set of circumstances—would be truest to the nation’s bedrock values.”⁴ Federalism is about balancing authority, and one of the fundamental masterpieces of the American system is that the balance rests on such hazy laws and fuzzy values.

These differences multiply the sense that government is increasingly breaking the deal that citizens have with their government: they pay taxes and subject themselves to government’s power in exchange for having the government produce the goods and services they want. But if they see some people seeming to get more from government than they deserve, that undermines their confidence in the basic social contract. Americans say that they like differences and want to live in diverse communities, but their behavior suggests otherwise: Americans increasingly prefer to live with people like themselves. That shift has aggravated the very tensions that Madison worried about.⁵ In fact, one of Madison’s biggest worries, as he explained in Federalist 10—one in the great collection of op-eds that made the case for the US Constitution—was that factions might pull the nation apart. The inescapable irony is that one of his greatest inventions, federalism, has helped to do just that.

Federalism has rich, textured roots in the country’s first generations, but attention by scholars, analysts, and politicians to its central and important role in American political life has waned in the decades since the 1960s. In fact, federalism’s biggest problems began increasing just as attention to it was shrinking. Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s promised a vigorous assault on inequality, and an emerging national consensus suggested that many of the deep, pernicious divides in the country had begun to heal. The Nixon administration in the 1970s had its own New Federalism programs, but they were designed to give state and local governments more flexibility in determining how best to accomplish the Great Society’s aims. Civil rights seemed increasingly a universal principle, even though it was painfully obvious that, for many Americans, the problem was scarcely solved. But as an important driver of national debate, federalism drifted away from the center of attention. In fact, many opinion writers began speculating that federalism had died—that the debate over fixing the balance of state and federal power had largely ended with the rise of the federal government’s power.⁶

As Mark Twain quipped about reports of his own passing, however, the report of federalism’s de...