CRITIQUE OF PAROCHIAL FEDERALISM, III

 

Despite Daniel Elazar’s assurances that the US is thoroughly federalist,[1] the intrusions of the central government into all aspects of life and the resulting undermining of communal institutions[2] have become prevailing aspects of the nation’s political system.  And that reality undermines the nation’s federalist character which places a premium on localism.

That will be the issue this posting addresses – a lack of local government viability – as the next element of this blog’s critique of the parochial federalist construct.  This account draws the conclusion that the parochial/traditional federalist theory did not adequately address the potential – even perhaps the likelihood – of the centralization of power in the federal government.  It should be recalled that federalism is a non-centralized system of governance, yet many would view the federal government as the central element of this nation’s system.

Then again, some might think this claim is a bit unfair in that the founding fathers could not have been expected to foresee the conditions that led to the dominance of the federal government, i.e., the global depression of the 1930s or the danger to the nation’s security posed by potential enemies with nuclear weapons.

          Both historical developments occurred with a backdrop of the increasing dominance of national corporations as they increasingly exerted their financial power over the nation’s economy and through that advantage, the nation’s politics.  A truly localized governance, given these contextual realities, has been very difficult to sustain.  The parochial federalist perspective was basically overwhelmed by any attempt to re-establish this purer version of a federalist view.

          This blogger believes that one key cause of this deficiency is that the initial perspective assumed that the conditions of the compact drawn up by the founding generation would be basically accepted by succeeding generations regardless of how the nation was to evolve.  If true, that, one must say, was a lack of imagination, but this blogger should not be too critical; his entire life has transpired in a time of enormous change.

Except for the provision for an amendment process, which is basically expected to accommodate marginal changes and is very cumbersome to employ, there is no provision for a generational affirmation of the republican principles entailed in the nation’s constitution. 

Just to demonstrate – and what follows is only a demonstration – how resistant to change the original document was/is, the nation was to encounter a civil war before a meaningful change was considered and implemented.  That would be the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment that this blogger has heard a constitutional scholar characterize as a fundamental, transformational change to the original constitution.[3]

This prevailing hereditary approach (or problem) needs to be changed to one in which each generation makes a renewed commitment to the nation’s constitutional principles with the ability to make the marginal or significant changes for which the passing of time demands.  That is, there must be the opportunity to make constitutional changes more readily than now exists.

But even with that, this blogger has some reservations.  If such a provision were added to the national constitution, what would happen to common law that is so reliant on precedent?  For example, a major critique of overturning Roe v. Wade was how, by doing so, it undermined the principle of precedent and with it the ability of law to be predictable.  Yet states have a much easier process by which to change their constitutions and they seem to accommodate those changes.

 

Every state but Delaware requires voters to ratify proposed state constitutional amendments – changes to a state’s constitution.  From 2006 through 2020, a total of 1,016 constitutional amendments were proposed and put before voters.  Of this total, voters approved 733 proposed changes to state constitutions.[4]

 

And yet with this pace of change, state governments function and do not change their basic, foundational elements of their governments or how those governments govern their respective populations.

Such opportunity to change as the states accommodate – perhaps to a much lesser frequency – needs to be made at the federal level so that, while basic commitments to republican principles are protected against the whims of popular opinion, structural, procedural, substantive, and definitional elements can be altered.  The original plan underestimates how fundamentally the passage of time creates demands that often call for corresponding changes in the basic rules of the game.

For example, given the shifts in population to urban areas and the ability of the rural population to secure representation in Congress and state legislatures beyond their numbers – a condition allowed to occur from gerrymandering and single-representative districts[5] – the system is becoming less and less democratic. 

This promises to be a condition that will prove to be disruptive to a serious degree as this underrepresentation of urban citizens becomes more and more obvious.  As it is, this blogger believes that this undemocratic trait is a prime cause for the polarized politics this nation is presently experiencing.

          But the immediate problem this posting addresses is that the system has become too centralized in all aspects of governance.  Yet, due to the inflexibility of the system to change its constitutional provisions, on which levels of effective localism depend, the system seems helpless to protect the efficaciousness of local governing units. To what extent does the system need to be more flexible in its ability to make changes?  To the extent, in part, that the governmental system at the state and federal levels can meet the demands of the day without undermining the nation’s commitment to localism. 

Ironically, that commitment to localism has to be defined in such a way as to maintain an effective sensitivity to global conditions and challenges.  Why?  Because the modern world is now global, and viable local governance not only has to address local problems, statewide problems, national problems, but global ones as well.

Back in 1991, Robert Bellah, et al. wrote,

 

It is equally remarkable that this strong new awareness of the non-utilitarian context of life mostly operates at two quite disconnected levels.  There is very local, even personal “Green behavior” – such as recycling trash, using only certain products, and driving less.  And there is a second, planetary level of concern, as in campaigns to protect endangered species, tropical rain forests, or the ozone layer.  The mediating relationships that link the individual household with the planetary ecosystem are left out – the bounds of human institutions and culture.  There is a void in awareness, a gap in our thinking at the crucial point, the middle range between the local and the global level.  Planetary environmental degradation is rarely understood as connected with human poverty and hunger.  Why is it that it is easier to think about the whole planetary ecosphere than to understand the social effects of our everyday relationships within household, economy, and polity?  Environmentalists sometimes forget that human culture is itself, as Cicero put it, a “second nature,” whose true aim is not to exploit the rest of nature but to cultivate it, raising the potentials emergent in humanity toward harmonious completion.[6]

 

In short, viable citizenship, given the interdependence of nations and the global consequences of economic activity, demands public virtue that is sensitive to world-wide issues that not only address environmental issues but also global labor exploitation, international crime syndicates, global health issues, etc. that cannot be neglected. 

That is, such concerns among the citizenry cannot be effectively promoted solely by a national governance, but by local activity and engagements that politicize common people into getting involved not only with local problems, but also global ones.  Parochial federalism lacks a sufficient voice in dealing with global issues.  It is simply not modern enough to meet the world that Americans are confronting today.

            Of course, this is a complex situation, and this posting does not provide a solution in which one can have much trust – the aim here is to draw attention to these conditions.  But it – the situation in which localism is lost – should garner more interest than it now seems to have.  A national discussion in which the conversation goes beyond some newer form of “states’ rights” being expressed, needs to occur.[7]

          The next posting will address the shortcomings these counter federalist biases have had in maintaining a federation among a citizenry and yet not fully addressed by parochial federalism.  By addressing these concerns, as described above, one gets at a very fundamental aspect of a parochial view of federalism as that term suggests one should have.  That would be a parochialism based on local partnerships across the nation in which a partner comes face-to-face with other partners.

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[1] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution? Thoroughly,” in a booklet of readings, Readings for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar, prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute (conducted in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1994), 1-30.

[2] Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community:  A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom (San Francisco, CA:  Institute of Contemporary Studies, 1990).

[3] The reasoning supporting this claim is based on the provisions of the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.  With them, the federal government introduced the potential policing of states in how they treated all of their citizens.  That said, it took over forty years before the courts began honoring these provisions by initially protecting property rights of business interests (that case being Lochner v. New York, 1905).

[4] “Amending State Constitutions,” Ballotpedia (n.d.), accessed July 14, 2022, https://ballotpedia.org/Amending_state_constitutions.

[5] Jonathan Rodden, Why Cities Lose:  The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (New York, NY:  Basic Books, 2019).  This blogger’s recently published book, From Immaturity to Polarized Politics (available through Amazon), provides an overview of Rodden’s study in which this “single-representative” districts provision is identified and described.

[6] Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York, NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 14-15.

[7] States’ rights debates are generally conducted for racist and xenophobic attitudes and beliefs – but a discussion of localism needs to keep its focus on enhancing ways to encourage a more engaged citizenry in policy formation by all levels of government.  It is only at the local level that average citizens have a reasonable chance at affecting the process.