One of my big disadvantages as a writer, and one of the intrinsic perils of blogging, is that I often make lazy assertions. This means that I spend a lot of time getting my ass fact-checked, and you know how long the waits are down at the free ass-fact clinic.
But, when I do pull my fishbelly-white corpulescense off the chair and go check stuff out, I find out a whole slew of fascinating facts, and as you know, facts can be used to prove anything that's even remotely true! Federalism is silly? How silly!
I've actually gone back to read the Federalist Papers, in recent weeks. I had power-skimmed them in the past, but only for specific purposes like understanding the mind of Richard Hofstadter (The Master). This return to smarty-pants reading is partly because, now that I have an advanced degree in history, I'm finally getting serious about the study of history. The other part is, I don't know stuff about things, and I need to know junk like that so can ensmarten myself.
So, I'd like to re-address that issue, and retract my assertion of silliness. Sort of.
First: Mike, although your characterizations of Federalism are accurate as far as they go, they are not the whole picture. To take an example from our recent discussions, it's as if we were talking about Stalinism, and you wanted to only discuss the internal politics of the Kremlin. Relevant, and somewhat complete, but misleading.
Second: Buckethead, I did say that Federalism as originally conceived has been rendered silly by the passage of time, and that's a poor choice of words that deserves some splaining. What I really should say is that the bugbears of Hamilton and Madison (let's leave John Jay out of it) are no longer scary to us today, and those aspects of Federalism most carefully designed to combat them seem urgent out of all proportion with how we today perceive the same issue.
Example. Hamilton spends thousands of words thrashing at the dead horse of "faction." By faction he did not mean political parties such as were beginning to form at the time, and which took greater shape in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. He meant a Party in the crazy rest-of-the-world sense, like the Roundheads, or more recently the Nazis, Communists, and Ba'ath Party-- organizations with their own army/security force, an absolutist ideology, and a mandate to wipe out the competition. Faction in that sense is a dead issue in the US today. Other examples exist: the big questions of states' power versus federal power were settled in 1865, with clarification continually going on. Checks and balances work. Tyranny of state over state has not arisen. Tyranny of the federal government over the states is on the rise, and should be combatted, a counter-example of how Federalism remains relevant.
So, what I should have written was, "I still think a national bank is and was a good idea, but the rest of Federalism's big concerns have been thankfully rendered silly and mostly irrelevant by the passage of time." This is truer and only partly wrong. The wrong part I now disavow: feh! ptui! ptui!
The spirit of Federalism as conceived by the framers consists in retrospect of two types of propositions: short-run ideas like described above intended to combat the immediate challenges of the 1790s, and long-range plans intended to ensure the nation's survival. The latter of these are always very relevant-- things like providing for the interests of individuals against the state, clarifying the ways in which it is appropriate for the branches of government to use its power, ensuring that civil war is never around the corner (except that once, which I covered yesterday), etc.
"Federalism" in the parlance of our time is used as a synonym for everything from Republicanism to Libertarianism. That's a big house. It's so big because the tenets of Federalist thought have infused the whole game of indigenous American politics. And mostly, in a thoroughly modern, perhaps armchair, sense, I dig it.
Insofar as Federalism was intended to minimize friction between the separate states, and keep out of those states' internal affairs, it gets a big yes from me. That's in the Constitution. Insofar as Federalism was intended to uphold the rights of individual citizens (even though Madison and Hamilton were sometimes kind of fuzzy on how that would work, exactly), that's also in the Constitution, and very nifty. Insofar as Federalism was designed to mediate between the disadvantages of a direct democracy and those of an autocratic state, it works, and I'm happy. I'm a big fan of efficient, purpose-built central government counterposed with strong local governments, and treasure the dialogue that continues between these two poles. A lot of the original aims of Federalism may have fallen into irrelevancy and become, yes, silly. But the rest has been transformed by use and remains deeply relevant today, even if not to the letter as originally written.
In case you are wondering, strict constructionists make me crazy. CRAZY. Hence my animus against the brilliant, acerbic, and dangerously originalist Justice Scalia.
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