Franklin Foer: Liberals Discover the Joy of Federalism
Nobody would ever confuse the Massachusetts liberal Barney Frank with the South Carolina conservative Strom Thurmond. But when the tart-tongued Frank appeared on Fox News Sunday last winter, it sounded as if an aide had accidentally slipped him some of Thurmond's talking points from the 1950's, when he was a states'-rights segregationist. ''Should the federal government say no state can make this decision for itself?'' Frank asked. He had ventured onto Fox to assert each state's right to marry gay couples.
Frank isn't the only supporter of gay marriage to sing the praises of federalism. Last December, Andrew Sullivan argued in The New Republic, ''The whole point of federalism is that different states can have different policies on matters of burning controversy -- and that this is O.K.'' That same month, Paul Glastris, the editor of The Washington Monthly, posed the question, ''Why shouldn't the Democrats become the party of federalism?''
In some respects, they already have. Liberal energies once devoted to expanding the national government are being redirected toward the states. New York's attorney general Eliot Spitzer, declaring himself a ''fervent federalist,'' is using state regulations to prosecute corporate abuses that George W. Bush's Department of Justice won't touch. While the federal minimum wage hasn't budged since the middle of the Clinton era, 13 (mostly blue) states and the District of Columbia have hiked their local wage floors in the intervening years. After Bush severely restricted federal stem cell research, California's voters passed an initiative pouring $3 billion into laboratories for that very purpose, and initiatives are under way in at least a dozen other states.
These developments may look like a desperate reaction on the part of some liberals to the conservatives' grip on Washington. But in fact the well-known liberal liking for programs at the national level has long coexisted alongside a quieter tradition of principled federalism -- skeptical of distant bureaucracies and celebratory of local policy experimentation.
To understand liberal federalism, however, it is first necessary to understand its nemesis, Herbert Croly. A shy, obscure writer on architecture, Croly rose to fame in 1909 with ''The Promise of American Life,'' a long-winded manifesto calling for a strong national government. The book fell into the hands of Theodore Roosevelt and, with the Bull Moose as its promoter, it attracted a crowd of high-powered admirers, including the benefactors who bankrolled Croly's new magazine, The New Republic.
Croly had a tendency to swing wildly and hard. His big target was Thomas Jefferson, a man of ''intellectual superficiality and insincerity.'' The sage of Monticello, Croly argued, had created a government suited for a bucolic era. But modernity, the birth of the corporation, the closing of the frontier and technological advances had reshaped America and rendered Jefferson's governing vision obsolete. What America needed was centralization and efficiency, not antiquated state governments. The inefficiency of state governments, he said, was ''one of the most fundamental of American political problems.''
Croly generally gets lumped together with the early-20th-century progressives, but his book often savaged these supposed comrades as outdated and stupidly old-fashioned. Croly accepted concentrations of power -- corporations, as well as a strong central government -- as immutable facts of modern life. Many of his fellow reformers, he charged, were clinging to an outmoded Jeffersonian affection for competition and equality. They wanted to dismantle the trusts and return to a marketplace dominated by small business. What's more, Croly claimed, these reformers continued to harbor an irrational attachment to state governments; instead of building a modern centralized nation, they focused on renovating the old state machinery. Progressives in the West, for instance, created the referendum, allowing citizens to vote specific laws up or down. Croly, an unabashed elitist, preferred handing power to experts.