So Much for Federalism

“Join, or die.” by mclanea is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Back in my high school civics class — remember “civics class”? — we were taught the distinction between a “federation” and a “confederation”, with an eye toward understanding the difference between the American states before and after 1789. The take-away from all this was that a functional Federal government was necessary to preserve both the relative autonomy of the individual states and a means by which they could act together to preserve the common good in which all states shared.

Despite my own frequent dissent from the perennially upbeat view of American history, here I agree with the received opinion. Without the symbiotic relationship between local and national polities, the United States would not have survived, and cannot survive, not just politically but socially and economically. The Civil War put this Federal proposition to the test, and the triumph of the Union seemed to answer it definitively: the correct phrase is “the United States is”, not “the United States are.” (Plus the vanquished Confederacy, despite all the rhetoric about “States’ rights” that prevails to this day, was a federation in disguise. In politics rhetoric conceals as much as it reveals.) So Benjamin Franklin had it right when he designed the dismembered Snake flag: Join or die.

That was then. What the COVID-19 pandemic has shown is that the Federal government now may be beyond redemption. It is…