Will Democrats Now Become Born-Again Federalists?

B lue states are about to discover the virtues of federalism. Red states, Congress, and a restored Trump administration would be wise to let them do so.

America did not suddenly become united on Election Day, though some analysts are already detecting signs of a nascent realignment in the electoral chicken entrails. The bitterness of our politics has not ebbed. To live together, we will need to overcome the human tendency to want to control how other people live.

But we should try: That tendency is the root of our toxic politics. For nearly a century following the New Deal, the federal government grew in size and power. Republicans fought for a long time for smaller government, restraining growth at the federal level — until they didn’t.

Around the turn of the century, the GOP abandoned that role. It was as though the party threw the pool cue on the table and said, “Screw small government. We want control of the big government.” And the bar fight was on.

An evenly divided country has been fighting to the last vote for the right to tell the other half how to live for 20 years. Maybe we can learn to live together again by returning to the genius of our Founding: federalism, a dusty political-science word for allowing states to have some significant measure of independence from the federal government. Live and let live.

Red-state attorneys general have fought to keep alive the memory of states’ independence in the courts, successfully restraining many of the Biden administration’s most authoritarian attempts to seize power it did not possess. It seems likely that those red-state arguments will now be dusted off in service of blue-state priorities.

During the first Trump administration, blue states experimented with federalist arguments. San Francisco even cited the left-for-dead Tenth Amendment in a brief in support of its gun laws. (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”)

Allowing states to chart their own course will provide empirical proof of bad ideas, red or blue. California is already sprinting away from the woke criminal-justice policies creating chaos there — “reformer” Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón was trounced this year by a Republican-turned independent by more than 20 points. Gascón is only the latest in this now-clear trend that began with the recall of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco in 2022. Red-state ideas can fall, too, as Governor Sam Brownback’s bridge-too-far tax cut proved.

In a federalist system, such failures belong to the state, not to the nation. The best way to highlight the ill-advised nature of left-wing ideas is to allow them to be tried — but please, not at scale by the national government.

Even more important, states’ independence promotes freedom. The same resentment that chafes Ohio when California tries to dictate our energy or agricultural policy rubs raw the sensibilities of the Golden State should Ohio ever attempt to run California’s water policy.

Such local autonomy has calmed troubled waters in separatist parts of the world, and it has worked quite well in American history. But it requires humility to recognize that your own favored policies may prove bad, and the confidence to allow some poor policy choices in some places. The freedom to act cannot be divorced from the freedom to be wrong.

America is likely to remain divided for many years to come — it has been divided more often than not in its history, and that is the nature of a free society. Where we can be united is in a basic principle: We agree to leave each other alone on all matters in which we can.