Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Ltd.

Nancy Gibbs has an article in Times Magazine for May 4, 2009 (which I just got in the mail today) in which she discusses the idea of Texas seceding from the Union.  This reflection was brought on by Governor Rick Perry stating (I’m quoting from the article)  “he thought the U.S. was still a ‘great union,’ but ‘if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come of that?’”

In her hurry to engage in some standard East-Coast-style jabs at Texans’ pride in their state and moralizing about secession (where she finds it necessary to bring up President Lincoln), Ms. Gibbs misses the larger issue: the relationship between the federal government and the states.  Federalism is, in fact, much more important than Gov. Perry joshing a bit about secession (especially considering that reminiscing about Texas being its own country is basically a state past-time).

When the Founders wrote the Constitution, the relationship between the national government and the states was of prime concern.  The Articles of Confederation (adopted during the Revolution) had provided for a severely limited national government, composed only of Congress.  Congress could pass laws, but without an executive branch, could not enforce them.  Congress was charged with national defense, but could only ask the states nicely to provide them with militia forces, and could not raise taxes to carry out any military action even if the states sent the troops.  Such a government was intended to maintain as much of the independence of the states as possible, but was so weak that the compact between the states was steadily falling about (New Jersey and Connecticut almost went to war with New York over tariff duties, for example).

In writing the Constitution, the Founders dealt with this problem by establishing a federal system of government.  The national government’s powers were narrowly defined and concerned those issues that only a national government could handle: foreign policy, national defense, interstate commerce, etc.  In fact, the Bill of Rights (adopted in 1791) addressed this specifically in the 10th Amendment (which is often completely overlooked today): “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.”

Throughout our nation’s history, the general trend has been that power has steadily concentrated toward the national government (and within the national government toward the president).  There are many reasons for this, but one of the chief ones has been slavery and the subsequent civil rights issues that followed its abolition at the end of 1865.  Because of this correlation federalist questions often have a moral component to them.  States’ rights has become synonymous with pro-slavery and pro-segregation, while nationalists can claim to stand for individual liberty against state tyranny.

This is unfortunate, because in getting away from federalism we are moving toward more tyranny and less liberty.  The failure of some states in the area of individual rights, however,  should not be seen as a repudiation of federalism.  The growing power of the national government in education, the economy, the environment, and other areas moves decision-making farther and farther away from the people.

This is why smaller government is so important to conservatives.  Big government is not bad just because it is (which is the way the principle is often stated by those in favor of larger government), but because government is, in its very nature, the coopting of individual liberty; if government gets bigger, more liberty is taken away, more controls are placed on the individual.  The federal system was intended by the Founders to preserve liberty by insuring that the needs of the nation would be met by a strong but limited national government, and most issues (those closest to the people) would be handled by the states, which are limited by geography.

That brings us back to Gov. Perry’s original comment and Ms. Gibbs’s response.  Perry’s main point, that Washington is not listening to the people (or at least the people of Texas) is a very valid complaint.  If the majority of the country wants to go in a direction that the majority of Texans don’t, what is Texas to do?  The answer, which Gibbs gets annoyingly close to but still fails to miss, is already there in our Constitution.

To demonstrate this, let’s look at a portion of Gibbs’s article:

America is now a multicultural quilt of 300 million people spread across cities and suburbs and forests and prairies; when it is compared with the colonial world of our forebears, it is harder to judge whether what unites us is greater than what divides us – or agree on just how much power we want to cede to Washington so it can fight pirates and build highways and cure cancer, and how much we prefer to keep for ourselves.

This passage is particularly annoying to me, because she comes so close to the answer and then gets distracted by the secession issue.  Gibbs’s analysis is at once right and wrong.  She’s right that as a nation we are quite diverse.  She is wrong, however, in assuming that the first citizens of the United States had it easier on that front.  They were divided in ways just as deep as those that we see today, and in many ways more so.  They were divided by ethnicity, religion, politics, economics, geography, and all the other things that currently divide us.  Many of those divisions, such as geography, were much more dividing then than they are today.  The Founders’ solution to this diversity was federalism.

The more we move away from federalism, the less power the people of this country will have over their own affairs, and the greater risk we run of real tyranny.  A smaller national government, focusing on the duties entrusted to it by the Constitution (and not trying to “solve” every problem from on high) allows for greater liberty and freedom, as well as greater citizen participation in government at the local and state levels.  That’s a big part of what the Tea Parties were all about.