Federalism Could Heal a Divided Nation

There’s less reason to fight when one-size-fits-all policies are replaced with local diversity.

Anybody expecting politicians' empty promises that they'll savage one another more politely in the future to settle the country's tensions is dreaming. Vicious rhetoric by candidates may fan the flames of political hatred, recently fueling the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. But those flames were lit long ago. To damp those fires, the best way to reduce the likelihood of Americans with opposing views battling for political control is to reduce the power of government—starting with the feds.

Nasty Words and Nastier Sentiments

"MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people," President Joe Biden charged in a 2022 speech in Philadelphia.

GOP candidate Donald Trump returns the sentiment, including at a March rally in Ohio when he claimed, "If we don't win this election, I don't think you're going to have another election in this country."

That's raw stuff, but it's not just candidates. Partisans of the major political parties are increasingly disdainful of one another, according to the American National Election Studies. On a scale of 1–100, Republicans and Democrats were "meh" about each other from 1978 to 2000, with ratings in the 40s. After the turn of the millennium, those figures declined to 20 and below in 2020.

"A majority of Democrats (55%) say the GOP makes them feel afraid, while 49% of Republicans say the same about the Democratic Party," Pew Research reported in 2016. "And nearly half of Democrats (47%) and Republicans (46%) say the other party makes them feel angry."

That's led to considerable discussion about "hatred" dominating relations between the political factions—language that's not overblown when you see how the sides view each other.

"Roughly half (52% Biden voters, 47% Trump voters) viewed those who supported the other party as threats to the American way of life," the University of Virginia's Center for Politics found last year. "About 40% of both groups (41% Biden voters, 38% Trump voters) at least somewhat believed that the other side had become so extreme that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals."

And here we are, amidst escalating political violence culminating in an assassination attempt on a former president who seeks a return to the White House. The country's dominant political factions are convinced elections are too important to lose. Given how awful the factions are, perhaps they're right.

Turn Down the Heat With Decentralized Power

But if conflict is found in elections that mutually loathing partisans think they can't afford to lose, maybe the temperature can be turned down by making contests less important. If the federal government had a smaller role in our lives, it wouldn't matter so much who wins control of the White House and Congress. If power is transferred from D.C. to states and localities that are closer to their constituents and easier for dissenters to escape by loading moving trucks, maybe political battles don't have to be so nasty.

There's even an opening for such decentralization in the 2024 Republican Party platform.

"We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run," reads the document.

On abortion, the platform similarly celebrates the overturning of Roe v. Wade, not by calling for a national ban, but by saying "power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People."

"California is going to want to have a different policy from Ohio, Ohio is going to want to have a different policy from Alabama, and it is reasonable to let voters in states make the decisions," Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) told Sean Hannity on Fox News after he was selected as the GOP vice-presidential pick.

That's not enough to satisfy true believers on either the pro-life or pro-choice-side—some Republicans got very upset over the shift from the party's older hard-line position—but it's a reasonable approach for reducing conflict over an issue on which people strongly disagree.

Rediscovering Federalism and Voting With Your Feet

That's a reinvention of federalism, of course—a principle on which the structure of the United States was based. But two and a half centuries on, power has been hoovered up by federal officials who increasingly impose one-size-fits-whoever-is-in-charge policies. That's a recipe for the political conflict we see around us as people battle to impose their preferred policies and escape those of their enemies.

"The diversity federalism creates can also help promote unity, by reducing the conflict that arises when the federal government has the power to impose one-size-fits-all policies throughout the country," George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin told a Federalist Society symposium last year. "Decentralizing authority can mitigate that conflict."

Decentralized policymaking also makes it easier for people to "vote with their feet," Somin adds, by moving from jurisdictions dominated by policies they don't like to ones where they feel comfortable. He wrote a whole book on that topic.

We've seen that happening with the "big sort" captured in Bill Bishop's 2008 book of the same name, and the phenomenon continues.

"Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history," the AP reported last summer. "The split has sent states careening to the political left or right, adopting diametrically opposed laws on some of the hottest issues of the day."

Of course, that only works if states and localities are allowed to make their own policies. Unfortunately, Democrats have long preferred centralizing power and making policies uniform across the country. Uses of "federal" in that party's most recent platform overwhelmingly refer to increasing D.C.'s role.

But that document is four years old, and the country has become more divided and conflict-ridden since. Democrats briefly rediscovered an interest in federalism when Trump was in the White House and may again with him poised to return. Enjoying the policies they prefer locally—or having the option to move where they've been implemented—could strike them as better than national conflict and violence.

If Americans can be convinced to make federal elections not worth fighting over by shifting power to states and localities, we should talk about decentralizing even further. All the way to the individual would be best.