American politics has been full of rhetoric and debates about the power of the federal government vis-à-vis state governments in recent years. In 2012, for example, then-Texas Governor Rick Perry claimed that South Carolina was “at war” with the federal government over its voter I.D. laws. In 2014, Representative Paul Ryan described Barack Obama’s administration as “big government in practice.” Most recently, in 2017, speaking about environmental policy, Washington Governor Jay Inslee said “[t]here is nothing Donald Trump can do to stop us in our states from advancing these policies.”
But the argument over the proper balance of power between the federal government and state governments goes back to the early years of the United States. During the debates over whether the Constitution should be ratified by the Thirteen Colonies, the Anti-Federalists—those who opposed the Constitution—made what we might now call a “states’ rights” argument: they feared that the Constitution gave the federal government too much power at the expense of the states. The Federalists, by contrast, supported the Constitution, and believed that a strong central government was in the best interest of the young country. Ultimately, the Constitution was adopted in 1789, but the influence of Anti-Federalist thought remained.
Today, there is a common misconception that since 1789, calls for “states’ rights” have always been tied to racism and xenophobia. While they sometimes were—and are—there is a longer history of liberal forces using state power, rather than federal power, to advance their goals. State and local-level Democratic politicians are revitalizing this history in the Trump era, and liberals should embrace their heritage of change-making at the state level.
A Sinister Subtext
Despite the oft-forgotten progressive history of state-level politics, the association of states’ rights rhetoric with white supremacy shouldn’t be understated. The Southern declarations of secession which preceded the Civil War directly tied opposition to federal power to the preservation of black slavery. Likewise, the long Jim Crow era saw white Southerners continue to use the rhetoric of states’ rights to justify denying African Americans their constitutional rights and resisting the civil rights movement.
After the legislative civil rights victories of 1964 and 1965, openly racist rhetoric was no longer accepted in mainstream American politics. Racism didn’t disappear, however, and it has remained a subtext of some states’ rights rhetoric ever since. In 1980, then-candidate Ronald Reagan curiously began his general election campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi—the site of one of the most notorious acts of white supremacist violence of the Civil Rights era. There, in 1964, three young Civil Rights campaigners, one black and two Jewish, were brutally murdered by Klansmen who had the help of local law enforcement. Reagan appeared before the crowd at the Neshoba County fair 16 years after the murders and proclaimed “I believe in states’ rights.” It was a prime example of the “Southern Strategy” the Republican Party used after the Civil Rights Movement to garner the support of white Southerners—in this case, by turning “states’ rights” into a dog-whistle for racism.
Laboratories of Democracy
For such historical reasons, the view of states’ rights as an inherently right-wing commitment can be forgiven. But there is another history of states’ rights that should not be forgotten, as professor Jennifer Hochschild explained to the HPR. Just as the Anti-Federalists had “meaningful, non-race based allegiance to their state,” many Americans have historically felt their state community to be more culturally meaningful and politically representative than the federal government, unrelated to race-based hostility. This is intimately tied to the conception of states as ‘laboratories of democracy,’ an idea popularized by the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Indeed, professor Hochschild notes that there is a long history of states being pioneers of progressive public policy, going above and beyond what the federal government mandated at the time. Many Northern states abolished slavery a whole century before the Civil War. The state of Wisconsin pioneered unemployment insurance, inspiring the federal government to follow suit. From the mid-to-late 1800s, women had the right to vote in some states, a half-century before the federal government guaranteed the right. “There’s a little theme that runs through the states’ rights logic that’s actually more democratic,” confirmed professor Hochschild.
The liberal and conservative histories of state-level politics further demonstrate that the exercise of state power has always been pragmatic rather than ideological; “states’ rights” is not an inherently right-wing commitment, nor is using federal authority an inherently left-wing approach. The unemployment insurance pioneers in Wisconsin and the anti-slavery factions of northern states didn’t tie their agendas to an underlying belief about the importance of states’ rights or the dangers of federal power. Conversely, southern states willingly used federal power to pass and enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and did so without praising the political efficacy of a strong central government. Rather, liberal and conservative coalitions use whatever power they have to accomplish their legislative goals.
The political divides of the post-civil rights era illustrate this pragmatic approach, too. According to a CBS News article ranking the 19 states with the most stringent abortion laws, 18 of those 19 voted Republican in the 2016 presidential election. It’s unsurprising to see Republican-leaning states use state authority to counteract more liberal federal policy. But the reverse effect was seen before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states in 2015. In the years before the ruling, a number of states—including Massachusetts, Washington, and Maryland— legalized same-sex marriage on their own accord, and most had voted Democratic in the previous presidential election. In this case, Democratic-leaning states also used state authority to counteract conservative federal policy on same-sex marriage.
A New Paradigm
This is becoming the new normal: in recent years, it has mostly been liberal states using their authority to counteract federal policy. In addition to same-sex marriage, Democratic states have embarked on a campaign of states’ rights, contradicting or threatening to contradict federal policy on marijuana decriminalization, environmental regulations, sanctuary cities, the border wall and a host of other issues. Likewise, state-level mobilization recently led to a wave of Democratic victories in states from New Jersey to Montana. Liberal campaigners should therefore embrace this new role, and take the lessons of the past to heart—just because the Republican Party currently controls most of the levers of federal power does not mean that a left-wing policy agenda cannot be realized.
“We all grew up with the notion that the national government was liberal and the states were conservative. That’s now reversed,” professor Hochschild explained. Now facing a right-wing federal government, liberals must embrace political irony and admit that, as Hochschild articulated, “What’s going to save the country now is states’ rights.”
Image Credit: Flickr/Chris MacDonald