Posted on 03/18/2017 7:28:29 AM PDT by darrellmaurina
When hard-right conservatives like Patrick J. Buchanan and hard-left liberals writing for magazines like the New Republic both agree that it's time to reinvigorate long-forgotten concepts like federalism and states rights, and let liberal and conservative states both pursue the policies their voters think work best for their own people, something important has changed in our political discourse.
Either something's gone seriously wrong and our nation is falling apart, or something is finally working right as both sides of the political divide figure out just **WHY** our Constitution was written as a compromise between the interests of thirteen very different states whose leaders agreed on ground rules for a limited federal government, while letting each state do pretty much whatever it wanted within its own borders.
Republicans have advocated local autonomy and federalism for a century; this isn't new to us.
It is new for liberals.
Let's not minimize what a major change this is for people on the liberal side of the spectrum. Ever since the 1930s, Democrats have been the party advocating a strong central government, believing the social, economic and political changes they wanted could best be accomplished by Congressmen and Senators elected by large liberal states, and when the political process didn't generate the results they wanted, by Supreme Court decisions made by unelected black-robed Justices serving life terms who were generally graduates of elite liberal law schools that have been controlled by liberal professors for generations.
We're now seeing a situation in which the election of Donald J. Trump has shattered the myth of inevitable liberal progress.
We're now seeing important liberal magazines write things like this:
"So: What are we in Blue America going to do about it? What would it mean to remove ourselves as far as possible from the federal government? For starters, we now endorse cutting the federal income tax to the bone — maybe even doing the full Wesley Snipes and abolishing it altogether. We will raise our state and local taxes accordingly to pay for anything we might need or want. We ask nothing more from you and your federal government. Nothing for infrastructure, or housing, or the care of the poor and sick — not that you gave us much, anyway. All we want is our money, and you can keep yours, dollar for dollar."
That is the best news I've heard from liberals in my life — and I do not say that lightly. I mean it. The creation of the federal income tax required a Constitutional amendment, and the amendment was required for a reason. Our Founding Fathers wanted the federal government to have no financial ability to impose its will on the states, even if it wanted to do so, and they created a system in which state governments, whose elected officials are much more responsive to local concerns, would be primarily responsible for raising revenue and paying for programs their voters wanted, or failing to pay for programs their voters didn't.
I'm not opposed to keeping a federal income tax — the Founding Fathers also opposed standing armies, but Pearl Harbor and World War II taught us that the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were not wide enough to isolate us from foreign wars, and in an era of intercontinental ballistic missiles, we simply **HAVE** to have a strong military, and that probably requires a federal income tax.
But Kevin Baker's New Republic article is right. Let liberals raise their state and local taxes and provide all the social programs they want. Maybe let larger liberal states like California work with smaller states to provide programs that cross state lines. Let them experiment all they want, while we in conservative states experiment with the benefits of low taxes and letting businesses and individuals use their own money to provide what their customers want and what individual families want for themselves.
Those are two totally different models of how to provide services to the public. One model has been used for half a century by Europe, and if liberals want that model, they are completely free to follow it at the state level.
Let San Francisco be San Francisco. That's fine with me. But let red states be red states in return.
How did we get to this point?
It's true that Democrats controlled the White House for eight years, but their main achievement at the national level has been to wreck the Democratic Party at the state and local level.
Democrats now hold fewer seats in Congress and in state legislatures than they have had at any time since the 1920s. While predicting the future is a fool's errand — I've spent the last few months reading lots of glowing Democratic articles from 2009 about how great things were going before the 2010 Republican backlash threw many Democrats out of office — demographics do not favor the Democrats in the 2018 senatorial races. It is very likely the Republican majority in the Senate will greatly increase in the next election, possibly even to the key threshold of 60 votes which will allow Republicans to break Democratic filibusters, to totally dismantle Obamacare, and to appoint any Supreme Court Justice we want.
Frankly, the 2018 elections are the Republicans' race to lose. President Donald J. Trump may make major mistakes; the House and Senate may grind to a halt and be unable to pass anything substantive, leading to a Democratic rebound. However, the electoral map makes it all but certain that Republicans will not only retain control of both houses of Congress next year, but also use their leverage to force Democrats in conservative states — including Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri — to cast votes which the liberal wing of their party won't like.
The Democrats have become a regional party, controlling the Left Coast, the Northeast, and some major urban enclaves. But where they do control, they control decisively. California has a Democratic supermajority in which Republicans are all but irrelevant and can be outvoted at will in the legislature.
We don't need to listen to Fox News to know that. Read this in the New Republic:
"Shocking as your electoral victory felt to us in Blue America, we should have seen it coming. To paraphrase Virgil 'the Turk' Sollozzo from The Godfather, the Democrats, with all due respect, had been slipping. Twenty years ago, could any organization as stone-cold crazy as the Tea Party have gotten to them? The staggering defeats that Democrats sustained, at every level of government, in the midterm elections of 1994, 2010, and 2014 have now reduced them to the largely impotent, makeshift, regional party they were from the Civil War all the way to the Great Depression. That string of unrelenting electoral catastrophes should have tipped us off that there was something deeply, alarmingly wrong at the core of the party. Losses of that magnitude, over that period of time, are like a bright red dashboard light you’ve never noticed before that suddenly starts flashing insistently. Accompanied by a shrill beeping sound. And a voice repeating, 'Warning, warning!' And a plume of smoke pouring from under your hood. Yet the party elites drove blithely on, chatting on their cell phones about their demographic advantages and the imminent demise of the Republican Party, until the air bags had deployed, the steering wheel had come off in their hands, and the rims of their tireless wheels were grinding sparks off the curbside. At this point, there’s no retooling this burnt-out Chevy Cruze into a vehicle still capable of going coast-to-coast."
The reference to the Democrats no longer being a coast-to-coast party is right. Republicans control "red states" by large majorities and sometimes even supermajorities. We can pretty much do whatever we want in states like Missouri and Oklahoma, let alone places like Texas which have the economic power to go their own way much like California if they choose to do so.
As conservatives, let's pay close attention to articles like this in the New Republic. At least some Democrats have given up on trying to impose their will on America via top-down power politics from Washington. That's a good thing.
Let them run their states the way they want while we run ours the way we want. Let them even have a #CalExit via the Yes California #Calexit Campaign if they wish.
Federalism works if it's allowed to work. Since the 1930s, it's been the Democrats destroying federalism. Now that they've figured out what it's like to be in the minority, let's not try to impose top-down penalties from Washington, but rather let liberals be liberals, and if their voters like liberalism, that's fine. That's the way America is supposed to work.
In the meantime, there are lots of red states with lots of wide open land available for business owners from liberal states to relocate when they decide they like liberal social programs less than they like low taxes in red states.
I think I know how that will work out long term, but the liberals think they know, too. And that's fine.
In a free republic voters, given enough time, will get the kind of government they want — or the kind they deserve.
Here’s the New Republic article: https://newrepublic.com/article/140948/bluexit-blue-states-exit-trump-red-america
Here’s Pat Buchanan’s article: https://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2017/02/24/is-secession-a-solution-to-cultural-war-n2289942
And here’s an interesting article in the liberal Nation arguing that the New Republic liberal author is wrong: https://www.thenation.com/article/blue-state-secession-is-dumb-and-cruel/
The Democrats are lying as usual.
The left will use “States rights” to get what they want and then ignore them when they return to power on the National level. U.S. leftists are Fascists. Everything is expendable (human lives, inalienable rights, God) when it comes to their acquisition of power.
Bullshit! Conservatives should be wary of anything a Liberal does, or “discovers”. In anything a Liberal does, or discovers”, there is always a hook in it for Conservatives.
I hope no FReepers get sucked into this absurdity. The LEFT is very much for states rights. It is the Constitution that says rights come from GOD/natural law and only belong to individual humans.
Governments have Powers. Governments have the power to coerce. Governments have that power because individuals allow their rights to be abridged.
That governments have rights is very much a leftist, big government idea. We fought a civil war over this concept
One side said government had the power to enforce the slavery of the individual and defined that as a right of government. The other side, the Constitutional side, said government does not have any rights and certainly does not have the right, and should not have the power, to coerce slavery on anyone.
The right of government to coerce is very much a leftist, big government concept.
When the Progs next get in power, they won’t forget why they lost.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.