Someone has pointed somewhere in these threads to a study or book that suggests that self-government, whether democratic or representative, constitutionally-constrained democracy or what have you, works better in smaller polities like the Greeks believed.
That's why I think some people have always advanced the concept of subsidiarity, to keep the politics local -- and never mind NOW's sloganeering about "think locally, act globally".
Madison wasn't arguing for size per se, but for a federal system that diffuses intense local conflicts over a larger and more heterogenous area. The separation of powers would make it harder for local disputes to bulk so large on the national scene or for national conflicts to disrupt local politics.
I would disagree with him. One of the side effects of Liberals' learning to strap around uncongenial state governments (a lesson Wm. F. Buckley dated, in IIRC The Governor Listeth, to a 1950's New York City teachers' strike: the City and State said No; but the Liberal congressional delegation said Yes, and delivered) has been to clog Congressional committees and bureaucratic inbaskets in D.C. with the minutiae of local issues. Perfect example: the provision in ISTEA (the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency [?] Act), which mandates that federal highway maintenance and construction monies shall be cut off for any State whose cities accept ISTEA monies and then fail to institute networks of bicycle lanes! I'm not kidding! This is a federal law!
The theory is supplied by a 1972 book on urban politics, from the age of Liberalism's post-Nixonian apogee, The New Urban Politics, ed. E. M. Fox. In an included essay, "The Mayors versus The Cities", by James Q. Wilson, we read, after a discussion documenting the reliable tendency of big-city mayors, even under strong political challenge, or even (in the case of Sam Yorty of L.A.) victorious support, from the Right, to behave very consistently as Liberals:
I would suggest that there is a general, structural reason for the behavior of many big-city mayors, a reason that, if correct, implies the arrival of a new era in city politics, one unlike either the era of the political machine or that of......reform. For many mayors today...., their audience is increasingly different from their constituency. By "audience" I mean those persons whose favorable attitudes and responses the mayor is most interested in, those persons from whom he receives his most welcome applause and his most needed resources and opportunities. By "constituency" I mean those people who can vote.......
At one time, audience and constituency were very nearly the same thing......With the decline of the urban political party and with the decline in the vitality and money resources of the central city.......the separation between audience and constituency began......he campaigned through the help of -- and in part with the intention of influencing -- businessmen, planners, and federal agencies.
In the 1960's....The model cities program, the war on poverty, most civil rights bills, the aid of education programs, and the various pilot projects of both the government and private foundations were largely devised, promoted, and staffed by groups who were becoming the mayor's audience, though they were not among his constituents.
In other words, the cities fell, in the 1960's, under the influence of a Faction committed to promoting Liberalism with Other People's Money in cities whose politicians they captured because the cities needed the money -- and so the "owner" of the marginal dollar, the Liberal apparatchik, became the preferred customer for city government, and the constituents got to take a number. To continue,
This audience consists principally of various federal agencies, especially those that give grants directly to cities; the large foundations, and in particular the Ford Foundation, that can favor the mayor with grants, advice, and future prospects; the mass media, or at least that part of the media -- national news magazines and network television -- that can give the mayor access to the suburbs, the state, and the nation as a whole; and the affluent (and often liberal) suburban voters who will pass on the mayor's fitness for higher office.
The last statement is a clunker, since suburbanites have voted fairly conservatively since at least the riots of 1965-66, and it would be fairer to say that the liberal voting component comes more from block-voting urban blacks and (now) Hispanics, plus other urban Gorebot liberals -- lifestyle liberals, academics and academic wannabes, "urban animals" ("Yuffies"/"young urban failures"), and so on.
But the idea of audience and constituency is intriguing. It spells doom for Southern nationalists, who think they will be the chief constituents of their elected officials. But their audience will be elsewhere. This is what happened in Ireland and other countries, and what is bound to happen in Eastern Europe. The religious, salt of the earth peasantry is an important constitency, but the audience of the politicians is among national and global elites. So it is here and now, and so it would be after independence. The New South, the country club elites hold the power now, and barring a catastrophe will rule after independence. Only they would be liberated from the Northeast-South polarity, which strengthens conservative ideas, to pursue the liberal capitalism that's been their chief motivation for some time.
But another idea that has made itself known is that such elites will precisely be the the ones to break away, with Seattle, San Francisco, Portland and other metropoli severing their ties with lesser mortals to form an ecotopia. Robert Kaplan's Atlantic articles and books outline such a thesis, though as with everything he writes there's plenty of room for scepticism.
Will city states or smaller regional states be freer than nation states? Perhaps in some ways, but I don't know about across the board. Ecotopia would grant you wide lifestyle privileges but come down hard on smokers and non-recyclers. Confederatopia -- if it does free itself from the country club elites -- might provide great freedom from government social programs, but be quite unpleasant for dissenters to live in.
One thing I do notice is that we are in the middle of a great libertarian tide. People naturally assume that changes will promote further libertarianism. But that's not a certainty. City-states in the 30s or 40s, 60s or 70s would have been far more socialistic. What regional states would do about turbocapitalism or Walmart capitalism is not easy to forsee.
FWIW, If America is being Mexicanized, the South won't escape the phenomenon. The new model of ethnicity, for better or worse, is neither Northern nor Southern but Western, and you'll see it in Arkansas and Georgia, Iowa and Kansas, as well as in big cities.