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I think you are right that size alone doesn't produce the kind of freedom Madison sought. There is, as you've said, the example of the Soviet Union, and of other megastates as well. On the other side, many of the city states of the Middle Ages provided freedom, opportunity, and toleration, within the bounds set by the dominant merchants, though the Italian city states were beset by all the dangers of faction, that Madison warned against.

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. The late 20th century system didn't reflect this perception, but neither did the Articles of Confederation.

As between unionists and secessionists, it's not clear to me that the secessionists were closer to the Madisonian balance than the unionists. I'd say the reverse was true. Of course if you had no federal government, you wouldn't have had such an imbalance of federal power in the next century, but we make our choices on present conditions. We may look generations into the future, but we can't anticipate all contingencies and shouldn't throw away something that works because of what it might become if our decendents don't have the virtues we do.

This is a living debate, since there are those even now, who see the US breaking up along regional lines. Part of the dispute here is about whether a divided or fragmented America would be more like those peaceful and prosperous Northern European city states or more like the contentious and tumultuous Italian city-states. What would happen now is anyone's guess, but the talk of absolute state sovereignty, distrust of industry, reliance on single crop agriculture, racial questions and slavery makes me expect that the Southern states of 1860 would have been in the unfortunate category had they truly tried to go it alone. You may dislike the chicanery and economic empire building of the Gilded Age, but they did direct the energies of the ambitious away from politics towards technology and business. Where this path isn't open, the ambitious young turn towards coups and political mischief. It's also possible that the Confederate government would have tried to keep the states in line and the same conflicts would have developed as we have known since the Civil War, as the new national elites sought to use the government for their own projects.

Not sure about ancient history, but the empires of the Hellenistic period allowed Greeks, Jews and others to move throughout the world, so there must have been some openness to other cultures. The opportunity for different peoples in pagan empires to just add each others gods to their own must have helped as well. As you note, such empires could be hard on those who weren't polytheists.

On the other side, many of the city states of the Middle Ages provided freedom, opportunity, and toleration, within the bounds set by the dominant merchants, though the Italian city states were beset by all the dangers of faction, that Madison warned against.

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".

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.