A story spread that the town and University of Ave Maria in Florida would be governed in accordance to Roman Catholic principles. The founders, Paul Marinelli, CEO of Barron Collier Companies, and Thomas Monaghan, the former owner of Domino’s Pizza, have since gone on to correct the misconception. “Although the adjoining university is a Catholic institution, the town will be open to all,” they said in a press release. “Ave Maria will fully abide by the United States and State of Florida constitutions.”(Source: Associated Press, Yahoo!Finance)

     The Free State Project is a libertarian initiative to move twenty thousand activists to New Hampshire where they will “exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty, and property.” (Source: www.freestateproject.org)

     From nineteenth century utopian experiments such as Josiah Warren’s individualist anarchist community of Modern Times, to the Amish today, U.S. history is stuffed to the brim with people setting off to carve their own little niche, to live their lives according to their own ideals. Yet the United States as a whole has endured. So it’s probably too early to proclaim a pending civil war or a breakup of the union when reading the above news items.

     But even if we’re not witnessing the balkanizing of the United States, it seems that the fundamental tension between freedom and governance, one rooted in history, is still at work. Perhaps it’s even more than just “at work,” but starting to simmer in an increasingly polarized political climate — a climate that arguably results from the collision between an opportunistic corporate media and an uncritical population.

     In other words, the federalist system is under strain.

 

 

     In theory, federalism looks nice. To put it loosely, discrete groups — cities — run their own affairs. They voluntarily band together (as counties and states) where they have common interests. The federal government, of course, is intended to oversee areas of interest common to all states.

     In practice, things are messier. The obvious example is when states get into a power struggle with the federal government. But, as San Francisco shows, there can be problems within states themselves. In essence, gun owners and the NRA are trying to use the state to reverse the will of San Francisco’s voters. It may very well be that the voters of San Francisco were philosophically mistaken in voting for the handgun ban. But it’s not the state’s business. It’s not the business of people who don’t live in San Francisco precisely because they don’t live in San Francisco. Quite simply, a ban that applies within the city limits is not an issue of common interest with other Californian cities.

     The NRA is simply trying to use a “higher authority” to override a local, democratically achieved decision that they don’t approve of.  Here we see the crack in the federal system as different governmental jurisdictions within a federalist hierarchy pit themselves against each other. Self-determination gets whipped in the process.

     In a similar vein, South Dakota and other states are reacting against what could be described as the federal government imposing a particular ideology (Roe v. Wade).

  

 
     Let’s backtrack for a moment. Ideally, if we started with the principle that all should be free to live their lives as they see fit, provided they don’t interfere with that right in others, we could make the case that most of the authority invested in state and federal governments should be decentralized to cities or small regions. Assuming that people have the freedom to move wherever they want and join whatever community suits them, why not have Roman Catholic towns, atheist towns, towns with handgun bans and towns better described as arsenals? There is the implicit assumption that people within the country — any country — are legally unified in terms of values and beliefs. Yet this doesn’t seem to be the case.  Why accept a system that imposes uniformity and homogeneity where there is none?

     The issue gets tricky when highly contentious ethical issues are involved. The ethics of abortion, viewed from either side, by their very nature make it difficult to simply live and let live. For the pro-life lobby, innocent lives are at stake. Could they really be content living in their own abortion-less state while other states allow it? Similarly, women’s health, autonomy, and quality of life are at stake for the pro-choice side. Is it possible to leave innocent women at the mercy of states that would deny them control over their own bodies?

     The ethical nature of abortion means that the law is seen as a vital remedy for evil. It‚s a question of social justice.  Like the NRA in San Francisco, both sides are willing to use the different levels of a federalist hierarchy against each other to enact the laws they want. 

     To a certain extent, this derives from the notion that different levels of governments, with power divided between them, can serve as checks and balances. But I suspect that this actually creates a conflict within a federalist system. The expectation that top-tiers in the system police the lower-tiers when they misbehave doesn’t quite mesh with the expectation that the top-tiers embody the interests of the lower tiers. Bottoms-up and top-down authority simply cannot co-exist successfully. Hence, all these pushes for more autonomy.