The New Federalism: A Critique

Every mode of political thought has its season, however brief or parochial. This is the season for "small is better" in government. A new "federalism" has been proclaimed. It is an approach to the workings of the United States that aims to place state and local governments at the center of administrative focus. Conservative and/or grassroots proponents of this approach hope to supplant the leviathan federal bureaucracy that has permeated American life since the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's subsequent "New Deal" response. Federalist restructuring will push ever more responsibility upon the state and local governments in which advocates place so much faith. This paper will survey some of the organizational roots from which this approach has evolved and the discontents from which it has devolved in past years - and, in so doing, examine a number of the increased responsibilities that have been falling upon state and local communities in recent decades.

Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all community aims at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.

"Community," as Aristotle noted in the first paragraph of his Politics, is the foundation of all social org

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e and community government. As western expansion increased the states to fifty, local custom dictated the shape of government below the federal level - influenced by immigration patterns, geography and social movements. As before in the colonial era, community-based government in the next 150 years was often far more progressive than its centralized, federal counterpart. The territory of Wyoming gave women the right to vote in 1869, years before becoming a state - and five decades before the nation as a whole caught up. In 1880 environmental protection laws were passed in Indiana even while the federal government was promoting strip-mining and forest-denuding policies in the western territories. As seems to be the regular case, community-based progressivism was founded upon pragmatism: local laws generally represented practical solutions to specific problems. There were two other major factors influencing community-based government: special interests and populism. Beginning with the special interest of tobacco and cotton growers in the Southern states, special interest influence on community government has tended to reflect the conservative, narrow-focus side of local and state government. Special interest influence gene

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