The reciprocal relationship between social welfare policy and the political economy of states has never been so apparent as this election season of 1994. In a virtual "sea change" of Republican Party victories, political strategists from both sides of the aisle have come to realize that they must confront a very distinct evolution of the electorate's social ideology. A key element of that change is the "new federalism" endorsed by the conservative-leaning electorate. "Federalism" is the new term for what was previously labelled "states' rights." Previously labelled - and libelled. States' rights were what the Confederacy stood for when it seceded from the Union prior to the Civil War. States' rights were what Southern governors George Wallace and Lester Maddox invoked as their justification for resisting federal civil rights legislation enacted in the 1960s. States' rights is that grey area in the U.S. Constitution where Messrs. Hamilton and Madison, after granting the lion's share of governing power to the federal government, threw a bone of compromise to the individual states by deliberating keeping certain areas of future development undefined.
Although states rights, or federalism, was overwhelmed by Northern victory in the Civil War, it was not obliterated. The Reconstruction legislation of the Radical Republicans was punitive to the South, but not to the cause of states' rights per se. The Republican governors and state legislatures that had swept into power on the wave of anti-Democrat sentiment that had overwhelmed the North during the Civil War did not extend to denying themselves rights they demanded and enjoyed; they would not let their Washington representatives cut too deeply into their base of power. It was a Republican president, though, who presided over the first 20th Century major attacks on states' rights: Theodore Roosevelt. "Old Rough and Ready" believed that the federal government should lead the as...