The overwhelming victory of Bill DeBlasio in NYC’s mayoral race is being hailed (or decried, depending on your political beliefs) as the ushering in of a new era of liberalism in NY City. DeBlasio has already indicated some of what he intends to do, including taxing the rich, demanding that charter schools pay rent, putting the NYPD under greater civilian oversight, ending stop-and-frisk, and so forth. Moreso, he has unapologetically embraced liberalism, and taken steps (in his support for Melissa Mark-Vivitero for City Council Speaker, for one) to establish left-liberalism as the basis of NY City’s governance for at least the next 4 years. He has done so not only because he can but because he considers his election as a mandate. I shan’t go into the validity of this presumed mandate here (look up voter turnout if you wish to), but rather I’ll address a broader question that’s raised.
Liberals have had plenty of success establishing their ideologies and moving government at the federal level in their direction over the last century. Yet, there are constant complaints about how the “red state” folks obstruct and clash with them at every turn. Read some blogs or message boards and you will certainly witness numerous laments about how things would be so much better if the right wing would just let the liberals in charge have a free hand. It’s a bit amusing, from a detached perspective, to see so many complaints from those who have had so much success actualizing their agenda, and while I’m very tempted to suggest that their complaints are rooted in the failure of that agenda (it ain’t working, but they can’t admit it’s fatally flawed, so they rationalize the failure by blaming those who told them it wouldn’t work and fought them along the way) I shall instead suggest that if they dislike opposition, they have a simple means of avoiding it.
There are numerous states and cities that are “all-in” liberal. D.C., San Francisco, New York, Boston, Detroit and a host of other cities, and states like New York, California, Hawaii, Michigan, Oregon, Massachusetts, et al are fully in the hands of the Left. Yes, New York just spent 12 years under a “Republican/Independent” Mayor Bloomberg, but if measured by a less localized yardstick, Bloomberg and his legacy certainly skew left in many ways. So, if liberals/progressives have had so much success establishing themselves in a number of states and cities, why, then, struggle with policy at the federal level? Why work to accrue power at the top, instead of focusing their efforts in the places they operate without resistance? Why not embrace “federalism” in its modern form?
Free of red-state, conservative, tea party and liberty movement opposition, progressives could march forward with their agenda unimpeded. If laws at the federal level interfere, an embrace of federalism could be the basis for side-stepping that interference. I’m sure the red states and conservative cities would enjoy and embrace having the reciprocal effect and outcome – less progressivism in their home turf. And if progressivism is truly the path to a better future and a better nation, then a federalist approach would validate all the liberal ideas and policies that the Left advocates. If conservatism and small-government politics are truly heartless and a scourge, then federalism will expose them as such. People, voting with their feet and moving vans, would concentrate where their beliefs are shared.
So, why isn’t the Left embracing federalism? Why aren’t liberals simply telling the deep-red states “you do your thing, we’ll do ours?” There’s a common complaint that the red states receive more from the government than they contribute. Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter – it’s a firmly-held belief among progressives. If libs went federalist, they could address that complaint, and in doing so, could seek to demonstrate that the Right is stupid and illogical and the Right’s ideas don’t work. There are so many reasons for the Left to draw in unto themselves that we might wonder it hasn’t happened yet.
A couple small problems, of course. States can’t print money, so deficit spending would have to be funded with debt. I don’t think that’s a high-level concern, though – if they believe deficit spending brings prosperity, they’re not going to worry about borrowing. There’s also the question of whether the Right would leap into a power vacuum at the federal level and impose its will on the Left. This flies in the face of the Right’s oft-stated embrace of smaller government. Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. What matters is what the Left believes, and here’s the crux of the answer to the broader question. People tend to project in others behaviors they themselves default to. Liberals may find it hard to believe that others say they want to be left alone, because they cannot fathom a human nature that doesn’t want to meddle in the affairs of others. Thus, we might conclude that the notion of federalism is antithetical to liberal psyche. Letting some people and states operate free of outside interference is akin to letting market forces work without regulation, supervision and control, and I dare you to find me a modern liberal who is comfortable with that idea.
It is amusing to consider that the people who have assumed the moniker “liberal,” a term that in the classical sense centers around securing the liberty of individuals to act as they wish and that involves establishing government in a limited fashion to protect individual liberty, have become so antithetical to individual liberty. Even when the notion of classical liberalism bifurcated into economic liberalism (embraced by conservatives) and social liberalism (embraced by liberals), the Left held to the belief that government should be “kept out of the bedroom.” That last notion has been abandoned in so many ways by modern liberals that non-interference in others’ lives could be considered a concept utterly alien to today’s Left.
Thus, we have our answer as to why liberals haven’t embraced federalism, why they haven’t simply told the Red states “you do your thing, we’ll do ours.” They are incapable of leaving other people alone. Given that one of the most fundamental precepts of individual liberty is the right to be left alone, given that that precept is one of the foundations of the nation (“don’t tread on me,” anyone?), it becomes sadly apparent that the modern Left is who this nation was designed to protect its citizens from.
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