Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has a good post on how proponents of federalism have been pretty selective in their championing of the principle. He’s riffing on a descendant of Confederates who proclaimed his pride in the ideals of the Confederacy, “beyond the darkness of slavery,” in particular federalism.
Lemieux takes a look back and finds that erstwhile Confederates tend not to be very consistent in their support of “states rights”
[U]ntil demographics shifted in favor of the free states most Southerners were advocates of strong federal power — John Calhoun started as a nationalist, Jefferson may have been tortured by the Louisiana Purchase but most of his supporters weren’t (and even he went ahead with it), and so on. The relevant principle the slaveholding states adhered to is straightforward: the protection of human bondage.
When the federal government advanced the interests of slaveholders, they advocated strong federal powers; when the federal government didn’t advance those interests, all of a sudden the rights of the states were paramount.
And, of course, has been consistent from Reconstruction onward as well. Pro-apartheid Southerners who claimed that Brown v. Board was an outrageous arrogation of federal power generally didn’t object to the Tennessee Valley Authority, constitutionally dubious federal persecution of communists, federal spending programs as long as most of the benefits went to white people, etc. Almost everybody who purports to want abortion “sent back to the states” favors every federal abortion regulation to come down the pike. And so on. “Federalism” has never been an especially important independent factor in American politics; much more commonly, it’s a way of advancing substantive claims you’d rather not defend on the merits.
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