These days, after twelve years' more experience, I would name mostly different solutions than the ones that seemed plausible to me then. One area where I still think the solutions look similar is the problem posed by the Federal judiciary, and its penchant for imposing one-sized-fits-all solutions on a divided America. That's where so much of the tension is coming from. If we could fix that, we could live together in peace on most issues.
Consider a point Gringo made in the comments below, on the issue of Lexington, VA. I pointed out that Lexington is a town with a particularly unwelcoming structure for 'woke' politics. He responded:
Lexington city voted ~2:1 for Hillary, while Rockridge County voted ~2:1 for Trump. Which gives me the impression the restaurant won't lose much business.If that's true, then even in the reddest parts of America many cities are blue. And that seems right, because the same holds for towns like Birmingham, Alabama; or Athens, Georgia.
There are a few issues, like immigration, where ending one-size-fits-all can't solve our problems. Yet there are very many issues where a solution that allowed rural areas to have different laws from urban ones would greatly reduce the tensions facing the nation.
Of course, that requires a change to the Constitution, which requires a supermajority of states to go along with it. It's a hard pull to get there in a nation so divided and whose divisions are so contemptuous of each other.
6 comments:
With illegal immigration, education, poverty, and crime, the first thing is not to think in terms of a solution, but to try and manage an ongoing problem. We won't "solve" any of them, and conservatives fall into that trap too, thinking that a couple of good laws, a wall, plus some determination, and everything will be good in the garden again. It won't. But we can improve what we've got.
You are right that not everything can be effectively addressed at the local level. A few things can.
I will add than many people do not want to "reduce the tensions facing our nation." They want a fight. This does not divide left-right as neatly as argument would claim.
If the Constitution were easily changed, it would be useless to all of us, not just to the Progressive-Democrats.
Eric Hines
Years ago I got into a discussion at (IIRC) Reclusive Leftist in which I suggested giving the States more power over policy (e.g., abortion, education, health care) as a way to reduce outrage and animosity on a national level. The Leftist response was to ask why people in Red States should be left to languish, deprived of Blue policies. In other words, for some on the Left, the goal isn’t letting people choose their own course: the goal is making sure everyone everywhere lives under the “correct” laws - for their own good, of course.
As for more localized decision-making (counties, cities), I live in Alabama. It is somewhere between funny and tragic that, in a State which presumably thinks States’ Rights are the cat’s pajamas, the State government grants very little freedom to counties and cities.
None of this is about principles (process); it’s about who has the power (outcomes). The State of Alabama wants the power - which means it wants to deny that power to the Federal government *and* to local governments within Alabama. The Federal government wants the power - which means denying it to States. People (or perhaps just the political parties) seem to want power to reside wherever it’s most likely to give them the outcome they want. Hence the recent Democratic Party enthusiasm for States’ Rights when it comes to marijuana and illegal immigrants and the ongoing Republican Party enthusiasm for selling health insurance across State lines.
I think it will take a cultural/social sea change to fix what's wrong. Which is kind of tautological, I guess: if we had that sea change, we could make the fixes you talk about in your 2006 post but perhaps we wouldn't need to. Structural changes can only do so much if the citizenry is adrift.
(One issue you don’t talk about in your 2006 post is the problem of the Legislature granting law-making power to the Executive by passing broad-brush legislation. I’d like to see that change. If Congress had to actually spell out, in detail, how laws would work, I hope they’d write fewer, shorter, and simpler ones.)
I wrote back then, and it's kinda nice plus inconvenient that the comments were wiped, that cities need to be separated out as city-states.
My instinct is always for smaller and smaller local self-determination. What I run up against is two cold realities: (1) some problems respond well only to larger, coordinated efforts, and (2) some helpless people have to be protected against majorities. Both of these needs are inimical to small strictly local self-determination. I try to resolve the conflict by opting for as much self-determination as I possibly can, even if that means far less than perfect solutions.
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