This article was in the NYT Magazine yesterday, and I thought it was quite interesting:

A States' Rights Left?
By JIM HOLT

Published: November 21, 2004


Correction Appended

When George W. Bush was re-elected, people in some of the bluer states were so angry and sad that they talked of moving to Canada or seceding from the Union. How else, they felt, could they escape the intensifying red-state control of Washington? But there is a less drastic survival strategy available to liberals in the coastal and Great Lakes states, one that involves neither emigration nor civil war. It is based on the venerable doctrine of states' rights. And the oddity is that President Bush himself is determined to give the blue states a rather generous gift to help it succeed.

The phrase ''states' rights'' has a nasty ring to it for liberals, given its historical associations. During the civil rights era, it was the proud slogan of Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond and George C. Wallace, who fought tooth and nail against desegregation. A century earlier, it was invoked by the slave states of the Confederacy to justify their secession from the Union.

But states' rights has not always been the intellectual property of reactionaries. During the War of 1812, it was a rallying cry for antiwar forces. In the winter of 1814 and 1815, representatives from New England states came together at the Hartford Convention to express their hostility to the federal government and ''Mr. Madison's War.''

So the doctrine of states' rights has had a varied career. But why resurrect it today? The reason is simple. There are big differences among the states, as the last election showed -- differences in their understanding of tolerance, in their attitude toward the role of religion in public life, in the value they place on education, conservation and scientific research. The more sovereignty each state has, the better it can pursue policies that are appropriate to the needs and preferences of its people.

Marriage affords a vivid example. In some states it is evidently more imperiled than in others. The Bible Belt states, in particular, have a shockingly high divorce rate, around 50 percent above the national average. Given such marital instability, these states are anxious to defend the institution of heterosexual matrimony, which may explain their hostility to gay marriage. The state of Massachusetts, by contrast, has the lowest divorce rate in the nation. So its people -- or at least its liberal judges -- perhaps feel more comfortable allowing some progressive experimentation. It will be interesting to see how this experiment plays out, assuming the Bush administration does not succeed in choking off the right of a state to recognize same-sex marriages by getting the Federal Marriage Amendment enacted.

Another matter on which states differ is crime and punishment. Here, too, they have considerable autonomy. Since the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that the death penalty was constitutionally permissible, most states have chosen to reinstate it. As a group, however, the 12 states that reject capital punishment have a murder rate that is decidedly lower than those that embrace it.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But there are symbolic advantages to living in a state without the death penalty. A few years ago, when I happened to be a resident of Maine, I traveled to Paris. There, in the course of conversations with Parisians, I was reminded that capital punishment, which the French abolished in 1981, was now a distinctively American form of barbarity. ''I'm from Maine,'' I would always reply, beaming a bit. ''We outlawed the death penalty in 1887!'' (I did not mention that Maine had also outlawed drinking a few decades earlier.)

One of the most striking differences among states is in their levels of wealth. Liberals tend to live in more economically productive states than conservatives. The top five states in per capita personal income (Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland and New York) all went to Kerry; the bottom five (Utah, New Mexico, West Virginia, Arkansas and Mississippi) all went to Bush. Since the blue states are generally richer than the red states, they must bear a greater portion of the federal tax burden. Most of them pay more to Washington than they receive, whereas most of the red states receive more than they pay. Some liberals in blue states must wonder exactly what they get in return for subsidizing the heartlanders, who are said to resent them.

Here is where President Bush is their friend. According to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, as much as two-thirds of the benefits from the income tax cuts he pushed through in his first term go to taxpayers making more than $100,000 a year. These well-off Americans tend to be concentrated around New York City, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco and other liberal enclaves. By contrast, relatively few of the benefits from the Bush tax cuts go to the Southern and Prairie states, where low-income working families with children are more the norm. At present, the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire by 2010. If the president succeeds in making them permanent, as he has vowed to do, it will mean lasting relief for the blue states. The money they had been sending to the red states could then be spent locally, according to their own liberal values -- say, on public schools (where they already spend more per pupil than the red states) or stem-cell research.

The more conservatives succeed in reducing the size and scope of the federal government, the more fiscal freedom the blue states will have to pursue their own idea of a just society. There are already signs that this is happening. Senators like Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, Jon Corzine of New Jersey and Charles E. Schumer of New York are rumored to be contemplating gubernatorial runs in their respective states, convinced that there is now more to do in the governor's mansion than on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, blue-state liberals should stop despairing and start thinking locally. Instead of saying, ''The United States is. . . . '' try saying, ''The United States are. . . . '' See? You feel better already.

Correction: Nov. 21, 2004, Sunday

An essay on Page 27 of The Times Magazine today about states' rights as a potential issue for the Democrats includes an outdated reference to the possibility that Senator Charles E. Schumer would run for the governorship of New York. On Monday, after the magazine had gone to press, Senator Schumer announced that he had no plans to run.

Nice paradoxial article--thanks for sharing.

Viva la states rights!
Good stuff, thanks.

Me likey.

I liked the way the author subtly included all those staistics we've been throwing around for the past few weeks about divorce rates and who pays for whom with federal tax dollars, and made it so that you feel not angry or resentful of the red states, but sad for their loss.

--PunkDavid (cross-posting article to all my friends)

I'm glad you liked the article. I just think it's strange that this administration is supposed to be "conservative," yet I don't think you could call our federal government "small." I also think it's strange that I'm interested in states' rights, yet been called quite liberal. Paradoxial indeed!

Seriously though, what are the advantages of having such a wide-spread, large federal government?

What are the disadvantages of having more states' rights?

Could we all be more happy with a smaller federal government and larger local governments?

This goes to show you how meaningless the terms "conservative", "liberal", and other pigeonhole descriptors are.



I wish I could even play devil's advocate for you, but I can't.

I want as small of a federal gov't as possible.

That's exactly what I thought.

Let the revolution begin!