US 17th Amendment and Plebeian Democracy?

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Consult the U.S. Constitution to see which powers the State governments have, which powers the Central government has and which rights the People retain.

ruveyn

States rights unfortunately have been tarnished by attempts at the state level to keep blacks and other minorities second class citizens. It was the federal government that had championed the civil rights of ethnic minorities against the state governments.
Thankfully in recent times, gay rights have made the greatest strides at the state level, so maybe there's hope for the states to champion the rights of all their citizens, no matter how unpopular.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

That strikes me as a ridiculous notion in a federation with defined areas of jurisdiction. Think about it. If the federal government and the several states each exist in mutually exclusive jurisdictions, then how is it possible for a state government to act to protect the civil liberties of a citizen against the federal government? Or vice-versa?

To my mind, checks and balances is the tripod of legislative, executive and judicial branches acting within a given government, not governments acting in mutually exclusive spheres.

American Federalism was an attempt to forge a working republic with multiple sovereign states attending to their local concerns and a centrel government tasked with defense of the whole nation and relations with foreign nations. It was a nice idea, but if fizzled out after the Civil War. The United States is noe UniStat with the various "States" functioning as departments, similar to France. The 17th amendment which made the Senate popularly elected took the State governments out of the loop entirely. Prior to that the Senators were appointed by the legislatures of the several States and represented the -States- as opposed to the people of the -States-.

The U.S. no longer has a Federal or Federate government. It has a National Government.

ruveyn

But even if this is so, why is that a bad thing?

If the notion of state sovereignty was a contributing factor in the Civil War, one must question whether state sovereignty is all it's cracked up to be. And even in more modern, less bellicose times, surely the experience of the European Union would suggest to the observer that a federation of sovereign states is an exercise in search of a means to fail.

In the US, we place a lot of value on individualism... maybe you could even call it individual sovereignty. As power moves away from the individual and more into the group as a whole, we become less defined as individuals and more as miniscule members of the group. This may not be bad from an outside perspective, but it's bad from the perspective of the individualism that this country was built upon.

I don't think it's fair to question the value of a principle of the losing side of a war simply because they lost. I do like your second point, though. The EU is definitely not a shining example. Maybe it would be different if the federation came into existence around the same time as the states themselves. Maybe not.

But surely the siren call of states rights is just as inimical to individualism as a strong central government. You're simply swapping one power centre for another. A state government is just as capable of trampling on the rights of its citizens as a central government--indeed, I would suggest that they are much more effective at it, because they are closer to their citizens.



I don't question the value because the South lost the war. I question the value because it was a causus belli. I question the value because it was used as a means to defend the indefensible.

Is there any example of a well functioning federation that lacks a strong central government? The only possible examples that I can think of are Belgium and Switzerland.

In the case of Belgium, it seems to me that any weakness in the federal government is due primarily to the political impact of Belgium's linguistic duality, rather than any constitutional favouritism towards the linguistic communities. As for Switzerland, it may be a unique example of a decentralized federation--but so long as banking and monetary policy still sit with the federal institutions, can this truly be so?

With a federation of states where we have the freedom to move between them, it's easy to leave a state with policies that you don't like and move to one that has policies that you do like. It's somewhat like this now.

For example, I live in Idaho, which is pretty damned conservative and not very gay-friendly. Even though I'm not gay, I think it's BS for people to tell other people who they can love and "marry". If it was important enough to me, I could move to California where it's much more gay-friendly. On the flipside, I spend a lot of time around firearms and doing combat training both personally and through my business. I like the gun culture here. In California, I'd struggle with people who freak out around guns.

But with a powerful national government, people in California have a lot of influence on my life in Idaho and people in Idaho have a lot of influence on people in California. I'd rather have the choice between the two than have them normalized to a common standard.


I'm not sure I understand this correctly. Are you saying that you question it because state sovereignty was used to defend slavery? I think it's reasonable to question anything that leads to war, but I think state sovereignty can stand on its own.


I don't know much about foreign politics. The US was probably a good experiment in it early on, but that fell apart in the beginning of the 20th century (if not earlier).

When you have a plebeian democracy you have the dumbest voting on what's fashionable, what's given to them by who, or who the media tells them to like - in much greater numbers than the educated. At the same time you have a great amassing of power in the representatives at the top, all living and working in the same city and all getting to know each other and every lobbyist that connects them.

Essentially you've castrated the educated voter and given the people at the top, with control of the media, full control of everything. In accounting we look at that as having both accounting and custody of an asset. In such a system fraud, theft, or even completely cleaning a country out and making it collapse, is incredibly easy.

A fair comment that I had not considered. I will modify my opinion, accordingly.



Indeed, that is one of the bases on which I have questioned it. While your mobility rights argument has strengthened my view of subordinate jurisdictions' sovereignty, I am still not persuaded that the extension of the national government is ipso facto a bad thing.



Fell apart? Fell apart?!?

You're talking about the single most successful nation on earth in the 20th century. You have far and away the largest economy on the planet. Even in your current economic state you have one of the most poductive economies anywhere. As citizens you have accumulated a package of rights and liberties that are the envy of most of the world. Your prosperity and your safety have given you the luxury of contemplating your constitution, when well over half of the planet's population have to be worried about feeding themselves or hiding from the predations of warlords and thugs.

If you believe that your country is so troubled, you really should go to a country that genuinely is troubled.

Ok, I could have phrased that better. I didn't mean that the US fell apart. I meant that we fell apart as an experiment of decentralized federation, to use your excellent terminology.

I've been abroad a number of times. I'll stay here. But I'm still going to criticize things we could do better!

I am convinced that it is a bad thing in most cases, but I wouldn't say that it's a bad thing in and of itself. The problem is that we're so far past my idea of appropriate nationalism that there is no risk we're going to have too little centralization of power.

This issue reminds me of how the senate seat vacated by Barack Obama was "sold" by Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

These kind of backroom deals might be a real concern, but I almost wonder if the people placed in office this way are more likely to have qualifications and merit then people who win based on a successfull advertising campaigns.