"States' Rights"

[xenologer]

Federalism keeps coming up from people who want a weaker federal government with stronger state governments. They are self-identified "federalists," because to them "federalism" is a code phrase for "states' rights" that (theoretically) carries less baggage from long service to segregationism.

This annoys me, and I feel a need to vent about it. I mean, it's one thing for the meaning of a word to change over time--which is inevitable and not worth fretting over--but it is quite another to totally reverse the definition of the word in the hopes of co-opting its credibility without actually having to like it.



Dear Conservatives,

About the whole "federalism" thing. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

See, according to my East Coast elitist American history classes (with their nasty tax-funded public education curriculum), the USA used to have a Federalist political party, and I'm pretty sure that what you so-called "New Federalists" want is much closer to the Federalist Party's opposition: the Democratic Republicans. Democratic Republicans were the ones who worried that "big government" was going to be a threat to the rights of the people. Federalists wanted a stronger--wait for it--federal government.

I know, I know. Complicated stuff.

But please, guys. If you're going to kneel down to fellate our forefathers in the absence of any original plans, please do it right. This so-called "New Federalism" is the brainchild of Conservatives who must have either flunked history, or hoped everyone in their constituency had.

Stop proving them right. Go read The Federalist Papers, and then decide whether you want to say, "I am a Federalist."

Hugs and kisses,

Your friendly neighborhood social scientist.

Comments

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure the people who use the term this way now are thinking about it to that depth, though.

By the same token that they wouldn't answer the way I mentioned to __kat__, "I don't mean a real Federalist," I doubt they'd say, "Well, I mean a European-style Federalist." I'm aware that in different places "federalism" has completely different meanings, but when we're talking about people who are typically trying to be All-America, All The Way (which is why the French are unamerican despite being the source of many "American" ideals)... I can't help but feel like they're trying to borrow legitimacy from the American Federalists in a way that they wouldn't be borrowing from the Germans or Australians, even if in those cases the "foreign" federalism fits better with the approach they're pushing.

Again, if I honestly thought that most of these politicians and Conservatives were willing to call their ideals "European-style" anything, it'd annoy me less to have them use the term to mean something completely different. But I tend to hear it from folk who also believe that the Founding Fathers of our Glorious Nation had everything all figured out already back then, and that their intent is important above all things. So while they could be giving me the more informed explanation you just did... I can't help but feel like this is just another case of Conservatives invoking "founders' intent" without feeling a need to know (or care) what that actually means.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

I agree that people who talk about the "vision of the Founding Fathers" have a heavily mythologized, basically false idea of what the Founding Fathers were about -- they were bickering politicians with no more of a grand unified vision of what the country should become than Congress has today.

At the same time, though, I disagree with you that "wanting the country to be more like the Founders intended" is an incoherent or meaningless ideal. It is true that there are many ways in which our country is totally different from things *all* of the Founders held as basic baseline assumptions of how things worked and that there is a set of proposals you could make that would, indeed, have the very clear effect of making our country look more like it did in the 1700s. Increasing states' rights would be one of them.

(Note that I of course don't agree with any such proposals, because I think our country changing from the "Founders' vision" is a necessary and proper result of our country being bigger, richer, more complex and more technologically advanced than any country was back then. But that's not to say that what they're talking about is logically incoherent or historically mistaken.)