Everybody knows that the United States is a highly polarized country, and many of the key divisions are manifested at the level of the state. Blue states tend to favor minority voting, abortion rights, mask mandates, climate mitigation, LBGTQ rights, Medicare expansion, gun regulations, a higher minimum wage, more ample state entitlements, and a church/state divide, among other policies. Red states tend to favor just the opposite. Of course, there are significant blue minorities in red states, and vice versa. Further, individuals who identify as blue or red often have strongly negative opinions of each other, which social scientists call “affective polarization.” Many experts believe that this intense polarization threatens democracy.
This is far from the first time in American history that the country has faced polarization. In the middle of the 19th century, it took a civil war to — at least temporarily — resolve its economic and cultural differences. More American lives were lost in that war than any other the United States has fought. And more episodes of polarization have broken out since then. Now, far-fetched as it might seem, some people are once again discussing the possibility of an American civil war.
From William Riker on, political scientists have analyzed the causes and consequences of moving away from direct rule at the central level toward indirect rule at the state level. While the doctrine of indirect rule (or “states’ rights,” in American political lingo) has long been popular among American conservatives, in the near future it may also appeal to liberals, too. Here is the logic behind this proposal — and what it implies.
Some argue that the U.S. is heading for civil war. History suggests something colder.
Greater indirect rule could transform American politics
I argue that the recent advent of polarization is largely due to the growth of direct rule — that is, increased power by the central government and the Supreme Court compared with that of state authorities. On this account, direct rule from the 1960s onward has tended to advance the (mostly) cultural preferences of the residents of the blue states of the Union and reduced those of their red state counterparts. The aggressive reaction of the supposed losers, first manifested in Pat Buchanan’s 1992 unsuccessful presidential campaign, is a consequence of heightened direct rule. When direct rule advances in a diverse society, it’s likely to cause a backlash from culturally distinct elites who fear displacement and delegitimization. These elites often seek to mobilize their followers in opposition to the central government.
One alternative is to adopt greater indirect rule — allowing the voters in both blue and red states to assume more governance of their territories at the expense of federal government power. The respective powers of the federal and state governments are already constitutionally limited to some extent. Despite this, however, a significant amount of intergovernmental redistribution occurs. Fiscal imbalances occur when states have different abilities to raise revenue and have different expenditure needs and costs. Although the United States has no explicit equalization program, many grant programs have equalization programs within them. Forty-two states have a positive balance of payments, meaning they receive more from Washington in terms of federal dollars than they contribute in taxes. The tax dollars of the remaining eight states are distributed to other states after adjusting for any federal spending in them. Constitutionally, therefore, the American system allows for considerable state sovereignty over policy. If the United States shifted toward more indirect rule, it would be able to minimize such intergovernmental transfers.
The logic of this approach reflects a Madisonian rather than Hamiltonian view of American governance, letting local public opinion about policies prevail over the opinions of Washington elites. Blue states would probably remain largely socially liberal, pro-regulation and more redistributive, whereas red ones would become more socially conservative, nativist and libertarian.
What would its consequences be? First, there is some evidence that people in federal countries — those that unite separate states within an overarching political system so that each maintains its own integrity — support regional authority because, like the citizens of the Swiss cantons, they have enhanced self-governance.
Second, as time goes by, blue and red states would come to diverge ever more economically and culturally. It is impossible to predict how they would fare over the long run, despite the likely faith of partisans in each kind of state that their approach would be the more successful one. Starker differences between states would give incentives to political minorities who disapprove of their own state’s governance to vote with their feet and move to a more congenial jurisdiction. This would mean higher levels of what social scientists call “sorting” so that people with particular political outlooks end up living in the states that reflect those preferences. And the increasingly divergent trajectories of the two kinds of states would permit everyone to see which type of governance they would prefer.
Today’s election denialism and violence has a dark echo in the Jim Crow South
This would be a kind of grand experiment
Political scientist Barry R. Weingast has argued that greater indirect rule would act as a natural experiment to assess the relative merits of the various types of regimes. Just as Ronald Reagan challenged the Soviet Union to keep up with American military expenditures — a challenge that the Soviet Union could not meet — so would the blue and red states challenge one another on which offered the most effective governance. Since this arrangement would heighten self-governance throughout the country, my argument goes, affective polarization would shrink. One of the key sources of affective polarization is the sense that one’s social status is, or will be, undermined by what I have described elsewhere as “alien rule” — rule by authorities who are not native to the territory. In the United States, this may be said to occur to the degree that red states are governed by blue central rulers — presidents and congressional majorities — and vice versa.
Accordingly, in a spatially polarized society like ours, any decrease in the powers of the federal government — no matter which side controls it — should correspondingly reduce the fear of the demonized out-group. And as that fear recedes, so intergroup tolerance should flower.
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Michael Hechter is foundation professor of political science at Arizona State University and author most recently, with Steven Pfaff, of “The Genesis of Rebellion: Governance, Grievance and Mutiny in the Age of Sail” (Cambridge University Press, 2020).