James Madison was 5 feet, 4 inches and slightly built. There’s little evidence to suggest that he was especially preoccupied with his own physical stature, but as “the father of the U.S. Constitution,” Madison was an intellectual giant who thought a great deal about size. In fact, Madison’s reflections on size can help explain why Americans today tend to be so disgusted with their political system but often seem at a total loss to know what to do about it.

Bear with me on this.

In 1787, Madison and his fellow Founding Fathers proposed to replace the Articles of Confederation with a new Constitution featuring a relatively powerful central government. Anti-federalist critics were aghast. They said it would never work because—as anyone who had studied history knew—republics had to be small, like Greek city-states. The republic proposed by Madison and his fellow federalists, stretching from New Hampshire to Georgia, would be enormous by comparison and was clearly destined to grow still larger. The anti-federalists dismissed Madison as a would-be power-centralizing aristocrat, and short too.

But Madison was thorough and persistent with his argument. The biggest problem faced by all republics was their tendency to split into narrow, self-serving, special interests, which Madison called “factions.” These self-serving interests can have a variety of natures. They can be political, religious, ideological, or commercial, the last being especially common. Such narrow selfish interests are normal in a free society, and can only be quashed through oppression—which in theory, at least, everyone’s against.

Madison turned on its head the conventional wisdom about the proper size of a republic. He argued that small republics easily became corrupt or tyrannical because it was relatively easy for one group or interest to form a majority, capture the government and oppress a minority. In a vast continental republic like the Unites States, however, there would be so many competing interests that none were likely to become powerful enough to take control of the government. Instead, those many interests would check each other.

Madison’s concept of interests checking and balancing each other, therefore, was not only applied to the various branches of government, as we are taught in school, but was considered a constitutional design feature that would be found within American society itself. Our large American republic, Madison concluded, had a good chance of being just, stable, and durable.

Madison was so enamored of his theory about the relative safety of a large republic that he obsessively argued it again and again, to anyone who would listen. The argument appears in Madison’s notes he kept while serving in the Continental Congress, in personal correspondence, in the records from the floor of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and most famously, in “Federalist No. 10.”

Madison’s theory held up reasonably well for the first 60 years of the American republic, until an extremely powerful faction—the slave-labor-based economy of the Southern states—rose up in rebellion, resulting in the American Civil War, which is to this day both the nation’s bloodiest war and its most epic contest with a special interest.

After the Civil War, the power of the federal government began to grow. Progressives demanded government oversight to combat various social problems. The New Deal and Great Society expanded the government’s role in the economy and created large entitlement programs. The Cold War birthed the military industrial complex.

For good or ill, depending on one’s politics, today the federal government is many orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than the one imagined by Madison and his fellow founders. And that reality throws a big monkey wrench into Madison’s scheme for a government capable of resisting selfish interests. It is no longer necessary for a self-serving interest to gain majority support to corrupt the government, and thereby subvert the common good, because when government is immensely powerful it can serve innumerable selfish interests simultaneously.

Today, a voracious hoard of selfish corporate and political interests gorges itself at the trough of power at the public’s expense. The common and long-term well-being of the American people is an afterthought, at best. The public understands this quite well. When asked in an NBC/Wall Street Journal Survey, over 80 percent of respondents agreed with the following unattributed statement:

A small group in the nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.

The quote, by the way, is from Donald Trump’s inaugural address. Would 80 percent still agree if they knew it was Trump who said it?

Probably not. Which points to another problem associated with size. In our time, it’s not only government that has become corrupted by interests. Large institutions that produce the knowledge, information, and ideas that a republic depends upon are also compromised. Media, which once at least went through the motions of taking journalistic standards seriously, now nakedly behave like other corporations; non-stop sensationalism and partisan narratives drive a views-and-clicks business model that sows division, and even hatred, among citizens. Tidal waves of corporate and politically-driven government money have corrupted universities, funding narrowly confined agendas. Independent scientific research is increasingly rare, particularly when it is costly.

The United States’ free market economy has always been a paradise for loosely bridled interests to run wild. Economically, the formula for channeling selfishness has been wonderfully productive. But when corporate interests capture the government, the free market is no longer free or safe for consumers. When politicians collude with corporate and other professional interests to form an entrenched political class, then the government no longer represents the people.

This should terrify everyone who is not part of the system and shame anyone with a conscience who is.

Our diminutive “Father of the Constitution” James Madison would have something big to say about all of this. In fact, he did say it. Again, Madison feared what selfish interests could do to his beloved American republic. He reasoned that in a large republic interests would check each other, and none become powerful enough to capture the government. It was a point that he reiterated so much that he must have been a bore at parties.

But Madison once revealed a dark fear he never expressed in public, because it would have undermined his signature argument about the relative safety of a large republic. To his friend, Thomas Jefferson, Madison wrote:

As in too small a sphere oppressive combinations may too easily be formed against  the weaker party, so in too an extensive one, a defensive concert [author’s emphasis] may be rendered too difficult against the oppression of those trusted with administration.

By “defensive concert,” Madison is not referring to oboes and violins. What he means is that in a large and diverse society, people are easily splintered into squabbling factions when, instead, unity is needed to resist corruption, or worse. Madison’s prescience is astounding since this is exactly where “we the people” find ourselves today—in need of concerted action against public institutions captured by special interests.

Would-be citizen leaders need to step back and see what is really happening.

Ralph Nader, the famous consumer advocate, channeled his inner Madison when in 2014 he said, “It was quite clear to me many years ago, that power structures believe in dividing and ruling by distracting attention from areas where different groups agree to where they disagree.” At the time, Nader was promoting a new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left–Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. The subtitle was sadly premature.

Today, whenever an isolated leader stands up to truly challenge the system, he or she is likely to be demonized and demonetized. Platforms are withdrawn, public personalities smeared, reputations attacked, voices censored, private lives harassed, and employment terminated. For real leaders whose only desire is to serve the public, the public square has become an increasingly dangerous and authoritarian place.

We need, in Madison’s words, “a defensive concert.”

The first step to ending this endemic corruption and rising authoritarianism should be obvious: unified opposition balanced by authentic leaders on the left and right. Real leaders need to find each other in our large and cacophonous nation. Currently, dissenting voices are hunkered down in their silos, building their own brands when they should be uniting to build a movement together. Each voice alone is too puny to make a real difference but uniting and organizing could change everything. And it must.

Madison would argue that such a movement should have a clear overarching mission: to remove from the political system every incentive that favors service to selfish interests, or factions, over the common and long-term good of the American people. For starters, that means terminating political careerism and making it impossible for elected officials to take money, or otherwise benefit, from the various corporate and other selfish interests they are supposed to regulate.

It’s an enormous and complicated task, but it must begin somewhere. The people are ready. It’s leadership we need for the concerted action that James Madison, the tiny founder with his big ideas, begs us to take.

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The discussion dug deep into the complexities, contradictions, and cross-pressures of American federalism, and how states and the federal government push and pull each other on citizenship, immigration, and health care. While noting all the ways that states have infringed on Americans’ rights, panelists also said that advancing ideas and rights at the state level is vital to progress in this country, no matter which parties win elections, and no matter who is in the White House.

“You cannot ignore the states,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, founding director of the Center for Social Innovation, which is based at UC Riverside. “For people who think that somehow you can [make progress] just by taking over Congress and the presidency and even the courts, history shows otherwise … You have to build power and policy innovation in the states.”

The event’s moderator, The Nation contributing writer Richard Kreitner, started the conversation by asking whether an emphasis on states’ rights ends up leaving vulnerable people “behind enemy lines.”

Ramakrishnan said that any progressive concept of states’ rights must start with aggressive federal enforcement of the 14th Amendment, and its promise of equal protection of the laws. States can build new rights, and new dimensions of rights, on this “federal floor,” he said.

And when the powerful federal government is violating rights, it’s even more important for states to practice what he termed “progressive state citizenship” to check federal power and protect rights.

“If you don’t have federalism and you do have a lot of division along geographic lines,” said Ramakrishnan, co-author (with Allan Colbern) of the new book Citizenship Reimagined: A New Framework for State Rights in the United States, “you’re going to endow the presidency with so much power that it’s like a whipsaw action when each party takes over the presidency. That is really harmful to divided societies.”

Cornell University government professor Jamila Michener, a leading scholar of poverty and author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism and Unequal Politics, cautioned that people’s views of states’ rights can vary based on whether their preferred party is in power in Washington, D.C. Using Medicaid as an example, she explained how American federalism produces inequality, with people receiving different healthcare and having different rights as residents depending on the state in which they live.

“What happens to any of us in any place is relevant to what happens to all of us,” said Michener, who is co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity. “One of the moral challenges of the inequality that federalism breeds is precisely that: It feels like our human dignity is contingent on arbitrary geographic location.”

At the same time, she said, American federalism also “creates conditions of possibility” to make advances in states and in the nation as a whole. This means that people need to be working constantly in the states to organize and build power.

“If you’re interested in minimizing harm and minimizing suffering, and if you’re interested in and committed to a particular vision of people living with full dignity and having access to a certain set of rights, then even when the folks that you favor are in power, you don’t necessarily then sit on your laurels,” she said. “You keep building power, so you can set the terrain that pushes up that floor that is established on the federal level.”

Cynthia Buiza, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, said that California is a model of such power-building. Over the past 25 years, California has enacted a “constellation” of more than 100 policies that protect immigrants and make it easier for them to work, drive, and go to college. “The state,” she said, “recognizes the fundamental role that immigrants play.”

“California is a very interesting case study in federalism,” Buiza added. “It has managed, over the years, to decrease the pain and suffering of many vulnerable people.” But this past generation of progress is a departure from California’s previous history of limiting the rights of migrants and others. And, even with today’s protections for unauthorized immigrants, the situation of immigrant families is dire in the state due to oppressive federal policies, the pandemic, and a scarcity of housing.

“At a time when health care is so crucial for everybody, people are hesitating to go to the hospitals,” she said.

In response to questions submitted by audience members, panelists suggested that states have a role to play in combating climate change. Ramakrishnan said that states should recognize “the right to human capital” and address climate change as a threat to that right. Michener argued that climate change was both a rights and justice issue, since its impacts fall disproportionately on poor people and communities of color.

Buiza and Ramakrishnan were also emphatic that the possible election of Joe Biden shouldn’t slow down state-level efforts to defend immigrants and pursue other expansions of rights. Ramakrishnan pointedly noted that the Obama administration had opposed sanctuary policies in California. Both he and Michener sought to debunk one conventional argument—that the pursuit of progressive policies in California or other states would provoke oppressive policies in other states. Progressive immigration policies in states have generally been protected by courts, while more regressive ones have been thrown out, Ramakrishnan said.

Kreitner, the moderator and author of the book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Perfect Union, asked whether the different policies of states helped hold the country together or are evidence that the country is splitting up.

Michener said that the divisions between states were being politicized, racialized, and institutionalized in destructive and increasingly visible ways. Americans, she said, must contend with these divisions. “Do I think it’s going to end well, with us remaining a singular polity that learns our lessons and then moves forward in a unified way?” Michener said. “No, not especially. But I’d be happy to be wrong.”

Buiza, herself an immigrant from the Philippines, noted that she had been to countries with separatist movements, including Indonesia, and that divisions should be taken seriously. But she believes that the United States is still very capable of solving national problems together, including the reform of its immigration system.

“I don’t know that there has been a final referendum on the American Dream,” Buiza said, “and if there is, I would like to know what it is—because right now, I still believe it.”

The post Why States Can Lead America Forward appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The debate over gay marriage pits two visions of America against each other, and I worry that the least enlightened one, bolstered by President Obama, is carrying the day.

I am not talking about the issue of whether marriage should be limited to heterosexual couples, mind you, but about the timeless question of whether we are to be one cohesive nation whose citizens enjoy the same “privileges and immunities” throughout–or whether, by contrast, we are to be a patchwork of states and communities whose residents’ individual rights vary according to their local community’s prevailing “standards.”

Earlier this month, the president told ABC News that he is personally in favor of gay marriage but wants the issue resolved by states. That’s deeply unsatisfying. It’s illogical for the nation’s first African-American president, a former Harvard Law Review editor and constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, to say that the right of gays to marry whomever they want is a clear matter of equality and due process but then leave it up to the states to go their own ways. Good luck with that, if you’re a same-sex couple wanting to get married in Alabama.

President Obama was quick to say in his interview that the definition of marriage (like the issue of slavery in the first decades of our nation, I might add) has historically been a state prerogative. Never mind that in 1967 the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage, holding that the ban violated the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Writing for a unanimous majority, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival.” The Constitution, Warren added, required that “the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious discriminations.” In other words: Buzz off, states.

Both competing visions of social cohesion–the national one and the communitarian one–have long co-existed in tension (“tension” being a polite euphemism to cover a brutal civil war as well). Our Founding Fathers subscribed to the belief that being an American transcended one’s narrower state identity while still bequeathing us a nation in which some states outlawed slavery and others allowed it to flourish.

The Civil War’s outcome, enshrined in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, appeared to have settled the matter for good. We would no longer remain what the Chinese in a far different context have recently called “one country, two systems.” Liberty, freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness were now going to mean the same thing in Alabama as they did in Vermont.

The South’s states’ rights mantra proved more resilient than anticipated, however, and it took a concerted effort by liberals, leveraging the power of the Supreme Court and the Congress, to restore a sense that we are one nation, undivided, whose citizens should enjoy the same rights and protections, regardless of state boundaries.

The Warren Court’s jurisprudence was the highest expression of national cohesion, and it was echoed at the time by the muscular nationalism of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. “There is no issue of states’ rights or national rights,” President Johnson declared in a stirring televised pitch for his Voting Rights Act on the heels of violence in Selma, Alabama, in March of 1965. “There is only the struggle for human rights.”

Included in the speech was a nationalistic sentiment that encapsulated the era’s progressive quest to forge one America. “This is one nation,” Johnson said. “What happens in Selma and Cincinnati is a matter of legitimate concern to every American.”

Today, such a declaration rings more hollow. President Obama’s hesitation to call for a national push to enforce equality for gays–his instinct that this is a matter best left to the states–is considered sensible and wise by plenty of leading progressive thinkers and activists. States’ rights have gone bipartisan.

Today’s revitalized, bipartisan federalism is fueled by two factors. The first is the political “sorting out” of the last few decades. The nation is increasingly split into red and blue states whose politics and cultures overlap less and less. Americans self-segregate into left and right communities, consuming only one or the other’s media and entertainment, careful to filter out “the other.” Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are endangered species. Blue states, red states; you know who you are.

As more and more Americans live surrounded by like-minded neighbors, the urge wanes to care about the prevailing norms in a community halfway across the country. If someplace else wants to round up immigrants to deport, ban gays from getting married, or allow residents to carry concealed weapons, what’s it to us? By the same token, if we want to welcome illegal immigrants, allow gays to marry, or ban guns, what’s it to them?

California is at the forefront of progressive federalism. Throughout the Bush years, California was regularly doing battle with Washington to forge its own separate path on any number of issues, from consumer protection laws to medical marijuana and environmental regulations.

That’s why an expanding range of issues, including educational standards and immigration policy, is now seen through the same prism that long defined obscenity: that of community standards. Forget about Cincinnati. Why should people living in West Hollywood concern themselves about the rights of people in Selma, or vice versa? Isn’t that a fool’s errand, whose best-case scenario will be an embrace of the lowest common denominator? Better to live and let live.

The second cause for the rise of a progressive federalism is the widespread exhaustion and unease with the role of the judiciary in enforcing constitutional rights and national standards. It’s now fashionable in liberal circles to believe that Roe v. Wade may have backfired by provoking, galvanizing and strengthening the far right for a generation to come–unnecessarily so, the theory goes, given that state legislatures were working their way, if at different speeds, towards legalizing abortion across the country. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal justice, has made this claim. Recently, Eric J. Segall, a law professor at Georgia State University, applied this argument to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the desegregation of schools; Segall claimed that, because the Court was too far ahead of society, the decision backfired politically. So it’s not surprising that many leading gay rights activists share a preference for legislative triumphs over courtroom wins.

To my read, though, the constitutional rights of individuals should never be compromised by political expediency or convenience or by polling of majorities to see if they are ready to stomach the protection of another’s rights. Courts don’t, and shouldn’t, have the option of avoiding judicial review because it’s politically messy.

Besides, counterfactual history is more art than science. Who knows how less polarized the abortion issue would be had the courts stayed out of it and the struggle been confined to the political arena? And, I would add, who cares? Progressive federalism may be in fashion, but it’s a sad historical retreat. The American constitutional system is built on a non-negotiable belief that there are certain inalienable rights we possess as individuals and citizens that the state, or the prejudices of a majority, cannot wrest away from us.

Fortunately, those pesky courts are unlikely to allow this “let’s let each state decide for itself” stalemate to last indefinitely. The infamous Defense of Marriage Act (an example of conservatives tactically ditching their states’ rights fervor to advance their social agenda through Congress) is under assault in the courts, and California’s own Proposition 8 banning gay marriage has been struck down by the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court (on admittedly narrow grounds that don’t seem to apply to states that never have allowed gay marriage).

President Obama has been commended, and rightly so, for “evolving” in his thinking on whether gays should be able to commit to loved ones in marriage. Now, hopefully, he will evolve in his thinking about whether he wants to preside over one country, or two.

Andrés Martinez is the editorial director of Zócalo Public Square and a vice president at the New America Foundation.

*Photos courtesy of Jason DeFillippo cliff1066.

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