are federalism & localism reversing in the us?
Something is switching in the US political system of multi-level governance. After the New Deal of the 1930s, it was the federal government that became the main agent for powerful progressive elements instead of local municipalities or state governments; by contrast, “states’ rights” became shorthand for local attempts to maintain Jim Crow racial hierarchies and other inequalities. To be sure, this was not always the case. There were progressives at local and state levels (certainly earlier in the Progressive Era, for instance) while at the federal level, Dixiecrats held federal efforts to end Jim Crow at bay from the 1930s until the 1960s. Overall, however, for all its flaws, the federal government became the main vessel to try to enhance equality, advance justice, and remap the polity along more egalitarian lines. Conservatives bemoaned the growth of federal power, by contrast, and emphasized state and local power as bulwarks against these changes.
The Republican Party has focused on chipping away at federal power, save for the military. It pushed to cut federal taxes (especially to the wealthy), deregulate, and, at the Supreme Court, roll back various federal acts and rulings of the 1960s and 70s (Voting Rights Act, Roe v. Wade) that used federal power to push forward progressive causes. Only in foreign policy did the Republican Party advocate for a stronger federal government.
But since Trump’s reelection in 2024, this no more. The actions of the Trump administration seem to mark a reversal in the relationship between federalism and localism in the name of authoritarian power. The goal has not been to shrink federal government, but instead to remake federal power for precisely the political goals that once flew under the flag of states’ rights. Even DOGE now looks more like an effort to clear out elements blocking the authoritarian takeover of federal power rather than an actual shrinking of the power of the federal government. We see the right-wing politicization of the Justice Department, not its weakening of power. We see the expansion of ICE. We see not the end of Civil Rights agencies within the federal government, but rather the repurposing of them to push for pro-white forms of civil rights protections.
Where has the resistance surfaced? Not at the federal level, but instead within state governments and local municipalities. Whether in Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, or elsewhere, the struggle to stop ICE’s aggressive anti-immigration tactics have turned not only on the key organizing of everyday citizens, but also have found support, to some extent, from various blue-state and blue-city governments. Or in term of women’s access to reproductive rights, certain state and local governments are passing laws and establishing protections in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision while the federal government strives to overturn or block these types of measures.
In the process of this reversal between federalism and localism, concepts of right and left are being reshuffled as well. “States’ rights” increasingly has a different ring to it in the 2020s, a different political valence, a new overtone of association and meaning. The fight is no longer clearly between federalism as an instrument of liberalism and localism as one of conservatism. Rather, it is a struggle about which worldview, which formation, which set of values, beliefs, and policies can seize control of which levels of governance. Left and right, progressive or conservative, federal or local, they no longer line up as clearly as they once did in the American political system. The 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society are long over. Even the Obama-era association of federal power with the left is no more.
Instead, governance in the United States now seesaws on a new fulcrum. Old assumptions about state power creak and moan with new weights. Out of the sudden shifts, perhaps a new understanding of what causes what in American politics might emerge. Beyond the old dynamic of federalism and localism, do new models and theories of governmentality await their turn?