Gregory Hood: Can Federalism Save Us?

The short answer is no.

Federalism cannot save us because it requires a consensus.

American Renaissance:

“Another war between the states has begun, with words if not with bullets. California Governor Gavin Newsom, the Democratic favorite for the nomination if President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris don’t run, decried Florida and its governor, Ron DeSantis, in a new ad. “I urge all of you living in Florida to join the fight,” he said, “or join us in California.” It’s startling to hear a call for political migration from a state governor. It suggests that we don’t live in the same country.

Governor DeSantis is the leading candidate to be the 2024 Republican nominee if President Donald Trump doesn’t run. Governor DeSantis built his political persona by directly challenging the federal government on COVID-19 policies, immigration, and transgender coddling. He has vowed that constitutional carry, or the right to carry firearms without a permit, will be law in Florida “before I am done as governor.” …

The American system was not designed to be unitary. With slavery and other issues dividing the 13 colonies from the beginning, the solution was federalism. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people,” says the Tenth Amendment. On issues where no compromise is possible, states are supposed to run their own affairs. …”

The United States was created to be a federal republic.

The emphasis was on republicanism, not liberalism. Insofar as liberalism was part of the original American formula, it was cabined off at the federal level. The Bill of Rights restricted the power of the federal government. Congress, for example, was denied the power to establish a national religion. The states used to wield vast powers which are unthinkable and would be decried as “authoritarian” and “illiberal” in our times. Some states had established churches. Other states limited citizenship to Whites.

By the early 19th century, American republicanism and federalism was being challenged by liberalism, which was becoming fashionable among Eastern elites who wanted to emulate the British Empire. It was trendy second generation New England liberals like the historian George Bancroft who created the myth of America as a liberal nation in his A History of the United States. These early American liberals who gained steam in the North in the antebellum era in the wake of the series of reform movements which were spawned by the Second Great Awakening – the origins of the American Left – were confronted by a system that had been deeply illiberal since the Founding. There was no “universal” set of civil rights or voting rights. There was no such thing as “equal protection of the laws.” There wasn’t even a common national citizenship. Americans were citizens of their states and by extension citizens of the United States which led to dilemmas like whether the black citizens of Massachusetts were American citizens.

The crackup in the War Between the States was ultimately a contest over whether the country would remain a federal republic with the conservative side – the Confederacy, which carried the republican banner of state’s rights – squaring off against the progressive side – the Union, which fought for a liberal “New Birth of Freedom” and the notion that the country was created by the Declaration of Independence. The Reconstruction era was the victorious Union imposing a liberal framework on the Constitution. The states were consolidated into one liberal nation and made into vassals and administrative units of the federal government. Equality made its debut in the Reconstruction amendments. Previously, the only equality that existed in the Constitution was between the states in the Senate. Progressives have always hated that equality and complain about it and hope to end it to this day.

The long and short of this is that liberalism is unable to coexist with federalism. Liberalism is a universalist ideology. That’s why abortion bans in states like Alabama are an intolerable affront to liberals. Federalism broke down in the early 19th century within decades of the Founding because it could not contain liberalism which insists on remaking the entire country and the world in its image. For federalism to work, it has to rest on a broad consensus that contentious social issues are best solved by allowing the people to govern themselves in their state legislatures because liberty is self-government.

Progressives are loudly telling conservatives that they do not believe this. Liberty is not self-government. Liberty is rule by experts, bureaucrats and technocrats – people like Anthony Fauci or Nina Jankowicz – who wield authority to accomplish liberal ends. “Trans rights” are human rights in New York and Alabama and Ukraine and Afghanistan. It is also “authoritarianism” for any government anywhere on the planet to engage in self-government and rule in a way that progressives dislike as their mandate to rule is over a global and galactic dominion. The Supreme Court “has lost its legitimacy.” There is a Higher Law than the Constitution which is that this class of people are entitled to be in charge.

Conservatives, of course, will use their majority on the Supreme Court to push the country toward “originalism” and will have some success in doing so. This isn’t going to settle abortion or any other issue because progressives do not believe in originalism or federalism. The Dobbs decision is reminiscent of Dred Scott which was a victory for conservatives that struck down the Missouri Compromise and set off a chain reaction that deepened polarization and blew up the country.

The people who topple statues of the Founding Fathers aren’t going to be restrained by the Constitution. They aren’t going to accept federalism when their entire movement can be traced back to rejecting federalism. The question now is how long will it take for them to lash out and what sobering effect that will have on their opponents. We shouldn’t be surprised to wake up to the news one day that a fanatic like James Hodgkinson has assassinated a conservative Supreme Court justice.

In our frenzied political atmosphere, it is getting easier to imagine something like that happening and progressives celebrating it. All it would take is a little spark like that to send the country up in flames

About Hunter Wallace 12394 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

16 Comments

    • Think of the kind of people that would do something like this. It will be a hellhole. Death boat.

    • Holy sweet Jesus

      It’s going to be like riverboat casinos. Haha. Floating abortion clinics. May God have mercy on these lunatics.

      Side note: this has ALL the earmarks of slave state vs free state with an Underground Railroad and all the rest.

  1. “Congress, for example, was denied the power to establish a national religion…”.

    In some respects, HW, that’s not altogether true. It IS true that Congress could not establish ONE version of CHRISTIANITY, i.e., the Church of England/Anglicanism) as the ‘STATE Religion,” but it is patently untrue that there WAS no ‘established NATIONAL religion’ when the country was founded. ALL 13 colonies had overt Christian and often TRINITARIAN charters, which clearly presuppose that some form of Christianity IS, has been, and ALWAYS WILL BE the ONLY ‘normative’ RELIGION of these United States.’

    Are you on Gab? Because the growing sentiment there is that we will restore a Christian government, now that Roe, et al have been destroyed. For the rest of you, as HW has been saying, more and more the various states are finding their way to a more federal form of governance, as was originally envisioned. At least this way, perhaps the more conservative folk can live in peace, AWAY from the sodomites, abort-whores, and the Jews…..

    • Well Christianity was the defacto US state religion even if it wasn’t official. It’s always been acknowledged that the U.S. is a Christian nation, and it’s only in the past few years with mass immigration that they’ve been stepping away from that to appease their new pets.

      The problem is “wokeness” ( or whatever name it’s using this week) is the new defacto state religion of the US government now. They didn’t ask the citizenry. They just decided it was and are trying to impose it on us. All those who don’t agree are heretics and will be treated accordingly.

  2. Kevin DeAnna, lord help us, Kevin DeAnna (“Gregory Hood”). Ten trillion words or so written and not a single mention of the JQ. What will “save us”? Can’t think of anything, except Jesus.

    Meanwhile, don’t use up all your ammo practicing. Once it starts you will need all you can get. As the Japanese proverb says, when you are already thirsty, it is too late to dig the well.

    • Kevin is an Irish given name. He date a woman named Katie McHugh, Irish. And Kevin had a publicized met up with Pete Thiel, power hungry homosexual. On the social issues, abortion and faggotry the Irish are the enemies of whites and are more closely aligned in their political points of views with the enemies of white, those being the Jews, the Irish and homosexuals in having a tolerant view on abortion and assloving.

      You will know them by their fruit.

  3. The world would be a better place if each group of people have its own space, culture, history, society…… But some people, like today’s globalists and woke want to rule over other people, they want to impose their culture, their version of history, their concept of society and want to take all spaces for them.

  4. As a matter of record the Constitution does not mention God. The DOI does. When the Greater White Heartland Republic becomes a reality its constitution will acknowledge our Christian heritage and our White European legacy. In reality we could just about build our own nation by looking at what the United States does and do the opposite.

  5. The United States is unsalvageable. A new nation with a new culture, new founding fathers and a new founding myth must completely replace this country. Our only saving grace is if we can isolate our people from the classical liberal trappings of our country’s founding philosophy which brought us to our current situation today.

  6. “All we ask is to be let alone…”
    —Jefferson Davis (The man can’t even have a highway anymore. They just finished changing the signs to “Route 1” in my county.)

  7. We can’t simply turn back the past and restore some supposedly much better time like the 1950s or the 1850s.

    Look to Russia – it’s not the case that Vladimir Putin is the restored Czar, but in lots of ways he sort of is and his policies are the same.

    Once the US Supreme Court tips with a couple more POC womyn or Harvard Law School Js or POC, non Catholic Catholic Irish with all J advisors, the US Constitution is completely irrelevant. Hell, these liars somehow found homosexual marriage equality and late, late term abortions somewhere in the Constitution because..

    “Well it ought to be, plus what would Hitler think”.

    Start working for localism, autonomy not complete Independence. Plus pretty much all secession, independence movements like Texas independence got infiltrated by liars, idiots same as Scottish independence.

    Remember when Libertarian Constitutionalist true believer pandering Lunatic Ron Paul said he supported the rights for Texas Independence in theory because the US Federal Government was putting Too much restrictions on Mexican, Central American (Haitian) migration, federal rules against hiring Illegals where “the market” should determine everything.

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