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James Madison

Frankly, because it is too big and culturally diverse to be governed centrally. And contrary to prevailing opinion, there are some very astute thinkers on the left as well as the right who have offered some compelling arguments to that effect.

The constitutional framers were fully aware of the immense cultural, political and economic diversity of the United States when they convened in Philadelphia in May, 1787. Despite several appeals to bind the 13 self-governing states under a national government, the framers settled on a system that Madison characterized as a compound republic: a “republic of republics” in which states retained sovereignty as well as many of the attributes of nationhood while delegating to the general government a handful of powers that were more effectively exercised at a continental level: national defense, foreign policy and a means of raising revenue that only sufficient to pay off the Revolutionary War debt but also to ensure that the general government was effectively equipped to garner sufficient revenue to carry out these tasks.

Some nationalists, notably Hamilton, wanted the general government to be equipped with a veto on state legislature to safeguard its relatively narrow prerogatives, but this was rejected.

States reserved the power to chart their own domestic policies.

Today, the federal government, significantly through passage of the 14th Amendment, has garned significant control over state domestic policy - a measure that many Americans would applaud for the role it has served in securing the descendants of freed s***es many of the common rights of citizenship of which their forebears were deprived in the years following emancipation.

Even so, the growth of federal power at the expense of the states has created plenty of mischief and ill feeling along both sides of the blue/red divide.

In what can be regarded as an unorthodox but courageous column, Michael Malice stressed in The Observer some 6 years ago that the United States has functioned as a united country only at a few times in history: in the “Era of Good Feeling” following the collapse of the Hamiltonian Federalist party, during the FDR presidency as the nation battled its way through a global depression and another world war and, more recently, after the Iraqi invasion and the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Aside from that, the term “the United States” has served to obfuscate a number of historical complexities. Malice argues that this includes an especially inconvenient and painful t***h: that the United States has never possessed a common culture and never will, despite the efforts of Abraham Lincoln and a host of public intellectuals and academics to invent one.

Yet, there other painful realities that should be addressed and likely will at some point as the divisions are felt more acutely: namely, the fact that the country possesses a population now exceeding 300-million, rendering effective central governance on a constitutional, democractic basis increasingly impractical.

Years ago, in fact, the progressive decentrist Gar Alperovitz has raised one of the great ironies bound up in James Madison's legacy: that he favored big national polities, albeit only up to their optimal levels off efficiency. Beyond that point, he stressed in a letter to his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, that a sprawling nation-state supplies elites at the center to exploit division and undermine democratic government.

We arguably passed that inflection point decades ago. Indeed in the early 1990's a revered nonagenarian diplomat, George F. Kennan, argued in his memoirs that the country would be far better off divided into ten or so “constituent republics,” vested with virtually all the powers of domestic governance, while the general government is restricted only to those powers assigned to it by the framers.

Whether the country ever manages to work out a means whereby effective governance is restored in the form of viable federalism and genuine democratic policy-making remains an open question.

If it is not resolved, there is the increasingly likelihood, as Alperovitz stesses, that large states such as California and even regions will begin unilaterally functioning more or less as de facto nation-states. And if this occurs, we may face an unraveling effect not all that far removed from the late Soviet Union.

Exactly right. A brilliant assessment. The United States emerged as a closely knit culture after being victorious in two recent world wars. The pax Americana, after 75 years, is eroding. The demands of the international left, who still loathe the outcome of the wars, are being accepted by the general populace. Demands of r********ns, demands of tolerance for every crime and perversion, renaming heroes, rewriting history, installing new holidays, dismissing traditional holidays, attacking Christianity, and diminishing the elite status of Victor for the United States.
Supported by the media, the educational system, and virtually every elected politician, the United States is being toppled from within to be assimilated into a borderless one government world with Islam as the policing force.