After being disobliging to President Donald Trump many times on this page, let me acknowledge that he is getting some things right.
For example, he is right to prioritize removing illegal immigrants from the country. I have never understood why this is even controversial. The clue is in “illegal.”
He is right to call time on the excesses of diversity, equity, and inclusion, including the bizarre idea of gender self-assignment.
He is right, too, to be a realist on energy policy. There is nothing to be gained by following Europe into poverty so as to virtue-signal to industrializing countries that continue to generate electricity by burning coal.
On all these matters, Trump’s approach is obviously preferable to that of, say, Democrat-run California. However, it does not follow that he should impose his agenda on Democrat-run California. Democracy means being allowed to vote for blockheads. Freedom includes the freedom to get things wrong. Federalism raised the United States to greatness because it guaranteed a measure of experimentation and competitiveness among the states.
States’ rights mean little to Trump, who revels in his disregard for constitutional precedent. When he mobilized the National Guard to crack down on Californian protesters, such as former President Dwight D. Eisenhower against Arkansas segregationists, it was the culmination of his campaign against the political leaders of the Golden State.
He has threatened to withhold funding from California schools over a transgender long-jumper and excessive “LGBQWERTY.” He has sought to crush California’s Sanctuary Law and to reverse its encouragement for electric vehicles. He wants the state to change its healthcare insurance system.
I think that, on all these matters, Trump has the better case. If I were a Californian, I’d want Steve Hilton as my governor. However, no president has the constitutional authority to set policies for individual states in such fields.
It’s true that Trump is hardly the first president to throw his weight around inappropriately. Even the sainted former President Ronald Reagan was happy to use his control of the purse-strings to force the 50 states into line. The 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act obliged states to set 21 as the age of consent or lose their highway funding. Every state complied.
But Republicans have tended to be — certainly since the end of the battles over desegregation — the party of localism. And there are good reasons for that. When decisions are made more closely with the people they affect, government becomes cheaper, more efficient, and more accountable. This may have been the founders’ single greatest insight.
Of course, voters tend to care more about the outcome than about the process. Tell me where someone stands on the right to life, and I’ll tell you, with around 85% accuracy, whether they thought it proper for federal courts to lay down abortion law.
One of the most unpopular opinions I hold is that the federal authorities were wrong to enforce desegregation. Not because the policy was wrong, but because it would have been better for individual states to have come to understand what was so morally objectionable about legally enforced racism, and to have had ownership over the new dispensation.
When Margaret Thatcher was in office in the United Kingdom, several cities came under the control of the extreme Left. Her response was to curtail their powers to protect local services and taxpayers. In retrospect, she made a terrible mistake. She left Britain with an absurdly centralized system of government, which naturally led to more bureaucratic inefficiency.
Conservatives should at least understand the case for localism in principle, even if they sometimes allow their partisanship to overcome it. But MAGA has never cared much about general principles. The test its partisans like to apply to every political question is, “Are you with Trump, or are you a soulless liberal globalist?”
We can hardly complain that we were not warned. During the 2016 primaries, former Republican Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse asked Trump on X, then-Twitter, “Will you commit to rolling back Exec power & undoing Obama unilateral habit? These r sincere questions & I sincerely hope u answer rather than insult.”
TRUMP’S GOLDEN AGE OF BUILDING STARTS WITH THE STATES
Trump’s response? “Ben Sasse looks more like a gym rat than a U.S. Senator. How the hell did he ever get elected?”
Back then, such a tone was newsworthy — shocking, even. People who aspired to high office were expected to display a certain dignity. They were, after all, aiming to embody the American republic. These days, that notion seems hopelessly antiquated. So, sadly, does the idea of a republic in which power is diffused and decentralized. It survived former Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even under former President Barack Obama, it could be found limping on. Alas, not anymore.