The chapter “On Federalism” from Mark Levin’s book Liberty and Tyranny has a lot of good information in it. The focus of this deconstruction may be on misinformation, but to omit the context of the good information would be misinformation in itself.
Levin echoes the sentiments of James Madison that the Constitution was meant for a FEDERAL government, not a NATIONAL one. If I may add to Levin’s good information by providing even more context. Nationalism and nation states are offsprings of western culture. There were city states and empires before then, but delineating fixed boundaries for a “nation” was the brainchild of Europe. We fancied the idea so much we incorporated it into western colonialism as well. The rise of nations was a critical achievement for paternalism and a critical blow for grassroots democracy. There is no doubt that this realization formed part of our founding fathers thinking as they crafted a Constitution that endorsed federalism.
Federalism is a recapturing of grassroots democracy through a stunning political innovation, more stunning in my opinion than Roman law or English charter. Let’s face it folks, we will never emulate the egalitarian democracy of prehistoric cultures. The appeal of expansive nations is through the beauty and resiliency of diversity. Diverse livelihoods, diverse ideas and diverse groups can be seen as advancements of civilization, as long as they can civilly coexist. Federalism enables some autonomy from grassroots democracy while at the same time providing a mechanism for aggregating the best ideas that surface from that autonomy. Granted, bad ideas surface as well, that is the cost of human variation. Yet altruism is the natural norm, not greed. If granted due liberty and autonomy over time the ideas that would spread through federation should be the good ones.
Levin presents the beauty of federalism well. I particularly liked his discussion about slavery and Dred Scott, something I’ve discussed in the past as well. State autonomy can be blamed for sanctioning the institution of slavery, but Supreme Court heavy-handedness led to both a prolonging of that bad idea and the catastrophic and incomplete way in which it was resolved.
Levin presents good information in this chapter, meaning that there is not much omitted or distorted about what federalism is, how it works and why it evolved in our country. Precisely because this chapter informs so well in a book that otherwise tends to misinform there are bound to be some inherent contradictions, which I will get to next.
Here is previous background material.
An overview of misinformation principles
A basic understanding of free markets
