Why We Need to Focus on the States
State governments offer our best chance for progress but don't receive nearly enough attention or resources.
When I started this newsletter, my intention was to begin by sharing some of the core observations and perspectives that inform my professional interests (pretty much my only interests). Now that I’ve twiddled away several weeks making unpopular arguments in favor of the SALT deduction, I thought I would go back to that original plan and explain why I am so enthusiastic about the world of state-level policy, which is where I make my living.
I believe that state governments represent our best chance for major social and economic progress and I have boiled my case down to five points:
States do really important stuff.
Ask someone, “what does government do for you?” and you will invariably get a list of state and local programs. Roads and transit, public schools and universities, trash collection, food inspection, fire and police, utilities, unemployment, etc. State and local governments build parks, libraries, hospitals and provide the water in our taps. From administering the legal system to establishing housing policies and designing our cities, it is hard to underestimate the impact that these "lower” levels of government have on our daily lives. While the federal government is responsible for the military and our large public insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare, it is state and local policy that keeps society running.
With just one-third of our total tax revenues, state and local governments provide more than 90 percent of K-12 funding, about 75 percent of infrastructure investment, as well as about half of both higher education and Medicaid expenditures. And those are just the big ticket items. Beyond spending, states and localities administer courts that oversee 30 out of 31 legal cases, and are charged with protecting democracy by running our elections. Regardless of how you measure progress—whether you want better schools, more housing, sustainable transit, or a less racist criminal justice system—it would behoove us all to think a whole lot more about the states.
Actually, states do just about all the stuff.
Even where the federal government does “do” something, most often states are called on to actually do the thing. The federal government, for example, provides various subsidies and funding streams for childcare, but it is states that must issue licenses, set standards, oversee providers, and distribute the money. Most provide supplemental funding as well. A similar arrangement holds for the massive task of managing Medicaid (our national health care program for low-income people), as well as various housing and social welfare programs like SNAP (commonly referred to as food stamps). I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that, outside of distributing money and maintaining the armed forces, state and local governments do almost everything that government does.
Recently, President Biden’s Build Back Better initiative has raised a good example of this dynamic at work: The proposal has been trumpeted as providing universal pre-K for three and four year olds. But what does it actually do? It offers states a portion of the money that these programs would cost and leaves them to figure out the rest. Matt Bruenig, who has provided a lot of useful analysis on the matter, comes from the perspective that this is a flaw in BBB and that the federal government should simply do the job itself. Matt is smarter than me but I think that’s a lot easier said than done.
My perspective is that state primacy on many social programs is both reasonable and inevitable, and that we should focus on working within that paradigm. The next few bullets explain why.
As political and economic jurisdictions, states make sense.
To start, let’s consider that every state in America is the size of a large- or medium-sized country. The map below (which I somewhat ironically stole from the conservative think-tank AEI) labels every state with its closest comparison by GDP. They range from California, which would be the world’s 4th largest national economy, to Vermont, which would be the 148th largest (out of about 243 countries).
A similar comparison holds true for population, as shown in the map below (which I stole from another conservative think-tank, heh heh).
My reason for pointing this out is twofold: First, coordinating essential services for these large jurisdictions is an enormous job worthy of a lot more attention and resources than we are currently devoting. Second, states on their own are amply capable of making the big investments in education, healthcare, and general well-being that most countries have been making for decades. Here in Minnesota, for example, I am fond of reminding people that our state is roughly the same size and wealth as Finland, which is a sovereign nation with one of the world’s most enviable social welfare states.
Additionally, and at the risk of sounding a little fanciful, I think that states are a nice size. While the U.S. is an enormous and extremely heterogenous place, individual states offer a degree of intimacy that could be useful for creating a more cohesive and productive politics. Every state contains a mix of urban, rural, and suburban areas capable of sustaining a healthy and balanced society, but their relative geographic uniformity (a dry desert, the western mountains, the frozen North) and other cultural touch points (da Bears, etc.) offer at least a hope of shared identity that is harder to establish for the country as a whole (and usually jingoistic when present).
I envision this last point will draw a lot of eye rolls, so let me move on to a related but more substantial idea:
Local politics are a lot less stupid than national politics.
For years, political scientists and other commentators have pointed out that our country’s politics are becoming increasingly nationalized and this—pardon my French—is a fucking disaster.1 Rather than considering the physical condition of our neighborhoods and seeking relief from collective challenges, we now spend our political lives reacting to a far-removed narrative playing out on a national stage.
As a result, our politics are almost entirely disconnected from the success of our elected leaders, and we have forgotten that government is meant to help us. Instead of voting based on the things we want for our communities, we are sharply divided and focused on picking the team that supports science, or whose emails were on the correct server, or whatever CNN, Fox, and the rest of our highly concentrated national media outlets are dueling over on a given day. There is even academic research finding that nationalization and polarization go hand-in-hand, and that policy differentiation at the state level has declined as our parties and elected officials have become more the same.
The separation of our politics and tangible reality also feeds itself. The more we focus on national events with only vague relevance to our daily lives, the more we lose our frame of reference for judging the success of our political institutions. And the less we feel ownership over those institutions and empowered to change them, the more elections center on whatever stupid narrative the media kicks up. Rather than thinking about our communities’ needs, we rely on national stories about whether we have a “good economy” or “bad economy” based on a few incomplete leading indicators. Right now, for example, we’re being told we have terrible inflation. But would we be so obsessed if it weren’t the national narrative? If we looked at our more immediate surroundings, wouldn’t we find a lot more important issues to dwell on? Perhaps the rapid deterioration of public education? In the last two decades, the number of schools cutting instruction down to four days per week has increased more than six-fold. This is not only a problem in its own right, but a sign of our local government decline that is echoed in lost transit infrastructure, ineffective public safety systems, and more.
Compared to the national circus, what local politics we have left remain more coherent and grounded in practical realities and the quality of local institutions. In polling conducted for her book Read My Lips, Vanessa Williamson found that people’s knee-jerk disapproval of “big government” often disappears the moment you start to name the things that government does. People want clean water, better schools, and good roads, they just don’t enjoy the image of a large faceless bureaucracy. Along these lines, other polling by Gallup shows that Americans trust their state and local governments considerably more than the federal government.
The relative chill and coherence of local politics is something I can confirm from personal experience. Having knocked doors in elections at all levels of government, I know that, “the school down the street needs more money” is a much easier conversation than, “who are you supporting in this year’s presidential election?” Ask one, and you may find you disagree with someone. Ask the other, and you may find out that Joe Biden is a lizard.
My hope is that a return to state and local politics will help us shake off all this confusion and connect back to the value of government and the importance of our votes. But in addition to reclaiming our political sanity…
More localized politics have a better chance of succeeding.
From any progressive/leftist standpoint, the focus on the federal government is terrible strategy. First and foremost, until we abolish the senate, it sets progressive policymakers up for an uphill battle. With smaller, more conservative states holding disproportionate power in congress, national progress on policy will always be unduly hampered by the more conservative members of the union. Thankfully, there is one serious flaw in the common perception that our government was designed to impede progress—in truth it is only our federal government that is designed this way. As recently observed in a worthwhile New York Times video op-ed by Johnny Harris and Binyamin Appelbaum, many blue states have enormous leeway to enact transformative policies if they could only find the will to do so.
The lack of pressure on state and local governments to make things better, I would surmise, has a lot to do with the fact that no one is looking their way. In addition to the disappearance of local media, turnout in local elections has plummeted to all-time lows just as national participation has surged. Thankfully, low participation itself offers a second strategic advantage—a grassroots movement need not be enormous to sway an election at the state or local level.
The final point on this final bullet is a simple one: There are a lot of states. So while a robust state and local strategy won’t deliver universal progress, it could improve living conditions for tens or hundreds of millions of people. This could lead to widespread or even national adoption, as has happened with Social Security and several other substantial federal programs that began at the state level.
Having now laid out my primary case, I’ll address a few likely counterpoints.
The first and most important counter argues that the federal government really can do all these things and that to accept state primacy is to accept a level of inequality we should not tolerate. I don’t completely disagree in theory, but pragmatically I believe cases where this is possible are few and far between. The federal government is not going to take over schools, urban planning, or any of the other area-specific, management-intensive tasks handled by state and local governments. Additionally, as mentioned above, I think these big sweeping policies are extremely unlikely to pass and very likely to fail if passed.
Another reasonable critique would be to argue that the corporatization of our politics (and the Democratic party in particular) is the real culprit here, and that the party has abandoned a more coherent material politics intentionally rather than as the result of some broad phenomenon of nationalization. If that’s accurate, then all levels of government will fail us. I think there is truth in this argument, but I believe that the two are mutually reinforcing—national politics are inherently disconnected from the practical needs surrounding us, so a retreat from our dumb national politics and towards more grounded state and local issues could help reverse the current death spiral of stupidity.
More importantly, I think that the shift left must commence either way, and that I would much rather bet on it happening from the ground-up rather than the top-down. And for all the reasons discussed above, I feel fairly confident that even a corporate state-level Democratic party will be more driven to deliver tangible progress—and more likely to succeed in doing so—than an ideologically identical party at the federal level.
I also anticipate there will be some pushback pointing out that states are the culprits behind some of the most harmful, discriminatory policies in the land. I could not agree more. State and local governments have enacted horrible brutality through their policies. The refusal by many to expand Medicaid at no cost under the ACA is a prime example and I certainly support federal programs establishing universal individual benefits. But in most cases, these programs require institutions, and most of these live at the state level, so we are forced to reckon with this reality even if we don’t like it.
The final critique I can think of is that this approach would leave people stuck in red states behind. First of all, we should of course exhaust all federal, state, and local options to create a more humane, just, and inclusive world. I am just describing why I think states offer a comparative advantage. More to the point, though, I believe that improving life for the working class is a winning idea and that if some states were to start offering popular programs with tangible benefits, like free childcare or college, others would find it hard not to follow along to some degree.
Is that too optimistic? Well, here’s some more optimism: I also think that a return to state and local politics could be healing for a society that is suffering from decades of social atomization.
Ok, obviously it’s late, so I’ll end there. Thanks for reading!
There are several commonly-cited reasons behind the shift, including candidate behavior and the erosion of (corrupt) patronage networks, but there are two that I think are particularly important to keep in mind. The first has to do with the loss of our independent local new sources and the rise of national news conglomerates. The second centers on the evolution (or decline) of our political parties, which now draw their funding and leadership networks from a centralized corporate lobbying structure instead of ground-up power from strong state parties and local chapters.