America’s Response to the Coronavirus Proves Federalism Isn’t Dead

Previously marginalized state and local governments have taken the lead in fighting the present pandemic.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s America was supposed to be long gone. Seeing political centralization as the great woe of the French state — which had been periodically wracked by violent instability since 1789, and would be again in 1848 — the young French aristocrat found a possible cure in the highly decentralized system of Jackson-era American government. Political life, he wrote, was overwhelmingly concentrated at the local level, where town meetings still decided most matters of significance. Counties were administrative divisions that mostly existed on paper, state governors were kept on an extremely tight leash, and the federal government was still in its infancy, its powers strictly confined to a few undeniably national concerns.

Until several weeks ago, it was hard not to think that contemporary America had turned Tocqueville’s analysis completely on its head. Following the Civil War, the vast expansion of federal power that was deemed necessary to guarantee the rights of freed slaves against the states that had enslaved them, and to enforce Reconstruction while it lasted, famously (though more gradually than some have implied) accompanied a grammatical change in the way we describe the United States, from plural to singular: “The United States are” became “the United States is.” Early 20th century Progressives led the growth of a federal bureaucracy, which expanded with the New Deal and the Second World War until, by the end of the 1940s, it was common to speak of a federal “administrative state,” attached to the executive, ruling the country, unaccountable to voters.

All of this led inevitably to the moment just before the current crisis hit, in which national politics, blaring on TV screens and dominating social-media feeds, seemed to crowd out state and local politics. The newspapers that had reminded Americans of the importance of these closer, smaller realms declined and disappeared. Ticket-splitting, which could be considered an indicator of the strength of the Tocquevillian tradition, hit a new low in 2018.