Fukuyama, Republicans and Federalism

Stumbled across Francis Fukuyama's opinion article Conservatives and the State on The American Interest website. (Fukuyama is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.) In the article, Fukuyama states:

Distrust of state authority has of course been a key component of American exceptionalism, both on the right and the left. The contemporary right has taken this, however, to an absurd extreme, seeking to turn the clock back not just to the point before the New Deal, but before the progressive era at the turn of the 20th century. The Republican party has lost sight of the difference between limited government and weak government, reflected in its agenda of cutting money for enforcement capacity of regulators and the IRS, its aversion to taxes of any sort and its failure to see that threats to liberty can come from powerful actors besides the state.

In response to Fukuyama, The American Conservative editor Daniel McCarthy said, "the abiding problem with the Republican Party is not its mythical anti-statism but its own reckless uses of government power when in office."

I agree with Fukuyama's statement that the Republican party has lost sight of the difference between limited government and weak government. Too many Republicans speak about government and public office as "necessary evils." However, to help ensure limited government, the GOP needs to re-discover the concept known as Federalism. In fact, reinvigorating Federalism (or "local control") is a concept that many on both the Right and Left may be able to find common ground.

Check out Why Congress Doesn’t Work by Leo Linbeck III. Linbeck, a Houston construction magnate and lecturer at Rice and Stanford Universities, states...

The major challenges facing the United States today are not problems of policy, but problems of governance. Our system is broken because we have imposed policies from the center that should be decided locally. Making those centralized policies more “conservative” will not improve our system; in fact, that will likely make things worse by increasing support for a bad governance structure. And a good policy under a bad governance structure ultimately morphs into a bad policy.

The “horizontal” fight over what is decided is a diversion from the more important “vertical” fight over who decides. The vertical fight will determine whether we restore the American system of self-governance or continue our progression toward the Bismarckian procedural state.

But shifting the focus from horizontal to vertical confuses those who are embedded in traditional politics. Their goal is to elect a national government that will impose their policy preferences on all 300 million Americans. For them, politics is about power and policy.

Image from "Why Congress Doesn't Work"