[mikeash]

Of course, but there’s plenty of milder acts that many of them would enact. How many would bring back poll tests (presumably with some suitable grandfather clause), reinstitute segregation, recriminalize homosexuality, recriminalize interracial marriage, etc.?

[dsfyu404ed]

I think you're over-estimating how much the federal government actively does to protect people's rights.

The federal government doesn't seem concerned that the state I live in requires you to pay about $200 and get the local chief of police to sign off before you can exercise a particular right in any capacity whatsoever.

Civil asset forfeiture is still a thing in many states.

Some state could adopt an obviously unconstitutional hate speech law tomorrow and it would take years before it's struck down and even then there'd be no recourse for those already punished under it. If the state continued to enforce the law then what would happen? After another year or three of hearings and court whatnot they'd get cut off from some funding or something.

The best you can hope for when your state is violating your rights is a supreme court ruling that makes your state go "aw shucks boys, guess we can't do that anymore" and that your state actually does stop doing it. I don't see a weaker federal government changing that status quo.

The danger of putting all your eggs in the federal basket is that when something dumb happens on that level it affects us all (e.g. the net neutrality debacle). At least with the states the stupidity has to happen on it's own in each state.

[mikeash]

I think you’re underestimating just how useful those weak protections still are. The increase in freedoms over the past ~50 years has been gigantic, and a huge part of that came from federal intervention. The state I live in would almost certainly still have segregation and still outlaw my marriage, for example. Consider all the crazy shit that certain states have started doing since the Supreme Court struck down the preapproval provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

It’s far from perfect. States still try to violate civil rights and it still takes a long time to fix that, if ever. The feds sometimes push more restrictions against the wishes of states that want more freedom, like with marijuana. But overall, based on history, I think that giving the states more freedom would be a huge step backwards.

[dsfyu404ed]

I'm not saying we need to dissolve the federal government, I'm saying that if a lot of the stuff currently done by the executive branch (the alphabet soup of federal agencies) was done by the states there's really wouldn't be much of a difference from the individual liberty point of view.

[odonnellryan]

I agree in a way. Changing laws doesn't make people free. Changing culture does. Sometimes (often?) changing laws has an impact on culture for sure, but how much? It is indirect.

[mikeash]

I strongly disagree. In some states that would be the case. In others, there would be enormous regression.

[dsfyu404ed]

So why not let those states use their freedom to sink their own ship. If they do really have it wrong and you do really have it right then that will show and they'll come around in the long term.

[mikeash]

Because human rights are important and oppression is bad. States aren’t monolithic entities. This isn’t a case where people suffer the consequences of their own choices. It’s a case where some people suffer the consequences of other people’s choices. You’re proposing to allow millions to suffer indefinitely, hoping that those who rule them will eventually change their mind.

This is been tried already, and it didn’t work. What changed things was force, first military, then legal.