To some extent, I think we could use some redrawing of the borders and reallocation of the states to better map to actual metro regions and group areas that have common interests together. It'd be a bit ticklish to get right, and leave everything functional, but there are some wicked schisms between areas of our historical states, and other places that are spliced up into multiple states that probably should be joined together.. It'll never happen, but it's a fun thought experiment.
I don't think things are going to get better on this front by themselves, as the economy seems to be centralizing more and more, such that even the second and third rate regional cities are hollowed out and population and money clusters ever tighter. It's already evident that the urban areas can throw their weight around and vote in pretty much whatever they want in a lot of places, and the rest of the state has to mobilize completely to defeat them. I'm from Maine originally, and it's been a constant battle lately to keep the Portland metro area from passing ballot initiatives that make sense in their little neck of the woods, but are insane when you get off the I-95 corridor.
> I'm from Maine originally, and it's been a constant battle lately to keep the Portland metro area from passing ballot initiatives that make sense in their little neck of the woods, but are insane when you get off the I-95 corridor.
I'm also from Maine, and this is true. And I agree that some redrawing is necessary, because the reason things work as you describe in Maine is tha the Portland metro area is almost half the state's poptulation. They kinda should get what they want if we're talking about this like it's a democracy. As you note, dividing things up and creating new levels of administration to better reflect this would be a real problem--'cause now Maine-minus-Portland opens their wallet and a couple flies fly out.
(I'm on the "federalism is broken" bandwagon, though, so, eh. I dunno.)
The best answer is to decentralize and devolve power as much as feasible. That way, everybody can go their own way as much as possible. Of course some people/groups don't like that and want to impose their way of doing things everywhere.
All groups do that. Even you're doing that with your comment right here. "Everybody should do X." That's what humans do with our shared moral languages. It is inevitable.
But you probably think it's different when you're proposing a decentralization rule like this, because it is about empowering people, not oppressing people. Of course, you'll empower people who want to oppress people, but you'll have shirked any responsibility for actual consequences, so it's all ok, isn't it? You're not advocating for your country to be divided and conquered, just divided. So you won't be responsible for the inevitable conquering that occurs afterward.
You have solved the problem of personal responsibility, but social responsibility still exists, and you haven't proposed anything to manage it.
Different people have different values, and one person's tolerance is another's oppression. (The more authoritarian sides of the Left and Right each see opponents as "too tolerant" of different things.)
Recent studies have suggested that there may be some fundamental cognitive factors that control political alignment. They may even be genetic. If this turns out to be true, are you still OK with forcing the other side to live by your "correct" rules? Isn't that just tribalism and conquest?
Just because people have different values does not mean we don't share values, and more importantly, that we don't share reality. The things that I am intolerant toward are a disregard for the facts, a disregard for demonstrated relevance, and a disregard for the legitimacy of expertise and aggregate authority.
>Isn't that just tribalism and conquest?
I mean, if you're saying that this conflict is an integral part of human nature, then you're not asking me to change my mind; you're giving me a justification for why I don't have to. That knife cuts both ways.
This is always the problem I have when trying to reason about American conservatism; if God gave you your riches, then if you lose them, attribute it to God. If might makes right, then I am not wrong to deny it so long as that denial leads to victory. Etc.. There's nothing there to tell me I'm wrong, only that people disagree. So wrongness has to be a kind of aggregate disagreement, and that leads to liberalism. Both roads lead to liberalism.
Asking that power be decentralized as feasible with more local levels and ultimately the individual as the default repository may be a moral exhortation like a call to communism in semantic sense but the end result if successful certainly wouldn't be the same.
I'm not asking for anarchy so we can still have our roads and bridges but for stuff like forced SSM cake baking I think we can take a page out of the prog playbook when they were arguing against the Religious Right and say that morality, beyond whats necessary for basic stability should be a private affair, and not actively managed and instilled by the State.