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by bigstrat2003 425 days ago
It would absolutely be more healthy. One of the big problems facing our country is that we have centralized so much power in the federal government (which wasn't meant to have it), that everything the federal government does becomes super contentious. The election of a president should be, in a better world, relatively boring because the real action is happening at the state or even local levels. But instead, the president has so much power to affect things that the elections become a desperate fight as people perceive it to be an existential threat if the wrong person gets elected.

It's been a long process to get that much power in the federal government - it goes back at least to FDR (so, near a hundred years now), and I've seen arguments that it goes all the way back to the Civil War. But I do firmly believe that the centralizing of power is destroying us. We got away with it when the nation was more united in its values and culture, and even then it could be contentious. But today vast swathes of the country share little to nothing in the way of values or culture. Of course we can't get along when such widely disparate groups of people are tied together and a single government body is controlling large portions of their lives.

1 comments

> the real action is happening at the state or even local levels

A lot of it is. For example the California housing shortage? It’s all state and local. But the same single family zoning pattern played out in many places.