Nov 1, 2021
Breaking Up the American Federal Government
America’s basic problem is that it’s too big. As the USA divides into warring societies, either the unitary federal government splits or the Constitution dies.
The United States Constitution has been totally colonized by a wealthy and well-connected elite so determined to secure their petty interests they have driven the country off a cliff.
Lobbyist-owned politicians in D.C. write pork-filled programs that waste taxpayer dollars, don’t give Americans the quality of services they expect and deserve, then turn around every election and demand donations and votes to keep the game going.
Citizens United made corporations the same as people and their money sacred political speech. The Constitution has been turned against Americans by their leaders, with the two main Red and Blue factions gaining support mainly by stoking fears about what the other will do in power.
The United States is now to the point close to half of Americans once again favor outright secession. About 30% of Republicans agree that violence may be necessary to preserve their phantom vision of a country that hasn’t existed for decades.
Half of Americans live at the edge of poverty, now facing oblivion through inflation, while the Democrats who are supposed to protect them embrace their new identity as the party of the college educated. Wall Street bankers get bailed out no matter what they do, the money they get filters back into the economy and raises prices.
America is broken. The two party system has killed it. It is impossible for a two-party system reliant on an elite-dominated D.C. establishment to reform.
America is not a democracy. And that is it’s basic problem — true democracies reform, but a two-party oligarchy isn’t real democracy. America is falling apart for the same reason the United Kingdom is — its democracy has been captured by elite interests, and they refuse to allow real reform.
They would become marginally poorer and less powerful. And this they cannot stand, falsely thinking their wealth will secure them against the chaos that may soon come.
Because of America’s paralysis, the odds of a second civil war breaking out are rising by the day.
Make no mistake — America is not special. Like any other country, it is subject to the same basic social, economic, and political forces that have torn apart many a powerful nation before.
The tragedy of America’s collapse is that its leadership caste refused to accept the necessity of deep reform. 85% of Americans see a need for substantial changes to their system of government, yet the politicians don’t deliver.
Since the late 1960s the United States has been structurally frozen, locked in the vise-like grip of a now-aged elite that figured out culture wars can substitute for leadership in a two-party duopoly. For decades America added states and amended its Constitution on an almost routine basis, but not anymore.
Alaska and Hawai’i only became states when the Boomer generation was still young. For the first 150 or so years of its existence the federal government imposed no income taxes. Senators didn’t used to be elected at all.
Change used to be the norm in American politics. It has ceased at exactly the wrong time.
America has been frozen in a brutal rigidity trap for half a century, a period of time that has seen the real wages of blue collar workers decline while white collar types have been able to float or, if working for the right industry, prosper. The wealth of billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is a direct result of their ruthlessly exploiting a system that was designed to be exploited from the start.
The trap is maintained by power — wealth, prestige, and political authority. Americans are trained by their schools to worship power in one of these forms and seek it at all costs. Taught a myth of meritocracy that has never really existed in the Norman-dominated Anglo-Saxon society America’s elite have imposed, they fake it until they make it then fail to effect real change when they have a chance.
As a result, America’s economic system is in perpetual crisis, its society is essentially a caste system that pits poorer groups against each other for access to the patronage system that guards elite power, and its politics are stagnant.
In a working country, each system is largely independent of the others. Social values change with the generations. Economies swing through boom and bust phases caused by speculative investments and unanticipated shocks. Politics is a perpetual churn that broadly sets the rules players in the other two systems must follow to avoid violence.
In America, the Boomer generation holds the majority of wealth yet is refusing to retire while the Digital Generations face exponentially mounting crisis — climate change, inequality, and wars are all set to get a lot worse before they get better. Boomers were raised to believe in America eternal, the only question being whether it turned Left or Right at any given junction.
Christianized as American society is, a binary issue will always eventually become attached to morality. Good and Evil are defined and bounded, ever in conflict, compromise impossible. Politics requires that someone loses, the trick of healthy politics is making sure that isn’t always the same person.
America today resembles a church in the process of schism. Neither side can communicate with the other nor really wants to, both sides demand total victory, each in their own way.
I may personally side with the Left on most matters of policy, but I’ve studied civil wars enough to recognize how absolutely lethal it is to play team sports with politics. Americans, by and large, don’t know how to do it any other way.
That’s a big part of why America is dying. Why trying to patch the thing without dramatic reform will only lengthen the pain.
Something simply has to give — and it will, eventually. Rather than wait for violence, if Americans are willing to wake up and take control of their own democracy, the Founders passed down a powerful tool that could be used to dramatically improve the situation.
That tool is the lesser-known back door process for Amending the Constitution most media pundits are loathe to talk about. It largely bypasses Congress, evading the usual controls placed on the legislative agenda by lobbyists, and has only been used once — to repeal Prohibition back in the 1930s.
Article Five of the United States Constitution allows a convention of states to be called if two thirds of state legislatures demand one. Three quarters of state legislatures — or possibly the voters directly — must then ratify it in order for it to take effect.
That means 34 state legislatures can together begin the process for Amending the Constitution without directly involving Congress. 38 state legislatures or the voters in these states can ratify.
Most commentators reject this as flatly impossible given the extreme divide between Red and Blue America.
But I disagree, because what can both Red and Blue Americans largely agree on?
That they would prefer not to live in a place run by the other.
Guess how many states have a Democratic or Republican trifecta, meaning one party holds both chambers of their state legislature as well as the governor’s office?
38, as of November 2021.
What this means is that if a compromise that suits the voters on both sides of the Red-Blue divide can be found — America was, after all, built on a series of great compromise — it can be put into place pretty much immediately.
Americans don’t have to keep going down this road to civil war or total collapse. They can simply restructure the way the federal government works so all Americans can get on with adapting to the future however they prefer.
The basic principle of democracy is that the majority may rule, but must respect the rights of the minority. This is defied by the two-party colonization of the American political system which is binding local politics ever more closely to D.C., making it impossible even to run schools given the political rancor infesting every aspect of American life as a result of so much money flowing into politics.
And most Americans live in states with a strong Red or Blue majority. This is a simple fact — as is the hard truth that national politics does not protect minority rights in states anymore, and instead nationalizes local fights in order to gin up outrage.
To survive, America must become more democratic — this means respecting that Red States and Blue States need and deserve their own style of federal government.
The way to give them this is to break up the federal government into eight autonomous constitutional regions by grouping similar and geographically linked states together and giving them their own sub-national capitol.
Sounds crazy, right? But it isn’t at all. We’ve just been told any real change is impossible by self-interested hacks on TV.
America is so enormous and diverse that the federal government is already administered this way. Take a look at any large federal agency like the IRS or EPA or even the circuit courts — they have regional headquarters, which lets their personnel focus on a particular part of the country.
Different landscapes need different styles of management, after all. What’s fundamentally weird about America is that it claims its system is democratic when in fact voters have very little real say in where their federal tax dollars go.
The time has come not to end the Union, only to break up the unaccountable federal government that is destroying it. It’s not as if Americans particularly like it anyway — the vast majority usually disapprove of Congress, most typically oppose the President, and the Supreme Court is even politicized now.
So the answer, if you’re willing to examine the issue with open, non-partisan, scientific eyes, is to invoke Article 5 of the Constitution and push as many state legislatures as possible to demand a Constitutional Convention.
To keep it focused, each state legislature needs to adopt similar language. Something like this:
28th Amendment to the United States Constitution (proposed)
All rights, responsibilities, assets, liabilities, and power presently vested in the unitary federal government of the United States of America are hereby delegated to eight regional federal governments, each with equal and separate Constitutional authority.
A Council of elected Presidents, one from each Region, will together maintain Control of America’s nuclear deterrent and national defense in time of war, make Federal Reserve bank chair appointments, and guarantee all Americans’ right to move freely between regions.
Here’s why this simply makes sense — refer to the map at the top of this piece, then consider these population, economic, and political statistics from 2020:
Atlantic
72.3 million people
$5.5 trillion GDP, $77,000 per capita
Senate [D]22-2, House [D]74-24, 21.6m Biden, 14.9m Trump
Great Lakes
34.2 million people
$2.2 trillion GDP, $63,000 per capita
Senate [D]7-1, House [D]27-21, 9.6m Biden, 8.2m Trump
Mountain
9.3 million people
$0.5 trillion GDP, $58,000 per capita
Senate [R]13–1, House [R]11–0, 2.6m Trump, 1.6m Biden
Ohio River
31.7 million people
$1.7 trillion GDP, $55,000 per capita
Senate [R]8–2, House [R]33–8, 8.6m Trump, 6.1m Biden
Pacific
53.1 million people
$4.1 trillion GDP, $77,000 per capita
Senate [D]8-0, House[D]55-15, 15.2m Biden, 8.7m Trump
Plains
55.6 million people
$3.3 trillion GDP, $59,000 per capita
Senate [R]16–0, House[R]51–18, 13.4m Trump, 10.4m Biden
Southeast
56.7 million people
$2.9 trillion GDP, $51,000 per capita
Senate[R]10–2, House [R]47–25, 14.5m Trump, 12.9m Biden
Southwest
18.7 million people
$1.1 trillion GDP, $56,000 per capita
Senate [D]8–0, House[D]14-9, 4.7m Biden, 4.1m Trump
The economic vital statistics alone prove the lie of One America. An Xbox costs the same in Ohio and California, yet Ohioans are about 30% poorer, on average, than Californians. Even correcting for cost of living factors, it ought to be obvious that one place needs different kinds of support from the federal government.
Instead, what America has is a classic, Middle East style patronage system where if you have a problem there is always a politician willing to promise to fix it — for a price. And in a two party system where the sides are increasingly hardened this means anyone looking to the government for support is bound to one team.
Everyone on that team is forced to compete for the party’s attention and scarce space on the national agenda. Too often, the losers are the same every time — those lacking enough power to force their concerns into the public eye.
Split up the federal government into eight parts, and you transform the problem. Both parties would fragment regionally just like Facebook or Meta or whatever Zuckerberg is calling his monster these days would fragment if the right regulations were put in place to enforce free market competition in the social marketplace.
And that, folks, would wind up benefiting all Americans in the end. A decentralized federal government is a fundamentally more democratic and therefore more accountable federal government. The same principles apply to corporations and bureaucracies — it’s all in the incentive structures that bound the game.
Amend the Constitution to break up the federal government, and all of a sudden this creeping nationalization of all politics would stop cold. Trump would be a non-problem, the need to rig elections to enshrine one-party national rule would evaporate.
No longer would politicians be able to use fear of stale old hacks like Biden and Trump radically changing American life to mobilize support. Each region would have a strong majority on one side of the Red-Blue spectrum or the other — and the party in power would immediately have to focus its attention where it ought to have been all along: on local and regional issues.
The blunt simple truth is that different parts of America need different styles of government. Americans will never have live, liberty, and happiness so long as their politicians can force them to play a sick game that benefits anyone who can attach themselves to D.C. in some way.
Will the result be perfect? Of course not. Life isn’t that easy.
But breaking up the American federal government would end the slide towards a second civil war. There would be nothing left to fight for, no region could interfere in the domestic politics of any other.
The dollar would be maintained by the Federal Reserve, accountable to the new Presidents Council. In the unlikely case of a direct military attack on the United States, this Council would have the power to pull the regional military districts together to effect a joint response. People and goods would continue to flow as they do now across state lines.
Better yet, the transition wouldn’t interfere with people’s daily lives at all. The federal government would continue to operate, each region would inherit a per-person share of the national debt and national assets in their area of responsibility throughout the shift from centralized to decentralized governance.
It would simply have a new accountability structure binding it to the people. And all Americans would have a chance to prove their particular vision of government is the best, meaning that innovations could flow across regions.
America’s future is bleak, barring some kind of dramatic shift in trajectory. It appears that the next decades are set to evolve one of three ways.
- The slide to civil war continues, leading to a total collapse of the federal government in the mid to late 2020s. The union and even many states divide, possibly fighting, more likely drifting apart amid global turmoil
- America muddles through without a serious breach, slowly losing global relevance much as the United Kingdom did after the Second World War. The US, England, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand form an integrated English-speaking economic and political alliance on the global fringes.
- A period of radical non-partisan reform begins by 2025 that reboots America’s governing system to handle the challenges of the twenty-first century.
One way or another, the America we’ve all known is in terminal crisis. It can’t go on like this, it’s centralization since the Second World War will prove lethal as cult figures rise to try and seize power in D.C.
Trump wasn’t the first of his kind, and he won’t be the last. Centers of power attract sociopathic narcissists like moths to a flame. America’s federal government and especially the Presidency are the One Ring to Rule Them All in the minds of these types.
Like ants at a picnic, they won’t stop coming unless the thing that attracts them is gone.
If you care about America at all, if you want the United States to survive, the only hope is Constitutional decentralization.
It’s way past time. And the alternative, I fear, is secession.
