People think of the Civil War as a slavery thing (and it was, no doubt). What many people don't see is how the Constitution fundamentally changed with the 14th Amendment immediately following the Civil War. The 14th Amendment gave the federal government the authority to intervene against the states for violating citizens' rights, and guaranteed those rights across the states, giving the federal government much more power over how the states operate. Ever since its passage, the Supreme Court has been trying to define just how much the federal government can intervene in what had been state-level questions.
It's long been my preference that we should have two things:
- Individual rights should be protected on the widest possible level--preferably nationally.
- Government powers should be devolved to the lowest possible level--state at best but county/city would be even better.
As you point out, the 14th Amendment "incorporated" the Bill of Rights against state / local action. I think that's a good thing. That's an area where federalism fails--when governments can discriminate/abuse individual rights at the local level, the Bill of Rights might as well be useless.
But as for the second part, that goes back to my large state / small state point earlier. The idea of federalism is that each State can make the policies that best meet their needs--because the needs of California and the needs of Wyoming aren't identical.
Of course, drawing the line on which policies do and don't *need* to be federal is hard. For example, things like environmental protections... It doesn't make sense that Wyoming would have a policy allowing despoiling the environment and Montana would limit that, but it's also true that things like air quality problems are much different in Los Angeles than in Siskiyou county, so maybe things like auto emission standards might need to be different by county, rather than state-level. So standards on dumping contaminants in rivers might be better to be national while auto emission particulate standards and testing requirements don't need to be.
It's true (in my view) that too much democracy is undemocratic. In states with robust direct initiatives (like California) we see the poor governance that comes from having popular votes on complex issues. A good example is prison/sentencing reform. This is a hard thing to tackle, and impossible to boil down into the kind of soundbites--and legislation--that lend themselves to popular vote (as opposed to, say, do we or do we not want the death penalty in our state, which is a simpler thing to legislate one way or the other).
Of course, one area that screwed California two ways was the gas tax increase.
The legislature increased the gas tax, and it pissed everyone off, such that we got an initiative on the ballot "Prop 6" to repeal the increase. Of note, the tax hadn't gone into effect yet, so the repeal would occur before any revenue had been generated.
But in the run-up to the election, I saw CONSTANT commercials saying that if we enacted "Prop 6", it would essentially be the end of the world and that first responders would have no money and we'd effectively all die. And it failed. Note that in all the advertisements I saw, over MONTHS, advocating against Prop 6,
not a single one mentioned that it would repeal the gas tax. They didn't even say what Prop 6 was about, only that if you voted for it, you must hate first responders.
Because the people who were slated to receive that tax revenue had HUGE coffers to advertise, while the people who were against the tax increase were basically individuals and small taxpayer watchdog groups who didn't have anywhere near the same.
I don't think Prop 6 failed because Californians truly believed that first responders,
who hadn't yet seen a dime of that revenue, would suddenly be decimated. I think Prop 6 failed because people are easily led, and didn't even understand what they were voting for/against.
