Look Away!

Federalism, modesty, and states' responsibilities.

By John Schwenkler,  November 11, 2008

In the wake of the Democrats’ Election Day sweep, it is only natural that Republican Party leaders and other political observers have begun turning to the party’s governors for potential sources of leadership and innovation. Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, and — yes — Sarah Palin: these are the names being mentioned alongside ex-governors Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee as the most likely faces of the GOP’s future. “If there is any hope” for the Republican Party, writes David Broder, its governors “are the ones most likely to provide it.”

The impulse here is an appropriate one: many Republican governors have been politically successful in ways that the national party can only hope to emulate, and the ideas they have championed may be able to offer some much-needed intellectual fuel to a political establishment that is just about running on empty. But there is also a temptation here to move in a direction sharply counter to the conditions that made these successes possible in the first place.

The temptation I have in mind here is one that I’ve referred to before as the political “farm system,” where executive experience at the state level is treated as a training ground for a career in federal governance, an opportunity to hone the skills and develop the policy acumen necessary for the presidency. Hence young politicians are to be given a few years to practice the craft of running a nation writ small before moving on to a shot at the real thing: “what is happening in the states,” as Peggy Noonan puts it in a recent interview, “and who is leading in and rising in the states, is going to yield up the leaders of the future.”

Noonan goes on, though, to expand on this remark in a way that undermines any view of governors as presidents-in-training — and in so doing, she speaks directly to the heart of conservatism:

The great story of the next few years, and maybe longer than a few, will be what is happening [in the states], and what is happening in the American culture. The McCain-Palin moment will pass, America will continue. Conservatives have to stop looking to Washington, it cannot solve our lives. And it’s not a very conservative impulse, to always be looking at and to the federal establishment.

The states, Noonan is saying, don’t yield only the conservative “leaders of the future” — they give us the leaders of the present, too. And so political and legislative successes at state and local levels are not mere precursors to the attempt to do the same sorts of things in federal policy, but rather political ends in their own right, and indeed ways to make intervention from the federal establishment that much less necessary.

There are lots of reasons to favor this approach, not least among them the way that decentralized governance provides opportunities for real innovation to a degree that an approach centered in Washington very rarely can. Even large-scale challenges like those posed by climate change are arguably amenable to this sort of strategy: rather than instituting a single, nationwide policy for carbon reduction, the federal government might set goals for each state to find its own ways to meet, with carbon taxes or stricter emissions controls figuring centrally in some areas while congestion pricing, creative zoning policies, and infrastructure development take pride of place in others. Very few problems have one-size-fits all solutions, especially in a nation the size of America.

Put slightly differently, we can understand the goal to be one of building on the traditional language of states’ rights to make the further case for the importance of states’ responsibilities. If conservatives don’t want interference from the federal government, they need to do more to show that they don’t need it — and demonstrating that conservative policies implemented at the statewide level can successfully address the challenges of climate change, health care, education, transportation policy, and so on will be a crucial step toward doing this.

But it’s not just conservative policies that have the potential to flourish as a result of this sort of strategy; conservative politics can take a much healthier shape, too.


Broder’s column, for example, runs through a list of Republican governors that is about as diverse as can be: Indiana’s Daniels, Louisiana’s Jindal, Vermont’s Jim Douglas, Utah’s Jon Huntsman, and Mississippi’s Haley Barbour may share the same party affiliation, but their political ideals and approaches to governance clearly reflect the differences between their varying constituencies. By campaigning and governing in ways that are tailored to local concerns, a politician like Mitt Romney can be a success as the Republican governor of Massachusetts even if his approach would be a less-than-ideal fit for the national party, while Mike Huckabee can do well in Arkansas even though the nation may not be quite ready for a “Christian leader” of exactly his sort. Presenting themselves, not as a single-minded party with an inflexible platform and no place for disagreement, but rather as a group that is focused on enabling local governance and a consequent sensitivity to regional particularities, can help Republicans to overcome their internal conflicts without having to throw the dissenters overboard.

The flip side to this is that adopting a federalist approach to governance will also entail abandoning the attempt to make federal policy decisive on issues like abortion, marriage, drug policy, and euthanasia. But the attempt to impose nationwide policies in such areas is a strategy fraught with danger for social conservatives: not just because it is Constitutionally suspect, but also because there simply isn’t the sort of national consensus on such issues that many conservatives would like there to be. As Jim Manzi and Megan McArdle have recently observed, the alliance between libertarians and religious conservatives that has traditionally been at the heart of the Republican coalition requires exactly this sort of modesty — and it’s far better to win in some states while losing in others than to bet the house on Washington and lose it all at once.

None of this means, of course, that the task of crafting successful policies at the federal level will go away: it won’t, and conservatives should certainly look to the examples set by successful governors for insights into how this can be done. But making space for federalism can be a job for the federal government, too.

John Schwenkler is a contributing editor of Culture 11. His column, “The Trying,” appears twice monthly.