Putting the U.S. back together again
William Appleman Williams' vision for a new federalism
8 minute read
This is the fourth part of a series exploring radical historian William Appleman Williams vision of regionalism as an option for reclaiming democracy in the U.S. The first is here. The second is here. The third is here. This is the second regular Friday posting of The Raven.
In recent posts I’ve been offering the outlines of an alternative vision for the United States, drawing from the thinking of radical historian William Appleman Williams, who during the 1976 bicentennial proposed re-constituting the U.S. as a federation of regional commonwealths, each with strong powers of self-governance. I am offering these thoughts now in anticipation of political upheaval in the U.S. over coming years. If the U.S. does experience a certain level of break-up this decade, how would we begin to put it back together, say in the 2030s?
The fuel for the fire is an increasing sense of the illegitimacy of the political system across the political spectrum, growing since the Supreme Court handed George Bush the White House in a judicial coup in 2000. (Blaming Ralph Nader takes the onus off Antonin Scalia.) Then Bush lied us into the Iraq War. Then the 2008 meltdown discredited the financial system. But Obama, elected to office with a progressive patina, put the people responsible for the meltdown in charge. Over his term he managed to give the banks nearly the equivalent of a year’s U.S. gross domestic product in free money, driving wealth inequality to record levels. Meanwhile, the “peace candidate” expanded the permawars. On the right, efforts led by Trump to discredit Obama as not a citizen, and then Trump’s “Stop the Steal” Big Lie, further eroded the credibility of the system. Whoever is elected president in 2024 will be seen as illegitimate by vast swathes of the populace.
The product of these long trends, with the backdrop of income stagnation and most people’s increasing difficulty making ends meet, is support for a break-up of blue and red states by 52% of Trump voters and 41% of Biden voters, as reported earlier in The Raven. I do not expect an official break-up of the Union, or military conflict, but a de facto division. We won’t see the Battle of Antietam, but instead increasing centrifugal tendencies as states and localities move to nullify federal authority, such as Missouri and county governments are attempting with federal gun laws. It is easy to envision this coming from blue as well as red states. After all, marijuana possession is still a federal crime, even if it has been legalized by many states. One could imagine what would happen if a radical Republican regime attempted to ramrod fossil fuel infrastructure on states that have clearly rejected it.
In his modest proposal in 1976, Williams suggested returning to the original framework of the U.S., the Articles of Confederation, under which states had far greater autonomy, and the federal government was relatively weak. Williams was a student of Charles Beard, an earlier professor in the University of Wisconsin history department. Beard pointed out the anti-democratic nature of the Constitution in his 1913 book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Creating a strong federal government was a move by the financial classes of the early U.S. to tamp back actual democratic movements in the states, diluting payment of war debts by issuing paper money – They wanted gold – and reducing tax burdens on people struggling in the post-Revolution depression. This interpretation has been validated by major U.S. historians such as Gordon Wood in his history of the early U.S., Empire of Liberty, and in The Framers’ Coup by legal historian Michael Klarman, recommended by Noam Chomsky as the definitive work on the topic.
A number of people will question the value of even attempting to put the United States back together, no doubt including some of my readers. I have speculated on what it would mean for the U.S. to break up into many small countries. After all, a powerful unitary state has been a great engine of empire both domestically and internationally. Williams saw that too. “If the objective is to govern the continent under one system, then it can only be done as an empire.”[1] He envisioned a more decentralized order in which regions take a stronger role in developing their own more self-sufficient economies as an antidote to what he called “empire as a way of life.” But he also saw reasons to retain a federal union. He proposed a new federalism. One has the sense Williams was somewhat tongue-in-cheek making his Articles proposal. His new federalism definitely goes beyond the Articles.
“The new federalism will be based on three kinds of fundamental agreement. The first concerns a firm commitment to basic rights as a condition of membership in the federation. We can begin with the Bill of Rights and move on through other political, and social and economic foundations of a democratic socialist community. The second involves procedures for reaching and implementing federal decisions. The third is defined by the ongoing negotiations between such regional communities as they deal with routine economic relationships. Each of us can and must offer suggestions in each area, but they can become meaningful only as we begin to create a social movement dedicated to the basic objective.”[2]
Common agreement on rights sets out a crucial distinction between the kind of democratic decentralization of power Williams proposed, and secessionist and radical state’s rights philosophies promoted by the far right. The Texas law restricting women’s reproductive rights is one of the clearest examples of the latter. The erosion of voting rights in state after state, supported by Supreme Court decisions, demonstrates what happens when federal authority to enforce rights is diminished. Meanwhile, radical rightist movements in Western states seek control of federal public lands to enable unbridled resource exploitation. Confrontations between the Bundy ranching family and the Bureau of Land Management over grazing have been a flashpoint, leading to the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Preserve in Oregon.
The critical point here is that we need a broader agreement to combat narrow local interests and bigotries. It must be noted that federal guarantees of social and environmental rights date largely to the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, and they came only as a result of determined social movements organizing on the ground. Despite the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954, it took years of organizing by the Civil Rights Movement to break official school segregation. (Unofficial segregation is unfortunately still widespread.) It was only grassroots and often dangerous work by that movement that gained the voting rights that are now being eroded. The women’s movement was fighting for reproductive rights for years before the Supreme Court validated them in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Facing a likely overturning of Roe, the fight will probably have to go back to the streets. Public lands would be unbridled resource exploitation zones without environmental movement struggles to preserve ecosystems such as the 1980s-90s Northwest forest wars.
This is why Williams’ call for a broad social movement as outlined in my previous post is key. The federal government has been a guarantor of rights, but as we see today, rights are eroding under a conservative onslaught. This is likely to continue under a rightist Supreme Court and a federal judiciary stuffed with judges espousing radical conservative judicial philosophies. It is clear that the rights of people and nature will be retained, regained and advanced only by rooted social movements.
That drives to an important conclusion. This series has been illuminating Bill Williams’ ideas for re-shaping the U.S. as a federation of regional commonwealths. The practical difficulties to reach that goal are immense. It may seem unrealistic, even utopian, to envision a nation divided in so many ways to come back together in an alternative form. (In future posts I will be addressing the gnarly issues of divides within regions, such as those between urban and rural areas.) At the same time, a starkly different form may in fact be what’s coming. We clearly are in uncharted waters. But whether or not an alternative vision is realistic, organizing a rooted social movement with a broad vision has value at multiple levels.
If massive political breakdowns and break-ups occur as seems likely, we will need a rooted social movement with a vision of how to put things back together. If we somehow skirt by national political crisis, and we can hope for that, a social movement with a vision still fills a vital political role, to move us forward in specific localities, states and regions, as well as the U.S. as a whole. If a genuinely fascist regime takes power, a rooted social movement will be what we will need to resist it.
In any set of eventualities, a broad social movement with a vision is vital. Not single-issue or reactive, but, as Williams said, one that generates its own objectives and sets its own agenda. Even if breakdowns are limited and we don’t have to put the whole thing together again, plenty is already broken down, politically, socially, economically and environmentally. Repairing our many broken institutions and situations is going to take people organizing from the grassroots, in specific places, and linking up across geographies, with a comprehensive vision for a different order of things.
In coming posts, The Raven will continue to explore how Williams’ vision translates into practical action and solutions in the current political environment. Go to Part 5.
[1] William Appleman Williams, America Confronts a Revolutionary World: 1776-1976, William Morrow and Company, New York, 1976, p. 183
[2] Ibid, p. 198