Katherine Dalton, Localism with Teeth

The principles underlying states’ rights and secession are ideas many writers here sympathize with. And as “localists,” we can’t separate ourselves from association with these terms. This is particularly true of “states’ rights.” What else do we mean when we talk about greater local autonomy and power, but states’ rights? What is subsidiarity, but the moral argument for the devolved power of states’ rights? What is federalism? We can avoid certain terms, in preference for others with less baggage, but we can’t avoid their meaning when their meaning is our own.

All talk of local autonomy, all calls for devolution of power from a central government, must in the end be calls for the rights of states to oppose and if necessary nullify federal overreaching. Otherwise those calls are just hot air. That is because politics is first and last about power, not highway beautification or universal health coverage. Anyone who has tried to argue with representatives of a federal agency—with, say, the U.S. Forest Service about the illogic of cutting down the woods the agency exists to manage—should know that earnest requests for an obvious good can have little effect on a large bureaucracy which exists to protect not woodlands but itself. The people who work for the Forest Service will follow a logic in making their decisions, but it will be the logic of their budget, not of the forest or the forest’s neighbors or the Indiana bat.