Anthony Lewis forgets federalism?

[Mark Tushnet]

I take Mark Scarberry's first set of questions to be (merely)
rhetorical, and not calling for answers.  As to his second, I too would
answer no to (1) ("important judicially enforceable antidote") and yes
to (2) ("important constitutional [though perhaps not judicially
enforceable] antidote"), with a qualification arising from my
uncertainty about my answer to (3) ("important cultural antidote").

The uncertainty is that -- despite the routine invocation of Texas as a
counterexample -- I am unpersuaded that the nation's diversity
correlates sufficiently with state boundaries for federalism to have any
real cultural bite.  Sometimes I'm inclined to give the Texas example
away, and ask whether a nation largely homogenous in the remaining 49
states can sustain a culture of geographically defined federalism; more
recently, I've thought about setting a research assistant to the task of
looking at various cultural indicators (proportion of meals consumed at
MacDonald's, or attendance at which movies, or popularity of which
television shows) to see if in fact Texas is really as distinct as is
routinely claimed.

I think it's easy to romanticize the connection between geography and
cultural variation in the United States and, while recognizing that I
have a reasonably cosmopolitan consciousness, wonder whether (believe
that) there's much cultural variation correlated with geography.  If
there isn't, I don't think that the answer to (3) could be yes.  But,
once again, the issue of the degree of that correlation is an empirical
question (of a sort that law professors are strongly disinclined to
address).
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