Federalism and Liberty

[Mark Graber]

Surely Sandy's account of liberty and federalism is a bit too simple
(as are all our two paragraph email missives).  For the many framers,
liberty was defined primarily in political terms.  Persons were free
to the extent they could meaningfully participate in government.
Federalism, thus, promotes liberty to the extent that people are able
to participate more meaningfully in state governments.  Second,
assume people generally like to live with those who share certain
really fundamental beliefs.  It may well be that allowing local rule
with minimize the number of people who truly believe that the rules
that govern them are tyranneous.  Both these positions are open to
question and rely on interpretation of empirical data (and, in fact,
for reasons Sandy suggests, I take the national side of the debate),
but federalism is typically understood as more than the liberty of
local majorities to tyrannize local minorities (why is nationalism
not the liberty of national majorities to tyrannize national
minorities).

Mark A. Graber
mgraber at bss2.umd.edu