The Europeanization of the US
We are becoming more European every day.
No, not “us” as in my students and I, currently rambling the rails and cities of central Germany — but “us” as in the United States. Where once we were a federal union, the USA is becoming a slapped-up version of a confederacy of squabbling mini-countries.
European history teaches a harsh but simple lesson. Basically, it is this: Division among similar places leads to violence, wars of conquest, mass carnage over religion, and the like. Division makes for misery on both the mass scale and the individual experience. The European Union, an attempt to at least avoid war and make roughly fair trade possible in Europe (and the marginalia that might or might not include classical Europe) has blossomed into a major series of agreements between sovereign nations. This allows them to collude on getting rid of fossil fuels, support the Ukrainian nation in its war against the Russian Federation, agree on climate change measures and a host of other things. Despite all their posing and snorting at the United States from time to time, they are trying to become us in the important ways we arrange governing.
The founders confronted a gang of 13 sovereign colonies, each with their own histories, traditions, ruling aristocracies — each with its own laws, judiciary, and connection to faith tradition. Where Massachusetts maintained a vaguely Puritan outlook, Pennsylvania was still largely Quaker. The Baptists had yet to be invented and would not come onto the U.S. stage until the 1840s – leaving the South largely Anglican (Episcopal). They all had their own coinage. Sometimes weights and measures differed. The old Articles of Confederation made for a nightmare of patchwork silliness and indecision, so the wise ones went for federation – a central government making most of the decisions but leaving some things to the members states if the policy was truly local in nature.
But this seems lost on us now.
Over the past few decades, states have argued that the expenditure of resources on state improvement should be left to the state legislatures. The national income tax should be applied to states not in the form of categorical dictum (grants aimed at particularly local problems from D.C.), but in block grants to legislatures to spend as they saw fit — to apply to conditions that were, after all, local and not federal.
In most cases (barring real corruption) this worked out fairly well.
But the next step – the state-centered and state-controlled application of social policy — has been a disaster. Allowing states to make state law about things like who is allowed to love and marry whom, whether or not the state – the State as opposed to the Nation – will dictate chattel status over women’s bodies, how contraception is managed, what “recreational substances” are allowed, and so on. This has created a 19th Century European catastrophe of programmatic and legal conflicts. Things that are boring conventions in one state will send you to prison in another. As to policy grounded in religious belief: Europe fought a war that lasted for 30 years over this in the not-too-distant past, and the divisions arising from it are only now – under EU federation – really being resolved.
Though I have sometimes strong preferences in these areas – mostly known by the readers of this column – pushing them forward is not the purpose or intention of this essay. National policymaking is. Issues along these lines must be the decision of the whole nation, not its components, as makeshift California or Mississippi laws of the moment. In so many cases, these conflicts are clearly things that we need to resolve as a nation, not as jig-sawed jurisdictions in a confederated landscape.
As Europe finally learns the lesson the founders taught us in 1789, we seem, now, to be doomed to being dragged back to the moldy and calamitous European model of 1788.
R. Bruce Anderson (randerson2@flsouthern.edu) is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics at Florida Southern College in Lakeland.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: The Europeanization of the US
