Thanks for this conversation.
I have to agree that in many ways the Federal Government is ineffective and has functioned counter to any sort of diversity equity and inclusion. I want it to be something it has never successfully been.
In Reconstruction and again in the 50s and 60s an interventionist federal government came in to try to legislate against racism where individual states we unable to. At the federal level, segregation became illegal.
The rallying cry for Southern states fighting desegregation has always been "States Rights," so I find myself suspicious of a "let states sort it out" solution.
It is enticing to think about states rights when we look at how ineffective the federal government has been at combatting injustice. We might think that the states might do a better job. Maybe they could? I think history says otherwise.
When the Tea Party first came out in 2010, a friend of mine invited me to a rally. The flyer said many of the same things about the Federal Government that I thought myself. At the time I was a Green Party member and wanted nothing to do with establishment Democrats. I'm glad I stayed home, because that particular anti-government movement was a tool of the wealthy to f**k the rest of us, but the language was enticing. I can see how Trump rose to power on the same language.
Over time, I have migrated to the Democrats. Bernie brought me in. I think I can have some influence if I chose the lesser of two evils and work on changing them from within, given our entrenched two-party system.
There is one point we agree on, which is the importance of community. I want a United States where individual communities can flourish. An example is the Amish in Wisconsin. It seems like they function outside of the noise. No one is telling them what to do and they just keep on keeping on. Maybe the Amish are allowed to exist that way because they are white? I think about how distressing Black independence movements are to certain white people.
I don't think handing it all over to the states would accomplish what we both seem to want - flourishing of all communities. There is a writer on Medium - Andew Tanner maybe - who keeps writing about the imminent division of the United States into regional units. When I lived in California, many folks in the Bay Area thought that would be a good idea. I didn't. Maybe my clinging to the concept of making the United States better is just tilting at windmills you gave up on long ago?
