Free the States

I’ve written about this before. It’s one of my pet peeves. The U.S. Left is not much attuned to the basic federal structure of the U.S. public sector. A Dissent volume about the future of the left failed to engage with it entirely. The premise that you have to have national reforms -- that you can only address a need if you do so everywhere, all at once -- is a constraint on progress.

Politics tends to be local. Mobilization conditions and opportunities differ from place to place, so what is right for NYC is not going to work in Nebraska. What is of interest in Nebraska will be insufficiently ambitious for NYC.

I suggest three priority areas to which state-based organizing can orient itself: health care, free college, and state aid to local public education. States can do most anything in the field of non-defense policy. All it takes is money. State and local administration of SNAP (’food stamps’) and Medicaid is Federally funded. They can do nice things in those programs out of reach of the Feds. They used to do the opposite, to curb enrollment in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC, a.k.a. ‘Welfare’).

States can add health benefits, alongside Medicaid. They can reverse the defunding of aid to public community colleges and universities (which should put downward pressure on the costs of private institutions). And they can improve their fiscal equalization regarding school districts. I leave the legal stuff to others better equipped, such as the author of the paper linked above.

The fate of those unfortunates in less-blue states is up to them, but that is the case now. Of course national reforms are better, when you can get them.

States’ borrowing horizons are more limited than the Feds, so it does take money, like by ‘taxing the rich.’ Call it a feature, not a bug.