One of the animating delusions of late-20th Century American liberalism was the
idea that progress equals federal programs -- nationwide, standardized, fair,
and administered largely by responsible experts from Washington. It's easy to
understand why liberals thought that. It was a product of the civil rights
movement, with the awareness that at least a dozen states would, left to their
own devices, deny justice to their own citizens.

It went back further, to the
New Deal, and the sense that big challenges required national, centralized
strategies. What state could build the Tennessee Valley Administration or Social
Security? And it stemmed from the professionalization of public administration
and the expressed in President Kennedy's 1962 Yale Commencement
address, in which he declared that the problems of that time were not
ideological battles but involved "sophisticated and technical questions" to be
resolved by dispassionate experts.



So a central strategy of the right-wing attack on liberalism involved bringing
down this very pillar. "Devolve" programs to the states, and they'll be more
effective, the conservatives said. Evidence suggests that most of them didn't
really care that much -- they just instinctively understood that if
centralization was a key liberal principle, they should break it. And so fights
like the mid-90s welfare reform battle were not as much about work requirements
but about whether AFDC would retain its basic character as a federal program,
with national rules and standards, or become just an amount of money that states
could do what they wanted with. (Welfare reform was hardly the only example: the
Reagan era began with massive conversion of federal programs into block grants
to states, job training programs were largely devolved, and efforts to convert
Food Stamps and Medicaid to block grants rise up periodically.)



Beginning in the mid-1990s, though, some smart liberals began to realize that
there was more to life than desperately trying to keep federal programs federal.
For one thing, devolution was a reality. States were going to be designing
welfare systems (for example), and we could either sit around Washington whining
about it or find ways to help advocates in the states fight for better programs.
(One reason that welfare reform did not turn out so badly is that these
state-level advocates were, over time, effective, especially when state budgets
were flush.) And further, there was opportunity in states. Real campaign finance
reform, for example, was unlikely in Washington but states were starting to
move. Living wage and minimum wage initiatives were catching on. Even if state
legislatures and governors were unfriendly, initiative and referendum in 24
states created a way around. And even Republican state governments were often
less ideological and more willing to consider new ways of solving problems.
Finally, there were plenty of issues on which only state policy mattered --
criminal justice, for instance.



A strong intellectual case for "progressive devolution" came in a series of
articles by
Joel
Rogers, a professor at the University of Wisconsin. In
"Devolve
This!," published in 2004, Rogers wrote,

we're missing an enormous political opportunity in the states, which
today are the most natural sites of progressive growth. States wield control
over many ingredients of a well-run economy and polity--from human capital to
transportation to campaign finance and election rules--and they have relatively
porous political systems that we could in fact organize. In at least some
states, we already have close to the organizational density (e.g., among unions,
community groups, service and advocacy organizations of different kinds) and
diffuse public support to do this relatively quickly--if we aimed at this goal
in a deliberate and coordinated way. With real government power in the states,
progressives could demonstrate that our ideas actually work--that a government
run in our way is more efficient and accountable, that a "high road" economy of
the sort we favor delivers higher living standards, that social service and
insurance systems financed our way are cheaper, with deeper coverage. We could
in effect take a page from the original Progressives of a century ago--the folks
who worked out at the state level many of the ideas that later informed the New
Deal and who, before it became a cliché, gave real meaning to the idea of states
as "laboratories of democracy." We could try new things, test their effects,
compare them across states and surface the best new ideas into national debate.

Rogers' ideas have slowly caught on, and progressives have become
more comfortable thinking about states as the locus for their advocacy, and
building up state-level and multi-state think tanks and advocacy organizations
to do it -- although this infrastructure is far from adequately funded. (I
should admit that when the history of this movement is written, I'll probably
deserve mention in a footnote, having worked to build out a lot of the state
think tanks and organizing projects from 1998-2004 when I worked at the Open
Society Institute.)



Now, however, the pendulum seems to have swung too far, and the
cult of the states now denounces the idea that federal action can
be, in some cases, vastly preferable to state-by-state action. This swing of the
pendulum is exemplified by
Nathan
Newman's critique here of Ezra Klein's
very
good article in the Washington Monthly on the limits of state-level health
care reform. Now the question has been transformed into a battle between
"inside-the-Beltway elites" like Klein who have "scorn" for the states and treat
them like "toys"; versus the Heartland visionaries who have made the discovery
that states can lead the way to change.



And even worse, Newman has replaced Rogers's pragmatic recognition of the
importance of states, with a vast moral
claim: states are "actually run as democracies" in contrast to the
"oligarchy" of Washington in which the Senate filibuster makes all progress
impossible.



Dude, have you ever been to, like, Albany? Every state legislature is different,
and they change, but as a rule there's no more "actual democracy" in statehouses
than in Washington, and it's beyond ridiculous to say so. State legislatures are
sometimes very tightly controlled by a few powerful and retrograde bosses, and
lobbyists often have a very strong and invisible hand. Further, while Washington
is sometimes constrained by Senate rules, states are constrained by equally
anti-democratic balanced-budget requirements, tax limitations and term limits.



On the specific issue of health care, Ezra is absolutely right. Which is not to
say that some states can't make
some progress toward universal coverage,
or that it isn't better for them to do it than not, but it is certainly
impossible to achieve anything close to universal coverage through piecemeal
state action, and the idea that we should let states experiment can be a
distraction from the real fight, which is why it is promoted by opponents
of universal coverage such as the Heritage Foundation.



It's worth noting that almost all the state programs cited by Newman, and
Schwarzenegger's proposal in California, work in part by maximizing and making
better use of federal funds, often by kinds of trickery. This makes them
vulnerable, as Klein points out, to changes or cuts in Medicaid, S-CHIP or other
programs, and they also often need waivers from the federal government to
restructure programs. In essence, they need federal money and federal consent
anyway, and even then they are stretching well beyond what those funding streams
were intended to do. I heard former Governor Kitzhaber of Oregon, who used a
"super-waiver" in the 1990s to expand coverage, argue recently that his state
should get a super-duper-waiver allowing it to take
all the federal money that comes into the
state and use it to structure a good health program. But by all the money, he
means, the federal money that comes in through Medicare and through the tax
deductibility of employer-provided health insurance.



But that's totally impractical. Medicare runs directly through individuals, and
a state can't somehow capture a federal tax deduction. Without those pieces in
the mix -- especially the tax deduction, which costs
$188
billion a year -- it is impossible to structure a real, robust health
insurance system. But the Feds can move those pieces around. And the kind of
regulated insurance market that most non-single-payer plans envision could only
be created on a national level.  Yes, as Newman points out, states can and
might enact employer mandates. But employer mandates are of limited value, since
they leave out the self-employed and marginally employed, and politicians almost
inevitably carve out exceptions for small firms, which is where the uninsured
are.  State programs are inherently going to be fragile -- buffeted by
changes outside of the state's control, especially the economy -- and limited.
They will rarely make good advertisements for federal reform, which would be
totally different.



And, finally, I would not accept Newman's characterization of the Senate
filibuster as if it were an absolute and unyielding barrier to reform. The
intransigent politics that Bill Kristol got started in 1994 with his memo urging
Republicans to block any kind of health reform, regardless of the details, is
running out of steam. And further, with a Democratic president and Democrats
holding a perfectly conceivable 56 seats in the Senate in 2009, it should not be
impossible to bring four or more Republicans over on a bill that had strong
business support (start with Snowe, Specter, and Smith, and note that Senator
Bennett of Utah has cosponsored Senator Wyden's universal-coverage legislation).
Newman argues that Wisconsin is "one election away" from enacting universal
coverage; I think the same is true in Washington, DC.



But my real point is, let's just be practical about this -- it's good to get
over the old-liberal delusion that only federal programs matter. But let's not
let that discovery swing us so far in the other direction that we forget that
sometimes there are things that only the federal government can do.