> If you don’t have a common culture, you need real federalism so people can self-segregate into more homogenous cultural groups and efficiently govern themselves.
This whole thing is disproved by the whole Emo Philips "Die Heretic" joke [0]. If you don't believe pluralism can work, you will divide (usually violently) into smaller and smaller groups of people--smaller even than families--until everyone either dies or lives by themselves. Politics is how groups of 2 or more people make decisions; in order for humanity to advance we have to believe we can work together despite our differences.
> People in both California and Alabama would be a lot happier if they didn’t have to care about what each other were doing except to coordinate national defense and foreign treaties.
Both States would suffer greatly because of lessons we learned while we were governed by the Articles of Confederation.
> Look at the Scandinavian countries. Look how effectively they have been able to implement major policy reforms because their electorates aren’t divided along dozens of cleavage lines.
There really are no homogeneous cultures--for example Sweden has 25 provinces with "their own cultural identities, dialects and folklore" [1].
The reason Congress has ground to a halt is the George W. Bush administration killed the Republican party by invading Iraq and Afghanistan and presiding over the financial collapse of 2008, but rather than adapt it doubled down on its (admittedly successful) politics of demagoguery, using wedge issue after wedge issue to divide the electorate while also pursuing anti-democratic electoral strategies like gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws. This lead to leaders who succeed not by appealing to a majority of all Americans, but by proving their bona-fides to a small subset of increasingly radicalized voters on the right (Republican primary voters), largely by "not compromising their values" to work on legislation with the Democrats and instead obstructing and grandstanding. An unfortunate byproduct of this is there's no longer any governing expertise or even impulse in the party, so even when they're in the majority Republicans have a difficult time providing effective governance.
But that's just Congress, and I wouldn't say we've not implemented major policy reforms--the Supreme Court (an intensely anti-democratic institution dominated by the far right and largely appointed by non-representative Senate cohorts) is working hard to reshape the US.
Anyway, Christians would say we're all God's children. I don't know why people on the right are so taken with this idea of balkanization and segregation (I, of course, have some ideas), but it's not the path forward.
> This whole thing is disproved by the whole Emo Philips "Die Heretic" joke [0]. If you don't believe pluralism can work, you will divide (usually violently) into smaller and smaller groups of people--smaller even than families--until everyone either dies or lives by themselves.
This is provenly false, as countries do stabilize when small at around a few million or so and people no longer feel the need to split up more.
Its just dumb to try to argue that there is no optimal country size, so trying to make it smaller will only lead to single person countries, that is clearly not true in reality.
If you were right about this; countries never would've fallen apart when the human population was much smaller than it is today, but it happened a lot, so you're not.
Another thing that disproves this is long lived empires. Japan's been around what like, a millennia and a half? Rome was almost around a thousand years, etc.
This whole thing is disproved by the whole Emo Philips "Die Heretic" joke [0]. If you don't believe pluralism can work, you will divide (usually violently) into smaller and smaller groups of people--smaller even than families--until everyone either dies or lives by themselves. Politics is how groups of 2 or more people make decisions; in order for humanity to advance we have to believe we can work together despite our differences.
> People in both California and Alabama would be a lot happier if they didn’t have to care about what each other were doing except to coordinate national defense and foreign treaties.
Both States would suffer greatly because of lessons we learned while we were governed by the Articles of Confederation.
> Look at the Scandinavian countries. Look how effectively they have been able to implement major policy reforms because their electorates aren’t divided along dozens of cleavage lines.
There really are no homogeneous cultures--for example Sweden has 25 provinces with "their own cultural identities, dialects and folklore" [1].
The reason Congress has ground to a halt is the George W. Bush administration killed the Republican party by invading Iraq and Afghanistan and presiding over the financial collapse of 2008, but rather than adapt it doubled down on its (admittedly successful) politics of demagoguery, using wedge issue after wedge issue to divide the electorate while also pursuing anti-democratic electoral strategies like gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws. This lead to leaders who succeed not by appealing to a majority of all Americans, but by proving their bona-fides to a small subset of increasingly radicalized voters on the right (Republican primary voters), largely by "not compromising their values" to work on legislation with the Democrats and instead obstructing and grandstanding. An unfortunate byproduct of this is there's no longer any governing expertise or even impulse in the party, so even when they're in the majority Republicans have a difficult time providing effective governance.
But that's just Congress, and I wouldn't say we've not implemented major policy reforms--the Supreme Court (an intensely anti-democratic institution dominated by the far right and largely appointed by non-representative Senate cohorts) is working hard to reshape the US.
Anyway, Christians would say we're all God's children. I don't know why people on the right are so taken with this idea of balkanization and segregation (I, of course, have some ideas), but it's not the path forward.
[0]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emo_Philips#Die,_heretic!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Sweden