Who is in charge? Part One

The following is an excerpt from Law in America by Lawrence M. Friedman( http://www.law.stanford.edu/faculty/friedman/ )

     The federal government is one of the great growth stories of the century )La. How could it be otherwise? Culturally and economically, this is more and more a single country. This may seem an odd statement, in the days of plural equality. Certainly, it at least seems as if the country is more fragmented than ever. All over the landscape, there are vigorous identity groups, loudly claiming their rights. One can even ask (and many people do) whether there is even such a thing as America anymore; or are there simply dozens of Americas, a black America, a gay America, an Irish America, a Jewish America, an Armenian America, an America of women, old people, students, yuppies, Mormons, deaf people, and so on. Yet, ironically, one senses a growing unity behind the yammer of all these voices. People who are looking for their "roots" are, overwhelmingly, people who have lost those very roots; people who have become part of the great American melting pot.

     All this assimilation is no accident. That there is a single economy, tightly bound together, is a reality. Goods flow easily across the borders of the states. The economy is getting more and more homogeneous. The weather in Alaska and the weather in Florida may be entirely different, but the same chain stores fill the malls, whether we are in Anchorage or Tampa. Tastes and culture are nationwide. There are, of course regional variations; but they are getting smaller and smaller. There are differences between raunchy California and the Bible Belt, to be sure; between ice-cold Alaska and tropical Hawaii; but everybody (more or less) watches the same TV shows and movies, dances to the same noisy music, wears the same styles of clothers, sings the same songs, shops at mall that are, more and more, cookie-cutter images of one another.

     According to Tip O'Neill, once speaker of the House of Representatives, all politics is local. But was Tip O'Neill really right? In a way, all politics seems to be national. The typical American sees the president on TV every day--the president, and his wife, and his family, and his associates, the house he lives in, his pets, his habilts, the skeletons in his closet. The typical American could not name his state representative to save his soul, or his member of the county board. Local politics is squeezed into obscure channels and late-night programming. And, as culture gravitates to one central point, so, too, does the law. For a good deal of our history, the states resisted any form of centralization; and "states' rights" was a rallying cry. This was true not only in the south. The federal government can do almost anything--can regulate anything--and the restrictions of federalsm do not really hem it in. The habit of looking to Washington is too firmly ingrained. People demand national solutions to national problems. The Supreme Court can fine-tune the boundaries; some tasks can be handed back to the states to manage; but the core, the federal core, is almost certain to stay strong and intact. In times of crisis--the Great Depression, the two world wars, the savage attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001--The country looks to its leader, to its center, to the national government.Neither Social Security nor the atom bomb nor the war on terrorsis will be handed over to Kentucky or Vermont

This did not happen overnight, or without resistance.

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