There has been a good deal of digital ink spilled over the last decade or so about the proper role of the Federal government in our lives. How much say should it have in education, business matters, healthcare decisions, even what fuel you put in the tank of your car. Whatever the proper answer is, the general consensus seem to be that we need less government. Less intrusion into all areas of our lives. This of course leads to the favorite topic of the cracker barrel philosophers: how to fix what has so obviously gone wrong.
There have been several competing opinions on how to reign in the Federal Leviathan. Ideas ranging from an Article 5 Convention to secession, to some people suggesting a phone call to Chile to see if perhaps Generalissimo Pinochet’s helicopters are available to rent. One of the more intriguing ideas calls for an insurrection of the states. Essentially having a group of states band together to nullify any federal law that they don’t like or agree with. While nullification has happened in a limited capacity with marijuana legality in certain states and lack of immigration enforcement in a few others none of it has been coordinated. It has been decentralized resistance to the federal government. Which in my opinion is why it has had some limited success.
As the primary driver of a larger movement to fix what ails our body politic, I don’t feel that an insurrection of the states will fix our current malaise. While I have a few reasons to believe that this is the case, the easiest to understand is that this is a variation on the Prisoner’s dilemma. While there might be a way of doing the complex multi-participant tasks, the largest problem is that the priorities for each state aren’t really aligned. As such, each state in the process that creates a suboptimal outcome is not really accountable for the consequences of their action. A few national examples that leap to mind are the failure to repeal Obamacare, balance the budget or to even fix education for the next generation of citizens. This misalignment of priorities will ultimately limit the success of the entire endeavor. What 1-5 items could realistically create agreement in 20-30 states? Real, tangible policy goals, not nebulous weasel words like “Stop federal encroachment” or the like.
Within the field of Game Theory there are three potential solutions to break the Prisoner’s dilemma:
1) Break the Prisoners dilemma through immediate exposure for every state to the full consequence of outcomes. –> In practice, this feels unfair to each state because they see the outcome as at least partially attributable to others in the process. Dividing responsibility among the state limits exposure to consequences. But it exposes states and their citizens to consequences for action items that they care nothing about.
2) Break the Prisoners dilemma through coordination among participants.–> In practice, communication like this takes time, skill and proximity; not every state is willing or even able to invest in communication that is seen as not “doing the work”. Additionally, accounting for the Allen curve takes effort. In this case, a separate congress would need to be set up. There is a word for this, and it rhymes with reason. Lastly, the time needed to arrive through consensus at an optimal approach for a given situation may exceed time available for solving the problem. I honestly believe that in the time that it will take to either build the framework or convert some existing framework to our purposes much less reap positive results, the republic will be lost.
3) Break the Prisoners dilemma by limiting everything to be done by one person or in this case State.–> In practice, this hero-based approach is limited by the attention-bandwidth of the state and by the skill of its politicians. As the complexity of the task increases, the skills needed by the hero increases, and the number of candidate heroes decreases. Large organizations accomplish complicated tasks by leveraging many average people in multi-step workflows. Which is where we are headed now with Florida and Texas tentatively leading on some issues important to red states. Colorado and California have led the way with marijuana legalization.
This hero based approach can only carry things so far, as some states there’s a separate compounding problem: limited resources. For a state, attention must be paid to resources, which are {time, money, staffing}. In the case of coordinated efforts to deal with the Federal government each state will have to layer on the negotiation for resources among cooperating states within Team Freedom.
Of the three options, coordination is the most common response. Some would ask why we need a separate congress. Can we not just do our coordination by email or maybe a virtual meeting? It is of course possible that some business could be summarized in an email, or at least agendas could be hashed out. But, actual face to face meetings MUST happen. Meetings offer an easier and more secure (though more time intensive) alternative. An additional bonus is that face to face meetings reinforce solution 1. Everyone, including the states that sent them, share the same risk in the meetings. As Ben Franklin is said to have quipped. “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
An understanding that setting up another congress is a nonstarter lets us understand that we can’t all communicate concurrently to establish consensus, with that concession we must allow for the fact that we will not all be using the same strategies. That unfortunate confluence of circumstances puts us squarely in the El_Farol_Bar_problem. So while some form of an status quo would exist, it would be in some sort of a Nash Equilibrium, which is shorthand for it probably being much more complicated than we would want.
While everything above applies in a static environment. A real organization is not static. Priorities must change. Governments need change. Technology changes. The opposition evolves. Roles change as individuals mature within a team. There is turnover on the team roster. Processes depend on who is available and what skills each participant can bring to the table.
The knowledge of an organization’s processes has a half-life. The social network that is built will have a half-life. As a consequence, states will need to constantly invest in creating and renewing the social network within the organization. The addition of new members of the social network should be used to reinforce the base ideals that brought it together in the first place. A separate congress will need to be instituted to manage the changes and ensure that the founding principles do not get diluted. All of these reasons lead us inexorably to the simple conclusion that there would have to be a congress or assembly or parliament for this confederation of states.
During the 245 years as of July 4, 2021 the United States has had two confederations of states. The first lasting from 1776 until the ratification of the new constitution in 1781. The second during the US Civil War when 13 southern states attempted to secede from the union and form the Confederate States of America. The second period lasted from 1861-1865. The former lead to the adoption of a stronger more centralized Federal Government. The latter caused a civil war that cost roughly 620,000 lives and had another 900,000 wounded or missing.
As we have seen, it will be exceptionally difficult to communicate or coordinate in an effective manner with an confederation of states without forming some sort of shadow congressional body. My solution would be a more decentralized model, along the lines of the founders vision of laboratories of democracy. Since the pool of voters isn’t homogenous between states like Ohio and Florida or even Florida and Texas, decentralization will be the key. States will be able to find the time and resources to address their voter’s concerns much more easily than signing on to some nebulous confederation. Additionally, by having a greater pool of legislators working on the problems Team Freedom will have a better chance of finding solutions that will pass judicial muster. As these solutions are found they can be implemented in other states in order to affect the necessary changes to get around onerous federal laws and regulations.
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4 thoughts on “An Insurrection of the States”