America, get used to a reduced federal level

your future is a Canadian-style confederation, with more powerful states and cities

Trump, as many have stated, is more of a symptom than a cause, an accelerant of America’s broken society. He is making the case, every day, for the office of the Presidency to be severely rethought and defanged. His incessant threats-by-tweets, the constant braggadocio and lies, all show his constituents and the world that the word of the American President means nothing, actually less than nothing.

Case in point his ridiculous war against against the Federal Reserve, which managed to almost crash markets and his signature #Trumpshutdown, at the behest of a bunch of overpaid rightwing pundits. These actions demonstrate just how much the Presidency is a Single Point of Failure, to America’s peril.

The Presidency-as-a-Single-Point-of-Failure is paired with a relative calm in the face of yet another government shutdown. It does seem, almost a week in, as if the US public seems to care very little about a functioning federal level. The unpaid 400,000+ federal workers do care but it’s telling that the larger American society seems very removed from the “hand of DC”.

America’s continued inability to have a functioning government, due to the looming chasm where 15% of the population will elect 70 senators, could push states, such as California and New York to take over basic functions from DC. It would be a historic inversion to see Democrat-led mega-states, each representing a disproportionate percentage of population and GDP, claim states rights and essentially reduce the federal level. Stranger things have occurred in the 240 year experiment that is the United States.

America should study its Northern neighbour, Canada, a confederation with powerful provinces and a relatively small federal level, and adapt its governing structures. Metropolises, the Boston-NYC-DC corridor in the East, Dallas&Houston in the South and the Bay area and Los Angeles in the West concentrate talent and innovation and thus are the future of America.

States and their major cities are where governing counts, where California governor Jerry Brown signs the Paris Climate Accord in lieu of the federal government, when Brown speaks of launching a California-funded satellite into space, and when NYC’s police force numbers dwarf small armies. Will these powerful economic engines willingly accept the political supremacy of sparsely populated and economically insignificant states ? Will the “blue states” continue to fund the deficits run by “red states” with their tax dollars ?

The jury’s still out but 2016’s election of an unpopular President with a thin margin in smaller states shows the way forward: a revamped and reduced federal level, with states shouldering more of the burden.