While I agree with much of Bill Murray (not that Bill Murray) has to say in his piece on the decline of federalism at RealClearPolitics:
Given America’s political distemper, there is an obvious desire for a proper diagnosis. It’s not an accident that Niccolo Machiavelli himself compared diseased political systems to “Aetolian fevers†– a malady easy to treat early when symptoms are difficult to notice, but almost untreatable when the sickness becomes easier to detect.
Jonathan Rauch, writing in the July/August edition of The Atlantic, gave as good an effort as anyone recently, using the same literary device as Machiavelli to put forward the theory that politics in the United States has a compromised immune system and is suffering from a type of “chaos syndrome.†This syndrome is essentially a breakdown in a political system’s capacity to properly self-organize.
and, to make a long story short, the underpinning cause for the breakdown is the decline of federalism.
The problem is that while I can see the problem I don’t see a ready solution. The greater the concentration of power the easier it grows to become a gazillionaire based on power, connections and rent-seeking, cf. Bill and Hillary Clinton. There will always be a clientele for harnessing the power of government to one’s own benefit. For the good of ordinary people, of course.
I don’t see a process by which that concentration of power is reversed, at least not a reasoned, moderate process and an unreasoned, immoderate process is more likely to result in greater tyranny than it is the diffusion of power.
It is a sad state of affairs and the trend line is not good. Not sure what can be done.