https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/29/want-more-unity-and-freedom-try-returning-to-constitutional-federalism/
The current electoral cycle has featured a political culture in which candidates and their partisans claim to be advancing unity, but the primary form of the unity advanced is agreement among some that they want what does not belong to them or to dictate what others can do, and that they want government to “make it happen.” Unfortunately, that is not the kind of widespread unity that benefits “we the people.”
That is what recent events, from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump to Joe Biden’s argument for why he was staying in, then getting out, or the race, to Harris’s promises to unify people by giving them even more federal “something for nothing” have only turbocharged.
But as long as the dominant political culture remains unchanged, and even more so if it intensifies, all those self-depictions of being unifiers will remain empty promises. If we really wanted more unity in the sense used outside current politics — general agreement, rather than some who agree to harm others for their purposes — we would be well advised to revisit the federalism designed in our Constitution, because of the limits that places on the latter usage.
At America’s creation, a decentralization of power — a federal system, rather than a national system, (more accurately termed “The States, United solely for specified joint purposes,” than “The United States”) — played a key role in protecting Americans’ liberties from infringement. That also allowed more unity at the federal level by eliminating many fights over who could exercise federal power to over-ride the choices of citizens and their governments that were closer to home.