Federal power meets local resistance in Minneapolis – a case study in how federalism staves off authoritarianism |
An unusually large majority of Americans agree that the recent scenes of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minneapolis are disturbing.
Federal immigration agents have deployed with weapons and tactics more commonly associated with military operations than with civilian law enforcement. The federal government has sidelined state and local officials, and it has cut them out of investigations into whether state and local law has been violated.
It’s understandable to look at what’s happening and reach a familiar conclusion: This looks like a slide into authoritarianism.
There is no question that the threat of democratic backsliding is real. President Donald Trump has long treated federal authority not as a shared constitutional set of rules and obligations but as a personal instrument of control.
In my research on the presidency and state power, including my latest book with Sidney Milkis, “Subverting the Republic,” I have argued that the Trump administration has systematically weakened the norms and practices that once constrained executive power – often by turning federalism itself into a weapon of national administrative power.
But there is another possibility worth taking seriously, one that cuts against Americans’ instincts at moments like this. What if what America is seeing is not institutional collapse but institutional friction: the system doing what it was designed to do, even if it looks ugly when it does it?
For many Americans, federalism is little more than a civics term – something about states’ rights or decentralization.
In practice, however, federalism functions less as a clean division of authority and more as a system for managing conflict among multiple governments with overlapping jurisdiction. Federalism does not block national authority. It ensures that national decisions are subject to challenge, delay and revision by other levels of government.
At its core, federalism works through a small number of institutional mechanics – concrete ways of keeping authority divided, exposed and contestable.........