JM

Federalism isn’t going anywhere, and as long as we have it that means there’s always likely to be some variation in outcomes across the polity. But we don’t have to accept this degree of inequality. And we shouldn’t. For one thing, there are other federal polities in the world that don’t have this level of inequality, so we know it’s not inevitable. And importantly, extreme inequality leads to an erosion of democratic citizenship and a diminishment of democracy in general. This is happening to such an extent that people now have differing degrees of incorporation into the political system, which is a fundamental problem that we need to contend with.

Sometimes in this political environment it’s hard to remember that we can make choices, but we can. We have options about, for instance, what kinds of inequality we will tolerate. There is a knee-jerk acceptance of this idea that different places will get different services and see different outcomes, but as far as I can tell there is very little that can justify the depth of these differences. If you ask somebody to give you a cogent case for why people in Mississippi should have so much less than people in New York, it’s crickets. The arguments sound practical, but are they right?

Inequality is intuitive to many of us, and we’ve come to accept it. Part of what I try to do in the book is challenge us to ask ourselves if the current situation is tolerable, and if it conforms to who we say we are.