Federalism in America

Federalism in America

Federalism is a concept that started many years ago during the times of the ratification of the document we live by called the Constitution. This concept basically states that there will be two levels of government, the national and the state. Federalism states that the national and state governments are separate entities and have formal authority over the same area and people. With its largest effect was during the Civil rights movement.

Federalism isn’t a natural outgrowth of the Articles of Confederation. But the problem with the articles of confederation was that they did not give any power to the fed government it was more focused on the interests of the state they didn't want to give power to one single body because they feared that it would be like being under a king, which they didn't want.

Since federalism was the belief that there should be a strong central government, the federalists obviously believed in federalism. As opposed to the anti-federalists who were later the democratic republicans who believed in states rights. The political parties back then were very focused on personal beliefs and benefits. So the political parties were out for personal gains and not what was good for the country. Which later on during those times foreshadows the federalists’ demise.

Our country was founded on the basis of small government federalism. Characterized by traditional constitutional federalism, it was sustained for 140 years by a narrow judicial and political interpretation of federal domestic power. The shared presumption was that the states and localities had sufficient regulatory and fiscal power to meet the nation's modest domestic demands except in well-defined and limited circumstances. Small government federalism survived the national crises of the Civil War and World War I. But it disappeared under the political imperative to increase economic security for all Americans in the wake of the Great Depression. A new and broader interpretation of the federal government's constitutional power led to big government federalism, which appears here to stay.

During the next two stages of federalism—the New Deal/ World War II era and the Affluent/Great Society period—it was widely assumed that nothing could or would check the growing centralization of regulatory and fiscal power. It was even argued that without generous federal revenue sharing to redress the great intergovernmental fiscal imbalance, states and localities would fall by the wayside as forces in domestic policy. But news of their death turned out to be premature.