Politics
What Federalism Was For
Dividing power between levels of government was a solution to a specific problem. It is worth asking whether that problem is still the one we have.
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Federal arrangements are often defended in the abstract, as though dividing authority were good in itself. The original arguments were more specific than that, and more interesting.
The original problem
The design responded to a distrust of concentrated power and to the practical difficulty of governing a large territory from one place. Both concerns were real. Only one of them has obviously survived the intervening centuries.