Governments of the world, be they communist or fascist or even nominally democratic, all agree about one thing—they agree that people are dangerous. Our lives need to be run and controlled. And they are the boys for the job. Governments agree on so much, they may even agree it can be mutually beneficial to go to war with each other from time to time. There’s nothing that transfers power and wealth from people to governments so quickly and efficiently as a nice little war.
So when you look at a thoroughly confusing global situation and have trouble understanding which country benefits from insanities like the war in Ukraine, it’s because you’re asking the wrong question: You imagine that, just because countries seem to be on opposite sides of the political spectrum, or even on opposite sides of a military conflict, that those governments must be fighting against one another. In reality, those governments are fighting together against you: Stealing your life and your labor and your money to pay their own way.
Fortunately, America is uniquely positioned among all the nations in the world with a safety valve—albeit one we’ve forgotten about: We have states. We have states that are supposed to operate as a counterbalance to federal power. Before the Civil War, individual states (and groups of states) were forces to be reckoned with—and that meant Washington had to pay them, and their citizens, due consideration and respect. It couldn’t treat the nation as a monolith, a single network of local government offices, all singing from the same sheet of music, reliably enforcing federal dogma. The Civil War, whatever else it achieved, notched a huge victory in the belt of unigovernment when it destroyed the power of the states. But in fact that power is still there, in potential. It is simply dormant, unclaimed: Rusty, but still sharp underneath.
We need imaginative and courageous governors to remember that they are, in their way, as important as the president. We need state legislatures to remember that their duty is not simply to attend to local matters but to sit on the other end of the balance against the national legislature. And when Americans, en masse, begin to get the sense that the federal government is representing its own interests rather than our own, it is the responsibility of the states to say, “Not so fast, there: I think you’ve forgotten about us.”
https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/06/the-unigovernment/