Contentious issues can be decided on a local level

The argument

Federalism, on this argument, works as a pressure valve: contentious issues can be solved on a local level, preventing large-scale unsolvable debates from having to be settled once for an entire country. In the US, issues such as gay marriage, drug controls, gun control and the death penalty are extremely divisive, and states have gone in radical directions on all of them. The point is not that any particular state reached the right answer but that allowing states to decide their own stance has prevented conflict at the national level, where a single ruling would necessarily impose one side's answer on everyone who rejects it. The underlying problem is geographic. Many states within nations lean left or right, which can cause serious divisions in national elections, because a national contest converts a patchwork of regional majorities into one winner-takes-all outcome. Federalism lowers what is at stake in that contest. In the US, liberals in California and New York do not have to have policy dictated to them by conservatives living in the South, and vice versa — so losing a national election does not mean losing the ability to live under one's own settlement on the questions people care about most. Ideological division becomes less of a fraught battleground precisely because states are allowed to go their own way, creating their own laws to some extent. There is also an exit built into the structure: people can move to areas which reflect their views, so disagreement can be resolved by relocation rather than by defeating one's opponents. Federalism therefore allows individuals to have their say on controversial issues at a local level. Devolving some powers to local administrations diffuses the tensions caused by difficult topics, which is how the argument connects federal structure to the preservation of national unity.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The most controversial issues of all tend to be the ones that many people wish to see implemented uniformly across the nation. When the central government cannot accept the individual wishes of states and vice versa, conflicts form. One of the best examples of this is the American Civil War. Leading up to the American Civil War, America split into two opposing factions over slavery. The inability of the states and central government to come to an agreement was one of the factors which led to the Civil War. In more recent times in the US, issue such as mask-wearing to prevent the spread of Covid-19, and abortion have created a huge struggle between states and the central government, with many people believing the central government most impose rules on individual states. The central governments often get into fights with their member states. In the US the conflict between different groups over how power should be devolved has been constant, stretching back to the founding fathers. More recently the New Federalist movement in the 20th Century, led by Ronald Regan, objected to Roosevelt's New Deal for undermining some state rights. Historically, federalism has not prevented conflict and has even caused it. Few can agree on what powers should be devolved to who and to what extent. Many people see a need to dictate major controversial or moral issues from the center.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise mistakes displacement for resolution: devolving an issue does not settle it but relocates the same dispute to fifty arenas, and on the examples given the conflict continued nationally through the courts and Congress rather than subsiding. [Rejecting P2] Mobility is not a remedy available to the people most affected, since moving requires money, work and the ability to leave family behind — and a right that one must relocate to enjoy is not being protected but rationed by means, which is the reverse of the unity the position claims federalism preserves.