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Federalismo y resistencia progresista en Estados Unidos

Jan 6, 2017 Laura Tyson , Lenny Mendonca

BERKELEY – El año 2016 trajo consigo un ascenso del populismo en Estados Unidos, el Reino Unido y muchos otros países desarrollados. El estancamiento de los ingresos, las inciertas oportunidades de avance económico y un amplio descontento provocado por la pérdida de fe en el progreso llevaron a los votantes a apoyar a candidatos que prometen devolver el poder al “pueblo” y sacudir los cimientos de unos sistemas “arreglados” por la dirigencia política tradicional para favorecer a una “élite” corrupta. En Estados Unidos, la creciente diversidad étnica, las tensiones raciales contenidas y los cambios en las costumbres sociales echaron más leña al fuego electoral.

Un prolongado proceso de debilitamiento de la confianza de los estadounidenses en el gobierno federal culminó con la victoria de Donald Trump en la elección presidencial de noviembre: pese a los altos niveles de aprobación pública del presidente Barack Obama, sólo el 19% de los estadounidenses creen que el gobierno federal hace lo correcto. Dadas las prioridades tradicionales de los republicanos (visibles en las designaciones del presidente electo Trump para el gabinete), es probable una reducción de programas del gobierno federal (con la notable excepción del gasto en defensa). Irónicamente, los recortes de gasto en salud, educación, capacitación laboral y medioambiente, sumados a grandes rebajas regresivas de los impuestos personales y corporativos, derivarán más riqueza hacia la “élite” y afectarán a programas que benefician a la mayoría de las familias.

Pero los grandes retos sociales y económicos que son objeto de los programas federales no desaparecerán: en vez de eso, una cuota mayor de la responsabilidad de hacerles frente recaerá sobre los gobiernos estatales y locales, que tendrán que abordarlos con soluciones innovadoras. De hecho, la respuesta al trumpismo es el “federalismo progresista”: la búsqueda de objetivos políticos progresistas por medio de la considerable autoridad que el sistema federal estadounidense delega a los gobiernos de nivel subnacional.

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Laura Tyson

76 Commentaries

Laura Tyson, a former chair of the US President's Council of Economic Advisers, is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior adviser at the Rock Creek Group.

Lenny Mendonca

Writing for PS since 2014
23 Commentaries

Lenny Mendonca, Chairman of New America, is Senior Partner Emeritus at McKinsey & Company.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 18 in all 18 Comments on this article

Jeremy Edwards Jan 8, 2017

People in Hawaii and Oregon should familiarise themselves with Henry George and taxing land values. Those two States will be critical in be biggest fight for a just society we will see in our lifetimes. Successfully implementing a tax on land values in those States will facilitate a political challenge to Prop 13 in California and thereafter passage of the policy in the country's largest economy. After that, it will be only a matter of time before we elimate poverty by using the receipts of the tax on land values to fund a form of universal basic income.
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Louis Stouch Jan 7, 2017

With the world’s sixth-largest economy, a population of nearly 40 million that looks like the future of America, and a united and responsible Democratic government, California is a model of what progressive federalism can accomplish...........

Ya lost me right there, and you expose your bias. California is a slow motion train wreck. No housing in SF unless your a plutocrat. Businesses and the wealthy fleeing the state due to excessive taxation. A sanctuary state sheltering illegal aliens while flouting the Law. The best thing that California could do would be to secede.
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Peter Schaeffer Jan 7, 2017

I love it. Calling illegal aliens, illegal, gets a comment about illegal aliens deleted. "Illegal aliens" is simply a statement of the facts. "Undocumented immigrants" is PC fakery.
- Peter Schaeffer Jan 8, 2017
  
  CC, I wrote a somewhat detailed reply, but alas it was deleted.
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
- Curtis Carpenter Jan 7, 2017
  
  What are you talking about Peter Schaeffer? Do you imagine that there is some Grand Censor here that sits around passing judgement on all of our rants? What a job that would be!
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Peter Schaeffer Jan 7, 2017

"It's Still a Mad, Mad California" by Victor Davis Hanson

Coastal elites set rules for others, exempt themselves, and tolerate rampant lawlessness from illegal aliens.

One reason for the emergence of outsider Donald Trump is the old outrage that elites seldom experience the consequences of their own ideologically driven agendas.

Hypocrisy, when coupled with sanctimoniousness, grates people like few other human transgressions: Barack Obama opposing charter schools for the inner city as he puts his own children in Washington’s toniest prep schools, or Bay Area greens suing to stop contracted irrigation water from Sierra reservoirs, even as they count on the Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy project to deliver crystal-clear mountain water to their San Francisco taps.

The American progressive elite relies on its influence, education, money, and cultural privilege to exempt itself from the bad schools, unassimilated immigrant communities, dangerous neighborhoods, crime waves, and general impoverishment that are so often the logical consequences of its own policies — consequences for others, that is. Abstract idealism on behalf of the distant is a powerful psychological narcotic that allows caring progressives to dull the guilt they feel about their own privilege and riches.

Nowhere is this paradox truer than in California, a dysfunctional natural paradise in which a group of coastal and governing magnificoes virtue-signal from the world’s most exclusive and beautiful enclaves. The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the overregulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment.

Pebble Beach or La Jolla is as far from Madera or Mendota as Mars is from Earth. The elite coastal strip appreciates California's bifurcated two-class reality, at least in the way that the lords of the Middle Ages treasured their era's fossilized divisions. Manoralism ensured that peasants remained obedient, dependent, and useful serfs; meanwhile, the masters praised their supposedly enlightened feudal system even as they sought exemptions for their sins from the medieval Church. And without a middle class, the masters had no fear that uncouth others would want their own scaled-down versions of castles and moats.

Go to a U-Haul trailer franchise in the state. The rental-trailer-return rates of going into California are a fraction of those going out. Surely never in civilization's history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise.
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Peter Schaeffer Jan 7, 2017

"It's Still a Mad, Mad California" by Victor Davis Hanson

"Coastal elites set rules for others, exempt themselves, and tolerate rampant lawlessness from illegal aliens. One reason for the emergence of outsider Donald Trump is the old outrage that elites seldom experience the consequences of their own ideologically driven agendas. Hypocrisy, when coupled with sanctimoniousness, grates people like few other human transgressions: Barack Obama opposing charter schools for the inner city as he puts his own children in Washington’s toniest prep schools, or Bay Area greens suing to stop contracted irrigation water from Sierra reservoirs, even as they count on the Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy project to deliver crystal-clear mountain water to their San Francisco taps. The American progressive elite relies on its influence, education, money, and cultural privilege to exempt itself from the bad schools, unassimilated immigrant communities, dangerous neighborhoods, crime waves, and general impoverishment that are so often the logical consequences of its own policies — consequences for others, that is. Abstract idealism on behalf of the distant is a powerful psychological narcotic that allows caring progressives to dull the guilt they feel about their own privilege and riches. Nowhere is this paradox truer than in California, a dysfunctional natural paradise in which a group of coastal and governing magnificoes virtue-signal from the world’s most exclusive and beautiful enclaves. The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the overregulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment."

...

"Pebble Beach or La Jolla is as far from Madera or Mendota as Mars is from Earth. The elite coastal strip appreciates California's bifurcated two-class reality, at least in the way that the lords of the Middle Ages treasured their era's fossilized divisions. Manoralism ensured that peasants remained obedient, dependent, and useful serfs; meanwhile, the masters praised their supposedly enlightened feudal system even as they sought exemptions for their sins from the medieval Church. And without a middle class, the masters had no fear that uncouth others would want their own scaled-down versions of castles and moats.

Go to a U-Haul trailer franchise in the state. The rental-trailer-return rates of going into California are a fraction of those going out. Surely never in civilization's history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise. "
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Peter Schaeffer Jan 7, 2017

The correct term is "illegal aliens", not "undocumented immigrants". Illegals have lots of documents... Ids from their own countries, stolen ids from Americans, etc. They are heavily documented, not just legal in the USA. An immigrant is defined (under U.S. law) as a lawful permanent resident of the U.S. Illegals are (wait for it), illegal.
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Thaomas H Jan 7, 2017

This is fine as far as it goes, but lots of the market failures, externalities and income disparities that we wish to address can only e done (or done efficiently) at the Federal level Indeed, climate change needs to be addressed internationally.
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Peter Schaeffer Jan 7, 2017

A few decades ago, the slogan was "segregation now, segregation forever". The updated version is "illegals now, illegals forever". Criminality and bigotry don't change. Only the intended targets.
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Henry Rearden Jan 7, 2017

This article is carefully written in Leftist code and it is dead wrong. Trump could easily disband the Bureau of Land Manage by stripping it of funding. He could then put that money to work elsewhere, such as the DHS and the Immigration Service. There are any number of large Federal Bureaucracies that can be and should be sacrificed for the greater good of these United States.
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Peter Schaeffer Jan 6, 2017

A few years ago, a number of states practiced “uncooperative federalism” by ignoring Civil Rights laws and maintaining segregation. It didn't work. Now “uncooperative federalism” is going to be used to protect illegals (yes, illegal aliens are illegal, not "undocumented"). It won't work either. States don't get to choose what laws they obey.
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Luke Lea Jan 6, 2017

Is Project Syndicate suddenly a partisan site?
- Peter Schaeffer Jan 7, 2017
  
  Luke Lea wins this. The range of opinion on PS is quite limited. The writers range from 'neoliberalism now, neoliberalism forever' to 'neoliberalism is having problems, but we have no idea what to do'.
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
- Ga Steli Jan 6, 2017
  
  Project Syndicate is not, and never was, a monolithic site; as difficult as that may be for the weak, dichotomizing mind to conceive.
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Alex N Jan 6, 2017

all the progressives I know were very anti-federalism up until recently. It's like all of a sudden they think the federal government shouldn't run roughshot over states rights. they were super pro the federal government controlling the states when they thought Bernie had a shot at winning
- Jose araujo Jan 9, 2017
  
  Well, don't bite the hand that feeds you. Progressists were federalists in an attempt to lift the Midwest and rust belt, until they turned away and not only didn’t acknowledge the help the wealthiest states were providing, but are now tuning and challenging the progressive states.
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
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Curtis Carpenter Jan 6, 2017

The new Federalism may work for California, but it will be the express land to hell's seventh circle for a lot of us in states like Texas.
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Federalismo y resistencia progresista en Estados Unidos

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