We Don't Understand States
State has its etymological root in the Latin status, meaning condition, position, standing, or manner of being. Over time, the term evolved into its modern political meaning: a sovereign political society with a single center of authority. Japan is an example of such a sovereign state — one national government, organized into administrative units with no internal sovereigns.
The United States, by contrast, is not a single sovereign state in this strict sense. It is a federal union of states, each originally sovereign, joined under a federal government rather than a national one. The Constitution is the compact through which the states created that federal government, delegating specific powers to it while retaining all powers not expressly granted.
Before 1774, the colonies that would soon rebel against the British Crown did not see themselves as a nation or a federation. They saw themselves as separate political societies, each loyal—at least in principle—to the Crown, and united only by common grievances against Parliament. Even Benjamin Franklin, who spent years in London, represented only the interests of individual colonies such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Georgia. He did not speak for a collective American government because no such body existed. Until his humiliation before the Privy Council’s Committee for Plantation Affairs in 1774, Franklin considered himself a loyal British subject working within the imperial system.
By the mid‑1770s, talk of breaking with Parliament—or at least resisting its authority—was common in taverns, assemblies, and correspondence. But it was Franklin’s shift, communicated through letters and reinforced by his return to America in 1775, that signaled to colonial leaders that reconciliation was no longer possible. His conclusion that neither Parliament nor the King would defend colonial rights gave political elites a kind of permission structure—similar to the effect Walter Cronkite’s televised criticism of the Vietnam War had nearly two centuries later. If the Crown had lost Franklin, one of the most loyal and respected imperial figures, then the imperial relationship itself was beyond repair.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Founding Fathers understood a “state” in the Lockean sense: a political society formed by the consent of its people and possessing its own sovereign authority. When the colonies declared independence in 1776, they did not create a national government with subordinate provinces; they declared thirteen separate, sovereign nation-states.
From Yorktown to the ratification of the Constitution, the central problem was that the precise relationship between these states and the central government was never explicitly defined. The Founders assumed the structure was self-evident: a state’s authority flowed from its people, who then delegated a limited set of powers upward to a federal union. In this framework, sovereignty moved from the people to the state, and from the state to the federal government—never the reverse. Under this arrangement, the states exercised oversight over the federal government as its creators, not its subordinates. To the founding generation, the federal government was understood to be a federal agent, not a national superior.
Prior to the Civil War, state sovereignty was a political given. Several states openly considered seceding from the “democratic experiment” whenever they believed the federal union no longer protected their interests. The clearest example is Massachusetts, which seriously debated withdrawal on multiple occasions—during the Louisiana Purchase, the Embargo crisis, and most dramatically at the Hartford Convention of 1814–1815. These episodes make Massachusetts the strongest pre‑1860 example of a state contemplating departure from what it understood to be a voluntary federal compact among sovereign political societies.
Massachusetts was not alone. Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, and the New England states collectively (in their discussions of forming a Northern Confederacy) all considered separating from the compact when they believed the federal union no longer served their interests. When New England explored the idea of a Northern Confederacy, it was not attempting to revive the Articles of Confederation but acting on the same compact‑theory premise later invoked by the Southern states: that sovereign states could withdraw from one federal compact and form another if the existing union ceased to protect their welfare. The recurrence of these debates across regions and decades demonstrates that the founding generation did not regard the Union as inherently indissoluble, but as a voluntary arrangement among sovereign political societies. The states did not see themselves as belonging to the compact, but as parties to it.
It is critical to understand that our modern view of statehood and citizenship differs sharply from that of the Founders. Until the Civil War, Americans primarily identified themselves as Virginians, Georgians, New Yorkers, and so on; the national label “American” existed, but it did not define political belonging in the way it does today. The shift from state‑based identity to national identity was gradual, cultural, and ultimately reinforced by the outcome of the war. It changed our understanding of both.
Today, we think of states as inseparable parts of a larger nation, as administrative units belonging to a single national sovereign. This reflects a national understanding of political order, not a federal one. The problem is that we now hold a national conception of the Union while still operating under a Constitution written for a federal system. Our modern understanding of a “state” was shaped not by the Founders or the ratifying public, but by later judicial interpretation. In Texas v. White (1869), the Supreme Court declared the Union “indestructible” and effectively vested national sovereignty in the federal government — a power the states never granted and never agreed to cede.
It should be noted: Only after the Supreme Court asserted for itself the final word on constitutional meaning was it able to confer on the federal government powers the states never granted in the original compact. Judicial supremacy is a doctrine the Court gave itself, not one the Constitution grants, republican theory supports, or the Founders intended.
Today we do not see states as participants in the federal government but as subordinates to it. We amended the Constitution in a way that removed state governments’ representation in the Senate. The courts, Congress, and the Executive Branch have routinely stripped points of self‑determination from state control in an effort to make the country more uniform. For example, state militias have effectively been supplanted by National Guard units that governors do not ultimately control — ultimate authority rests with the President. The states have become subordinate not through one broad proclamation but through a thousand incremental actions, reducing them to the subordinate position we accept today.
How we define statehood affects our daily lives. The line between state and federal responsibility is constantly shifting toward more federal (in practice, national) authority and less state sovereignty. This is not a partisan phenomenon. There are equally clear examples of conservatives supporting federal overreach when it serves their priorities, and liberals doing the same on different issues. Both political parties are willing to erode state authority when it advances a political goal.
States do push back, but the courts often muddy the water — sometimes siding with the state, sometimes with the federal government, and rarely articulating a consistent principle. The result is a patchwork of rulings that make it unclear where state sovereignty ends and national sovereignty begins.
The Constitution assumes that states provide the majority of laws and regulations that govern daily life. It does not support a national, one‑size‑fits‑all model of governance. Yet this is precisely where the modern tension lies. It is easy for someone to say, “I support X, so the federal government should impose it nationwide,” only to say the next week, “I oppose Y, so the federal government should leave it to the states.” We cannot have it both ways. States are either sovereign or subordinate. The Founders wrote the Constitution to maximize state sovereignty and strictly limit federal power. We have been blurring that line ever since.
One of the clearest examples of this tension is the death penalty. Nationally, it is difficult to reconcile that breaking a law in one state may result in execution while the same crime in another state results only in imprisonment. In 1972, the Supreme Court imposed a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia, halting all executions in the United States until 1976. It did not matter whether a state permitted capital punishment or not — the federal judiciary stepped in and said no. The Court held that the way states administered the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. This is a clear example of federal authority overriding state criminal law, regardless of the diversity of state policy choices.
This lack of understanding of the boundaries between state and federal sovereignty allows the public to be led around by politicians with little or no concern for upholding the spirit of the Constitution. Changes serve political goals and not constitutional stability.
At times, the federal government has taken authority from the states for reasons that seemed compelling in the moment, only for the long‑term results to undermine the very justification used to seize that power. Federal control of education is one example: national standards were imposed to “fix” inconsistent state performance, yet the resulting system became rigid, bureaucratic, and so unworkable that even Washington eventually had to retreat from it. The same pattern appears in federal drug policy. Congress nationalized drug enforcement in the name of uniformity, but as states began legalizing marijuana, the federal framework produced the opposite — legal confusion, selective enforcement, and a patchwork of conflicting rules. In both cases, the federal government expanded its authority at the expense of state sovereignty, only to discover that centralized control often fails to deliver the benefits used to justify the takeover in the first place.
Of course, once the myth of federal uniformity fell apart, neither Congress nor the federal government restored the state sovereignty that had been taken. The points of authority remained concentrated at the federal level even after the original justification for centralization proved false. The structural reality is that every transfer of power away from the states strengthens the federal government, and once that authority is consolidated in Washington, it rarely returns to the states — regardless of the rationale that justified the shift in the first place.
In the end, most citizens in the United States do not recognize when the federal government takes away points of state sovereignty. Nuanced issues of sovereignty become lost in the politics of the day. Press the average citizen on what a state really is and the conversation ends in frustration and statements like “that’s just how it is.”
In the United States, the terms federal and national are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. A federal government is one in which power is distributed among distinct, pre‑existing political units that delegate only certain limited powers to a central authority, as defined in the founding document — in our case, the U.S. Constitution. A national government, by contrast, is one in which all sovereign power is centralized in a single governing body, which then distributes authority to subordinate units as it chooses.
A useful way to understand federalism and nationalism is to compare two familiar hardware chains. Ace Hardware operates as a federation of independent, locally owned stores that voluntarily join together to share branding, logistics, and purchasing power while retaining control over their own operations. Each store remains its own business, choosing its own inventory, management, and priorities. Lowe’s, by contrast, is a single, centralized corporation in which every store is owned, directed, and governed from the national headquarters. The difference between the two mirrors the difference between a federal system and a national one: Ace is a union of distinct entities that cooperate while remaining sovereign, whereas Lowe’s is a unified enterprise whose parts exist only as extensions of the center.
The Founders envisioned the states as the Ace Hardware model: independent political societies that voluntarily joined a federation, delegated only specific powers to a central government, and retained sovereignty over everything else. In their view, the federal government was a shared service — a coordinating layer built on top of pre‑existing, self‑governing states. Our modern understanding, however, resembles the Lowe’s model: the United States is seen as a single national entity with states functioning as administrative subdivisions whose authority flows downward from Washington. This shift from a federated union of sovereign states to a national system of centrally directed units is at the heart of the confusion over state sovereignty today, and it explains why so many Americans struggle to articulate what a state actually is in constitutional terms.
In the end, we use the word nation when we really mean country. We default to national interests over state interests without realizing it. Yet the Constitution places state interests above federal interests in all areas except the limited powers expressly delegated to the central government. Politicians rely on national rhetoric and, in doing so, obscure our federal roots. Regardless of the language of the Pledge, we are not — and have never been — one nation, indivisible. We are fifty states, an independent seat of government, and several possessions, joined together for common purposes such as defense, treaties, and interstate commerce. At least, that is what the Constitution says we are.
It was from this position of complete sovereignty—possessing the power to levy taxes, enact laws, and declare war—that the states chose to delegate a narrow set of common functions to the new federal government. These were limited to areas where joint action was more efficient: foreign affairs, interstate commerce, a uniform currency, and a national postal system.
While the Founders were certainly flawed men, they shared a remarkable genius for compromise — from Roger Sherman’s Great Compromise that created the House and Senate, to the ratification compromise in which Federalists agreed to add a Bill of Rights in order to secure the support of skeptical states. They all understood that the immediate task was to create a functioning government; once the Constitution was ratified, the next task was to define the limits of federal power. That effort produced the Bill of Rights. Its central purpose was not to enumerate the rights of individuals but to restrict the federal government from infringing on the rights individuals already possessed and the powers the states already retained.
The Articles of Confederation had ensured that the federal government was weak — too weak, in fact, to withstand internal pressures or external threats. The Constitution corrected that weakness, but it did so with blunt specificity: the federal government would possess only the powers the states granted it in the charter.
The Bill of Rights reinforced that structure, most clearly in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which affirm that individuals hold unenumerated rights and that all powers not delegated to the federal government remain with the states or the people. These two amendments form the constitutional backstop against federal overreach. Scholars call them the Reserved Powers Amendments. I call them the Forgotten Rights Amendments — and, judging by its decisions, the Supreme Court seems to have forgotten them as well.
The scrimmage line of sovereignty moved back and forth for the next eighty years until the outbreak of the Civil War. Although the Constitution is silent on the right of a state to withdraw from the Union, the question was settled by force when the Confederate states attempted to do exactly that. After the war, the balance of sovereignty shifted decisively toward the national government. The adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, the rise of incorporation doctrine, and Supreme Court decisions such as Texas v. White (1869) — which declared the Union “indestructible” and “perpetual” — all pushed the United States away from the Founders’ federal model and toward a national one.
The old idiom states, “Walk on the right side of the road, ok. Walk on the left side of the road, ok. Walk down the middle of the road, you get run over.” What we have today is a system in the middle of the road, half federal, half national. And the bus is coming! Neither law from Congress or fiat from the Supreme Court can change the plain federal text of the Constitution. It may be politically Convenient for the powers in Congress to push a nationalistic agenda and it theoretically stabilizing for the courts to support expanding national power, but ultimately all that's been achieved is to alienate state governments and dishearten citizens.
The hemorrhaging of state sovereignty toward the national center will continue until citizens become frustrated enough to replace Congress with individuals committed to restoring federal balance, or until the states themselves awaken and propose constitutional amendments that reassert their authority. There is little evidence that either national political party has any interest in altering the status quo.
Long periods without constitutional amendments tend to end only after monumental events. The longest gap — sixty‑one years — ended with the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments. The next longest — forty‑three years — ended in 1929 as the nation entered the Great Depression. We now stand more than three decades removed from the last ratified amendment. The cause and timing of the next amendment cannot be known, but history suggests that when constitutional silence lasts this long, it eventually breaks.
Continuing to govern in a hybrid system — part federal, part national — is not sustainable. At some point the country will have to decide whether a state remains a sovereign political society or becomes an administrative unit of a single national authority. Either model can work; both exist in the world today. But a federal constitution coupled with national behavior guarantees friction. Problems thought settled will return. Even now, we lack a coherent sense of who we are: Are we one people or many peoples? Where does sovereignty reside? Who holds ultimate authority? Ask a state and you get one answer; ask the Executive and you get another.
As it stands, presidents behave nationally, Congress defers to national expectations, states lose autonomy, and citizens are left without clarity about where power truly lives. The voices of nationalism seek to erase state identity. Our federal identity has become symbolic rather than structural. The result is growing disillusionment and cynicism about democratic participation. If this continues, our civic apathy will reach Animal Farm proportions — not through terror, but through neglect, forgetfulness, and the slow surrender of responsibility.
While a permanent solution is unlikely anytime soon, there are steps we can take as citizens to lessen the strain of living inside a hybrid federal‑national system. The first is to understand both how our government actually functions and how it was designed to function. We must restore accuracy in the language we use — reserving “federal” for the constitutional structure of shared sovereignty, and using “national” to describe centralized behavior or policies that operate as if sovereignty were unitary. At times the national descriptor is appropriate, as in the case of our federal system’s national debt, but we must be deliberate in distinguishing structure from behavior.
States within any federation will always face the consolidation of power — what political scientist Robert Michels called the “Iron Law of Oligarchy.” Even the Founders recognized the danger. As Patrick Henry warned at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in 1788, “...a consolidated government is demonstrably clear; and the danger of such a government is, to my mind, very striking.”
Why a Governor as Head of State?
The term “governor” in the eighteenth century did not carry the subordinate connotation it has today. A governor was the chief representative of a sovereign power — whether that power was a king, a parliament, a congress, or the people themselves. A “president,” by contrast, was the administrative head of an elected or appointed body, a presiding officer rather than a sovereign executive. Even today, the administrative leader of the U.S. Senate is formally titled the President of the Senate. Our modern understanding of “president” is shaped not by historical usage but by the definition created in the Constitution.
All evidence points to the Founders wanting the states to retain as much sovereignty as possible while maintaining a Union strong enough to deter aggression. One of the primary reasons for the Revolution was to throw off an overbearing central authority. The Crown and Parliament served as the model of what not to recreate. The Founders feared a hereditary king, a House of Lords, and a Parliament with supremacy over the states. Their intent was to create separate and sovereign states joined in a federal union — not administrative districts of a single national government.
It is true the United States has never been fully federal or fully national. The original design was national only where absolutely necessary and federal everywhere else. Madison called this arrangement a “compound republic”; today we might call it a hybrid. Yet the long march has been steadily toward the national pole. We could, if we wished, adopt a fully national government — write a new constitution, vest all sovereignty in a single national authority, and dispense with the states as sovereign actors. The easier and wiser course, however, would be to acknowledge that we have drifted off the charted course and adjust the sails accordingly. What cannot continue is the pretense: chipping away at the real sovereignty of the states while insisting that nothing fundamental has changed.
For clarity and the belief that no one of us is as smart as all of us, we need to change what we’ve done. We need to reeducate ourselves on the strengths and dangers of federalism as well as nationalism and strengthen our constitution in the direction “We The People” wish to go.
The United States stands at a constitutional crossroads. We can continue down the path of quiet nationalization—allowing federal authority to expand through judicial convenience and executive ambition—or we can reclaim the federal balance the Constitution was written to preserve. The Founders’ "compound republic" was designed to be national where necessary and federal everywhere else, blending unity with autonomy and cohesion with resilience.
That design has been obscured by generations of drift, but it has not disappeared. The task before us is not to resurrect an eighteenth-century world, but to recover the clarity of its principles: sovereignty must be located and authority must be defined. If we can evaluate our present condition without sentiment or partisanship, we can chart a course for the next 250 years—one that honors the constitutional architecture we inherited while adapting it to the nation we have become.