Fade Resistance Performance
During the 19th century there was a covertly progressive trend away from federalism and toward the centralization of Government in the United States. This was occurring largely under Republican presidents. Grover Cleveland, a staunchly Democratic President, was arguably one of the last great spokesmen for federalism from either of the two major political parties. He once vetoed a modest $10,000 federal grant for drought relief on grounds that there was no constitutional power to do it.
If President Cleveland's veto action sounds archaic, remember that the federalist precepts and principles remained strong enough - for long enough - that during the 1950’s, the federal highway program had to be called a "defense" measure in order to win approval. Later, federal loans to college students in the 1960’s were absurdly called "defense" loans for the same reason. The Tenth Amendment is a refined taste, but it has always had a few devotees.
The Great Demolition Derby...
Early in the last century, federalism took some fairly serious blows and suffered several life threatening wounds. This began during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson while the aptly named Jekyll Island Hunt Club was in full session conducting its secret planning on far reaching changes in how this country went about doing business.
The execution of grand schemes like the National Monetary Commission and the creation of the Federal Reserve and it's related fiat currency and several other items related to the financial control of the United States were the business of these secret sessions. Subsequent federal laws were enacted permitting Senators and congressmen to become involved in the affairs of banks and a few more amendments to the Constitution were added, to bind the People.
First came the income tax and its constitutional reference established by the Sixteenth Amendment. This would mean that every US Citizen was now, for the first time, directly accountable to the federal Government.
Then the Seventeenth Amendment required that senators be elected by popular vote rather than chosen by state legislators. This means that the States no longer have their own representation in Congress, so that they have now lost their remaining control over the federal government.
The Eighteenth Amendment, establishing Prohibition, gave the federal government even greater powers over the country's internal affairs.
All these amendments were ominous signs that federalism was losing its traditional place in the hearts, and perhaps the minds, of Americans. But even these expansions of federal power were at least achieved by amending the Constitution, as the Constitution itself requires. The Constitution doesn't claim to be a "living document". It is written on paper, not rubber.
In fact the radicals of the early twentieth century despaired of achieving socialism or communism as long as the Constitution remained. They regarded it as the critical obstacle to their plans, and thought a revolution would be necessary to remove it. As The New Republic wrote: "To have a socialist society we must have a new Constitution."
The following generation of collectivists would be extremely less candid and far more covert in their contempt towards the Founding Fathers' Documents and the federal system which it birthed. Once they learned to falsify devotion to the Constitution they secretly regarded as obsolete, the laborious formality of an amendment would no longer be necessary. They could merely pretend that the Constitution was on their side.
When Franklin Roosevelt restaffed the Supreme Court with his compliant cronies, the federal government was free to make up its own powers as it went along, thanks to the notion that the Constitution was a flexible "living document", whose central meaning and foundational precepts could be changed, and even reversed, by ingenious interpretation.
The Catholic intellectual and author Hilaire Belloc sounds a near prophetic warning in 1912 through one of his best known non-fiction works, The Servile State. In it he maintains that the future for freedom looks grim because the working-class is willing to give up its freedom in exchange for security and guarantee of subsistence standards.
The Raw Deal...