Break up the states! The case for the United Statelets of America - Salon.com by Michael Lind.
After noting the proposal in this thread's OP to divide California up into 6 states, he proposes that that does not go far enough.
America’s state governments are too big to be democratic and too small to be efficient. Given an adequate tax base, public services like public schools and hospitals, utilities and first responders are best carried out by cities and counties. Most infrastructure is either local or regional or national. Civil rights, including workers’ rights, should be handled at the federal level, to eliminate local pockets of tyranny and exploitation. Social insurance systems are most efficient and equitable when they are purely national, like Social Security and Medicare, and inefficient and inequitable when they are clumsily divided among the federal government and the states, like unemployment insurance, Medicaid and Obamacare.
So what are state governments particularly good at? Nothing, really. They interfere in local government, cripple the federal government, shake down lobbyists and waste taxpayer money.
Few if any state borders correspond to the boundaries of actual social communities with a sense of shared identity. A look at county-level voting maps shows that, in terms of politics, rural Americans everywhere generally have more in common with their fellow hinterlanders than with their urban fellow citizens in their own states — and vice versa. Arbitrary state boundaries merely insure that state legislatures will be the scenes of endless battles between country mice and city mice, resulting in stalemates that don’t serve the interests or reflect the values of either mouse species.
Colin Woodard has a nice cultural history of the US,
American Nations, complete with a map of the US cultural nations. They don't follow state boundaries very well.
Breaking up states, merging states, and transferring territories between states are all entirely feasible, but the US Constitution specifies that these operations require the agreement of Congress and the governments of the affected states. That may be hard to do if it means more blue states or more red states. The proposed California split, into Jefferson, North California, Silicon Valley, Central California, West California, and South California, would produce three blue states and three purple ones. Splitting Texas would create several red states and perhaps some purple ones. Etc.
Splitting up the larger states would help resolve a problem with the US Senate. According to political scientists Frances E. Lee of Case Western Reserve University and Bruce I. Oppenheimer of Vanderbilt, it is the world's most malapportioned upper house (
Senatorial Privilege), and thus one of the least democratic ones. Two Senators per state was included in the US Constitution to get smaller states' delegations to support it. At that time, the most populous state, Virginia, had 11 times the population of the least populous state, Delaware. Nowadays, the most and the least are California and Wyoming, with a ratio of 60, and likely 70 in 2025.
At this point, to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” on a fife and drum, somebody in the peanut gallery will object that our system represents the “genius of the Founding Fathers.” Sorry, peanut gallery patriots — the major Founders hated the overrepresentation of small states in the Senate. For most of their political careers, Alexander Hamilton favored more centralization, while the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison (except early in his career), was for states’ rights. But these two co-authors of the Federalist Papers agreed that states should be represented in the Senate on the basis of population and that the compromise in the Constitution that gave each state two senators, no matter its size, was a mistake.
75 Stars | Mother Jones by Michael Lind, discussing how small-population, largely-rural states have often thwarted the wills of the voters of states with big cities. This is because of their Senate representation.
There also, ML proposes breaking up the more populous states. That article has cutesy names for the possible states:
- California: Vineland, Marin, Siliconia, Reagan, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego
- Texas: Petroland, Texahoma, Alamo, North Mexico, Tejas
- Michigan: Ford, Michigan
- Ohio: Rockland, Hayes, Ohio
- Illinois: Jordan, Greater Chicago, Illinois
- New Jersey: North Jersey, South Jersey
- Pennsylvania: Philadelphia, Franklin, Pennsylvania
- New York: Long Island, New York, Hudson, East Ontario
- Florida: Epcot, Okefenokee, Geritolina, New Cuba
