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A/B test competing stances across a couple jurisdictions if you feel like it or if/when it benefits you
You dont really need to hold a strong stance on anything, leave that to people who affect nothing
Concretely, I prefer power to be decentralized to the most local and smallest group of people that is feasible. (Feasible is doing a lot of work in that sentence; I acknowledge.) In the limit, the smallest group of people is a single individual.
Even if a more powerful federal government would be likely to decide “my way” on Friday April 22, 2022’s three most important topics to me, I’d still want that decision to be as local as possible because, over the course of my life and my children’s lives, I think we get better decisions and outcomes from more local decisions where the people affected know the people discussing and deciding.
Of course it's not bad. What's bad is degrading the role of truth in political debates by selectively invoking states rights or federal rule as sacred principles, only to be abandoned or reaffirmed depending on the needs of any given debate.
For instance, I have close family members who are strong free-market conservatives (to a pragmatic extent, not anarcho-capitalists or anything) who I consider to be good, decent, and intelligent people.
Across the board they support states' rights to make decisions about loads of things, even those things they personally don't want (e.g. drug legalization, public healthcare, climate change regulation).
Not saying that those tribally-minded "our team must win at all costs" folks don't exist, but those who actually believe in free-market conservative values for their own sake (as opposed to for the benefit of their "team") are, in my experience, just as reasonable as most other groups, and I think we can criticize hypocrisy without painting with such a wide brush.
OP's implication was that such principled individuals exercise not much power in the real-world politics of our time.
Even more so, we usually share the same ideals just have different ways of getting there. There isn't huge division out there. Just two camps of dicks with most of us in the middle.
Basically, some white supremacists argue the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights. It wasn't. There's plenty of historical evidence and facts to debunk this. But even if true, the particular right in question was to own black people as property.
Actually, not really. The EU is, in political science terms, a confederation (to the degree that it's a state and not a supranational organization in the first place). The constitution envisioned the US as a federal state (the first one ever), in explicit contradistinction to the confederation that preceded it, as well as other then-existing confederations. That the constitution was ratified meant that the people of the time agreed to disband a confederation and move to a federal state.
The primary difference between a federal state and a confederation is that in a federal state, both the federal government and constituent states have their own loci of authority and power, as opposed to a confederation (where the federal government exists at the behest of the states and derives all of its power from those states) or a unitary state (where the reverse is true). As the US was the first example of this kind of government, the US Constitution has several weird quirks that now seem anachronistic (e.g., the federal territory not having representation) that probably helped stabilize the government in its early years.
Arguments that center on what the Founding Fathers actually intended for the country fall flat for me because a) how do you know what they actually intended versus what you want to say that they intended, b) what makes you think that a government that made sense for the US 250 years ago would make equal sense today, and c) if you look up the history of treaty-making, you'll find that the first person to bin the original intended procedures of how the government would work was George Washington, barely a year into his first term in office.
I think it's further than that: regardless what they intended, it's very easy to see the opposing views of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists via their respective Papers. It's pretty clear that some of the founders wanted a strong central government, and some wanted a weaker central government with stronger states. Big surprise, politicians disagree on fundamental issues.
But it's also pretty clear that the Federalists "won", and quickly. Very early in the 1800s we see the federal government asserting itself much more strongly than the Anti-Federalists wanted.
So I think it's just flat-out wrong for someone to say something like "the founding fathers wanted a small, relatively weak central government". Sure, some of them did, but many did not, and, well... the small-central-government faction lost.
Certainly some parties -- like libertarians -- would actually enact policies to make the central government truly smaller were they to come into power, but they are guaranteed not to with our electoral system as it is.
While in theory We The People have the right to determine all this, in practice we have little choice, it seems.
The greatest thing the Founding Fathers did was create a process within their document for fixing said document.
I’m an independent liberal and I’m pretty apathetic about NN (none of the doomsday stuff has manifest, but it doesn’t seem like passing NN would be harmful either and also I would rather solve ISP issues with antitrust regulation). That said, this feels like a straw man or nut picking. I haven’t heard of any conservatives getting mad over this, and anyway there’s nothing inconsistent about arguing that NN at the federal level is a breach of states’ rights while also arguing against California implementing it because you think it’s bad policy.