ANTI-FEDERALIST FEDERALISM: AMERICAN “POPULISM” AND THE SPATIAL CONTRADICTIONS OF US GOVERNMENT IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

ABSTRACT

The US federal government has been widely criticized for its response to the Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic. Much of the poor response and outcome has been ascribed to President Trump’s personal failure. Yet more importantly this failure has been of the US governmental system. More specifically, the role of the federal government in fashioning nationwide policies across a range of areas, including public health, has been crippled by an anti-federalist ideology and the institutional inertia it has created. Ordinarily, one would think that the federal government would be empowered by a self-defined “nationalist” or right-wing populist in the White House. But rather than command and coordination across tiers of government, the states have been left to cope as best they can without much of anything in terms of coherent and consistent national/federal leadership. The recent efflorescence of anti-federalist ideology has roots going back to the 1980s. The pandemic has exposed the distortion of the once well-established polyphonic practices of historic US federalism by a now institutionalized dualist vision of federalism that has sadly become the leitmotif of failed US governance in the pandemic. Keywords: anti-federalism, federalism, pandemic.