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.

“Disasters may just happen, but catastrophes are made” (Agnew 2013, 455).

Pandemics are by definition global in character and spread from place to place through travel and community spread. They are a test for different governmental systems and the geopolitical-territorial arrangements upon which they rest (Horton 2020). Absent much in the way of effective global governance, national-level governments typically have the best resources and expertise to limit spread and manage healthcare as the disease spreads across their territories. Simply leaving management to lower tiers of government can create major problems when they adopt different testing and mitigation strategies and do not have adequate resources and expertise to institute them. But centralization is also problematic insofar as it presupposes a one-size fits all strategy that fails to account for regional and local specificities in susceptibility and resources to manage a major health emergency. The basic problem is something brought to light many years ago by Mark Twain when, in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), he alerted us to the fact that coloring in territories on a map as totally distinctive domains is utterly misleading, whether these be the states of the United States he had in mind or the self-evident nation-states of the world political map (Agnew 2019). Viruses do not spread or succumb to suppression solely on a territorial basis. That also goes for a host of other things that require regulation and management. Given that we are stuck with multi-tier territorial governance, how best can that be put to work on our collective behalf?

In the United States there has been much controversy over the problematic role of the federal government in the Covid-19 pandemic. The US has had one of the highest death rates relative to population size worldwide and one of the most incoherent and inconsistent national governmental responses in terms of public health policies and financial support to the tiers of government (state and local) at which policy has been administered (e.g., Beaubien 2020; Lerner et al. 2020). The lack of any national plan for dealing with the pandemic has been particularly obvious from the outset (e.g., Haffajee and Mello 2020). Much of the critique has focused on the performance of President Donald Trump; from his months-long dismissal of the dangers posed by the pandemic to his chaotic administrative approach to the challenges posed by the spread of the virus and his politicization of the pandemic for electoral purposes (e.g., Kristof 2020). Trump has certainly been more part of the problem than any sort of cure. But the pandemic exposes rather deeper structural flaws in the US system of government than just the managerial, psychological and intellectual flaws displayed by the person who has just happened to occupy the office of President at this trying time (see, e.g., Trump 2020; Woodward 2020). So much of what has gone for political debate in the United States since the 1980s has been over the size of government when it should have been over the quality of governance with respect to what the federal government should and can do. The question is what the government must do that other actors cannot, and also how one can coordinate between them and across tiers of government from the federal to the local (Agnew 2011). This has been a major question in political geography down the years to which the literature has tended to argue for coordination rather than competition or a rigid division of labor between tiers (e.g., Dikshit 1976; Markusen 1994; Van der Wusten 2017).

The major danger inherent in any federalism lies in not allocating “sufficient powers to their general governments to deal with modern economic [and other] crises” (Wheare 1963, 244). Crucially in the United States, a federal Senate biased to favor low-density rural parts of the country and an Electoral College that reinforces this bias in presidential elections have led to a mobilization against the sort of relatively powerful and redistributive central government that Founding Father Alexander Hamilton favored (Rodden 2019; Deaton 2020). A minority of the population has thus come to have a major influence in reviving the radically dualist (states versus federal) vision of US federalism (Milhiser 2021). This vision was the one that had defined the so-called Philadelphian system of weak federal government and strong states that prevailed before the Civil War (Deudney 1995). It was fully revived beginning in the 1980s. This has led to the present impasse where the federal government and its proper functions have been systematically neglected or actively undermined to the detriment of the system as a whole (Mishra 2020).

More specifically, there is a fundamental contradiction between a President like Donald Trump elected on a national-populist basis and the reality of a US governmental system that since the 1980s has been increasingly anti-federalist in its legislative and executive preferences for privatization. It has also favored “small government” and is thus immune to any sort of forward-looking role for the federal government in domestic policy. The manifest federal-government failures in managing the Covid-19 pandemic in the US are the outcome of this contradiction. But it is the federal-state-local nexus that has been more central to the mismanagement than the bureaucratic failures of the federal government per se, even though they have long played a role in skepticism about the performance of the US federal government (e.g., Schuck 2014). To the extent that discussion of the federal failure in the pandemic has extended beyond Trump and his coterie it has been to the specific failings of such federal agencies as the CDC, NIH, and the FDA (e.g., Bandler et al. 2020; Piller 2020). Notwithstanding their importance, I want to argue that the bigger problem has been a geographical one: the revival of a dualist model of federalism that does not match the multiple geographies of power at work in the world and across the United States.

“Revival “ of dualism is the operative phrase. A New Deal coalition dominated by the Democrats but subsequently supported also by many Republicans prevailed from the 1930s down until the 1970s. It knitted the country together across a number of significant economic and cultural divides. In the early 1960s the United States was widely viewed, inside and outside the country, as having an exemplary “civic culture” compared to many other countries in terms of trust in government at all levels and in a sense of popular collective political efficacy (e.g. Almond and Verba 1963). But it unraveled beginning in the 1980s though the 1990s with the emergence of major urban-rural and sectional differences on a range of policy issues not least the role of the federal government in the American economy and society (Mellow 2008). Rather than acting as partners, the states and the federal government were increasingly seen as opponents. During the Progressive era in the early twentieth century and following the 1930s New Deal down until the early 1970s, a federalist rebalancing as a result of social mobilizations had led to a more efficient and redistributive national government. Given the ambiguities surrounding the US constitutional compact, disputes between federalists and anti-federalists, originalists and proponents of a living constitution, and so on, the relative legitimacy of the powers of the various tiers of government (and delegation of executive powers) is ideologically forever up for grabs (e.g., Ollmann and Birnbaum 1990; Balkin and Siegel 2009; Mortenson and Bagley 2020). But Trump’s rhetorical dictatorial style with support from minions like Attorney General William Barr devoted to a “powerful” executive vis-à-vis the legislative and judicial branches should not be confused with an empowered and effective federal government tout court (e.g., Schwartz 2020; Falconer 2020). This is central to the paradox of Trump’s presidency.

Arguably, testing is crucial in managing a pandemic. The highest tier of government could be expected to take a leading role in coordinating across all lower-level jurisdictions in this respect at least. But as late as September 2020 the federal government was acting as if the pandemic were past and still leaving the states and municipalities to cope largely on their own (e.g., Weiner and Helderman 2020). There was still no national testing program by 12 June 2020, five months into the pandemic. Things came together tentatively on testing nationwide only on 22 June. But testing then became a topic that Trump could use to underplay the seriousness of the pandemic. Too much testing, according to Trump, was painting too dire a picture. As a result, in late June 2020 Trump even suggested that testing ought to be slowed down to make the pandemic look better than it was (Cohen 2020). In late June federal funding was pulled from testing sites in five states undergoing major spurts in cases and hospitalizations (LA Times Editorial 2020). At the same time, national testing capacity was still much less than needed to respond to the spread of the pandemic across the country (Madrigal and Meyer 2020b). Even as Trump continued to boast about “our great testing program,” as of early July many cities still could not test all those they needed to in order to trace and isolate spreaders, suggesting how deluded the president was about the empirical reality the country faced (Weiner 2020). Contact tracing, absolutely key to suppressing the spread of infection, turned out to be a total debacle, despite the best efforts of some state governments (Steinhauer and Goodnough 2020; Khazan 2020). In early August a group of seven states (Maryland, Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and North Carolina) abandoned the federal government for their own consortium in quickening the pace and scope of testing (Baker and Court 2020). Trump’s delusion about the unconstrained course of the pandemic fed into his inability to see that sustainably opening up the economy depended on dealing with the pandemic, not denying its existence (Bassett and Linos 2020). The US strategy, if that word is appropriate, was exactly backwards: instead of conquering the virus first and then opening up, opening up was seen as the priority much too early and then the virus rebounded. As the Economist (2020) wrote: it was like a hospital investing “in palliative care while abolishing the oncology department.”

After providing an overview of the spatial uncertainties of multi-tier governance revealed by the pandemic both in the US and elsewhere, I turn first to the case for a putatively national-populist leader such as Trump, how he has campaigned and ruled, and then briefly to the paradox of the geopolitical framing at the center of Trump’s appeal: the opposition between the national and the global. Suggesting that Trump’s performance during the pandemic cannot be understood entirely in these terms at all, I turn to the longer term institutional imbalances in the US federal system that have hobbled response to the pandemic. Of particular importance I claim has been the lack of coordination across the tiers of government from the federal through the state to the local that is a by-product of the anti-federalist perspective on US federalism that has become dominant politically in the US since the 1980s. The dualistic view of federalism (federalist versus anti-federalist) has undermined the possibility of a more polyphonic practice that would have led to better management of the pandemic. Just blaming Trump, therefore, has been to miss noting a more systematic institutional failure.

Spatial Uncertainties of Contemporary Governance: Dualism Versus Polyphony in Federal Governance

In Europe regional-level politicians and big-city mayors have been at odds with national governments over what policies to follow in order to suppress and/or mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g., Hall et al. 2020). In the United States state governors have clashed with the President and his administration and local officials with state and federal ones over public health measures such as facemasks, physical distancing, and quarantine rules. At one point the President even encouraged armed supporters of his to “liberate” states such as Michigan run by Democratic governors that he considered his adversaries (e.g., Cook and Diamond 2020; Edelman 2020). In this context there has been widespread disagreement about the relative merits of more or less decentralization in managing a crisis of such proportions as the Covid-19 pandemic. After an initial disastrous response to the first outbreak in Wuhan, the highly centralized authoritarian Chinese government brought the pandemic under control in its territory relatively quickly and effectively. At first, but with later problems, the federal German system produced a relatively positive outcome (Studemann 2020). The asymmetric devolution in the UK and the US federal system both produced relatively poor outcomes in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Cherry-picking your cases, however, can lead to whatever conclusion you wish.

Political debates in many countries about the relative balance of powers between different tiers of government tend to discuss them in terms of neat divisions between competencies and autonomies exercised at different levels: national, regional, and municipal (see Treisman 2007; Agnew 2011). From this viewpoint, a technical process of matching functions to levels on the basis of externality effects from and popular demands for different public goods and services will lead automatically to a clear and demonstrable geographical separation of powers. Historically, however, different jurisdictional levels have large areas of joint or concurrent powers or what can be termed “polyphony.” In the United States, for example, federal and state laws frequently regulate the very same goods and conduct, from drug trafficking to education, gun control, and bond trading. There is no tight combination of territorial level of governance and particular good or service for a wide range of goods and services. There is a constant practical struggle between tiers of government over powers in relation to numerous issue-areas. Even what might seem to be areas “settled” at one level, say immigration regulation and foreign policy actions, have become subject to cross-jurisdictional dispute and coordination. Witness popular attempts in California to impose immigration regulations (usually defined in a dualist perspective as a purely “federal” function) and Massachusetts’s so-called Burma Law banning all state agencies from signing contracts with companies active in Burma (Myanmar) because of the Burmese government’s history of human rights violations (e.g., Guay 2000; Paul 2002). That the US federal courts have turned these measures back is only an indication of how extreme any “sharing” of functions of this type would be. Many other functions, however, cannot be limited solely to one tier of government yet are typically viewed these days as if they should be.

In practice, therefore, governance is rarely if ever about exclusive and non-overlapping spheres of authority neatly divided between geographic scales or tiers of government. The term “polyphony,” coined in this context by the American constitutional lawyer Robert Schapiro (2005-6, 2009) to refer to the interaction, competition, and coordination between state and federal powers in the United States, captures much better the actual practices of fuzzy definition, competition, and antagonism that typically inform all attempts at managing power within multi-tier governance. Schapiro sees the dualist vision in the United States as having had twin roots. One is the economic argument of the state as a “firm” or private corporation within a system in which the federal government then operates as an agent of antitrust. In this market model, popular with conservative lawyers and with conservative-dominated US Supreme Courts since the late nineteenth century, federalism is essentially an exercise in line drawing between two tiers of government. Gerald Frug (Frug 2001; Barron and Frug 2006) has pointed to problems with the historical accuracy of this account and specifically to the analogy that inspires it, not least to the fact that local government in the US is increasingly “defensive” rather than reflective of “true” autonomy, and this is so largely because US federal courts have consistently favored private corporations (i.e., businesses) and their expansive operations over public ones such as municipalities.

The other root of dualism lies in the normative republican model that is often held to have motivated the founders of the United States and, more particularly, inspired the writing of the US Constitution. From this perspective, a rigid specification and separation of functions between tiers is held to promote various vague but rhetorically powerful goals: “efficient and responsive government, participatory self-government, and protection against tyranny” (Schapiro 2005-6, 248). The dualist view’s continuing ideological attraction, therefore, is longstanding and continues to draw adherence because it is deeply connected to common narratives about US history and US constitutional exceptionalism (Lim 2014). Obviously, the US federal experience sets it apart from countries such as France, Spain, Italy, and Britain, to name just a few, with very different governmental histories and dominant regime ideologies on the continuum from unitary to federal systems. But the distinction that Schapiro draws between dualist and polyphonic perspectives on multi-tier governance is a useful one that can be applied more widely. The tension between them reflects a more realistic grasp of contemporary geographies of power than simply accepting the older dualistic one as an inevitable fait accompli.

Why does the polyphonic perspective make more sense? There are at least three ways of thinking about how power is related to space with respect to political institutions: bounded territories, networked flows, and topological ties (Allen 2009). Typically, we think of governance almost entirely in terms of the first and arguably, for much of human history, this has made considerable sense. Territories contain power in the sense of being “tiered” units of space in which services, for example, are supposedly provided on an equal basis within the unit as a whole or differentially as a result of conscious political decisions within the various parts. The “scaling up” of power and the workings of power more generally, however, often, and increasingly, involves networked flows across territories including across their borders. The need for higher tiers of government can reflect the sense that only at a larger territorial scale can networked flows be managed or regulated. Relations of connection, though, are not always simply topographical, reaching across or bounding concrete spaces. They are also topological: gaps between “here” and “there” are increasingly temporal moments (across the Internet, for example) rather than distanced connectivities. Indeed, powers of reach are potentially beyond territorial containment.

It is important to identify these multiple spatialities of power because at least part of the issue with contemporary questions of territorial governance is the degree to which the externalities emanating from the second two spatial modalities can be captured or entrained within any sort of territorial framework (Agnew 2018). As yet, means of managing flows and more diffuse relations of connection outside of any sort of territorial reference remain radically underdeveloped. Plausibly, the financial products at the heart of the financial/economic collapse of 2008–9 flowed in real time between networked nodes around the world but were increasingly free of territorial regulation simply because the products and their agents defied the territorial imagination upon which regulation has been largely based. Likewise, our conventional thinking about how to challenge shadowy terrorist networks remains to a high degree trapped within a territorial imagination that can only work on a state-by-state basis rather than directly adapting to the modus operandi of the groups in question. Pandemics and how they spread are not all that different either (Horton 2020).

So, governance is no longer simply a question of matching “functions” to the most appropriate level of territorial resolution (local, metropolitan, regional, national, etc.), as for example in Mann’s (1984) classic account of the territorial origins of state autonomy, but also of adapting territorial modes of governance to more complex spatial modalities of power. Arguably, the contemporary world is more pluralistic in its spatialities of power than are available means for managing them politically. But this is also a contributory factor to why any sort of strict division of powers territorially is increasingly problematic in a world where power is not even contingently always divisible territorially (Agnew 1994, 2019). The pandemic has been exhibit A in showing how much practice of a coordinated and overlapping rather than mutually exclusive and divided territorial model of governance would favor better management. Arguably, for all their problems, the cases of Germany and Australia suggest how much a polyphonic federalism can serve to mitigate the disastrous effects of a pandemic as opposed to the either/or opposition between decentralization and centralization that has tended to prevail latterly in the United States.

Donald Trump and National-Populism

Donald Trump campaigned for the US presidency in 2016, unlike previous Republican candidates for that office, on an openly populist platform (Agnew and Shin 2019). His central claim, emblazoned on the baseball hats of his supporters, was “To Make America Great Again.” Following on a two-term first-time African-American President, whom Trump had personally insulted and run down from before the 2008 election, including being the primary source of the charge that Obama was an illegitimate president because he had not been born in the US, this slogan was not hard to decode. Indeed, since his election much of what Trump has done has been to undo what Obama had done with respect of social, healthcare and environmental regulation (John 2020). Apart from that, Trump has followed recent Republican orthodoxy on slashing the federal income tax on high-payers and appointing ultra-conservative judges to the federal courts. In the 2016 election campaign, however, more than these initiatives, Trump emphasized “toughness” in “bringing back” jobs in manufacturing that had somehow been stolen by “China” (not a word about the role of US multinational businesses in this) and building a wall with Mexico (that Mexico would pay for) to keep out the “illegals” that he spent much energy on the campaign trail decrying for their criminality and threat to the racial composition of the country. The entire thrust of Trump’s public persona has been to present himself as a national savior with a very clear sense that those he desires to see exalted after the Obama years is the largely elderly white demographic that he appealed to support him in 2016. Since arriving in office he made no attempt to portray himself as a president of the entire country, only of those who display loyalty to him (Wehner 2020).

Attacking the “mainstream media” (particularly so-called quality newspapers and television news that report in a fact-driven rather than ideological way) played a vital part in establishing Trump in his prophetic role as leader. The media must be discredited to undermine the empirical truth in which they claim to trade. Steve Bannon, Trump’s house theoretician, insisted that the imperative is to dominate the conversation, not to engage in a battle of ideas: “The Democrats don’t matter,” he says. “The real opposition is the media, and the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit” (quoted in Thornhill 2018). Trump has thus appealed to a cultural vein in American society that is suspicious of specialist knowledge and the notion of objective truth. His most important stock-in-trade is to accuse all and sundry who are not loyal to the lies and fabrications he espouses of trading in “fake news.” This is how he appeals above all to “his people” or “base.”

Say what you will about him, but Trump has been a political genius in managing to conquer a Republican Party that initially was allergic to his appeal, particularly on economic issues such as trade barriers, and in his consistently receiving since his 2016 election support in opinion polls of around 80% percent or so of self-identified Republicans polled through October 2020. In the 2020 presidential election, even while losing nationally and in the Electoral College, he still received around 74 million votes. So, even in the face of a dismal record of mismanaging the early warnings of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump still retained significant popular support (Gabriel and Lerer 2020). His reservoir of support among Republican Party voters is based on a “fealty, a visceral and emotional attachment” that is still triggered by his open displays of nativism and attachment to a nostalgic vision of an America that had been “lost” (quoted in Waldmeir 2020). Indeed, in parts of rural/small town America, his supporters were already prepared to blame their globalist co-nationals who travel abroad for the virus coming into their America (Kilgore 2020). That he rhetorically continued by and large to demonize his political opponents and rewrite his own history in relation to the pandemic shows how much he had not changed operationally even as the challenges he faced were no longer those of his own invention, like the Ukraine imbroglio that led to his first impeachment, but something that would test even the best of leaders (e.g., Baker 2020; Bump 2020; Parker and Rucker 2020).

Even in the face of the most significant challenge facing a US president in a generation he remained focused on his reelection in November 2020 rather than dealing with the crisis at hand. Populism always seems to privilege campaigning over governing, not least because its main tenets, beyond claiming “the people” as its leitmotif, are riling up anger and resentments rather than pursuing rational policy goals or good governance per se (Agnew and Shin 2019). Trump’s performance in a prime-time speech about the pandemic on 11 March 2020 as he struck a “starkly militaristic and nationalistic tone” while the country was being radically upended by what he termed a “foreign virus,” as if it were not already abroad in the land, was widely panned by critics (Glasser 2020). But it probably resonated positively with those he wished to mobilize for the November 2020 presidential election. Because the pandemic had started in China, even as their favorite son was off playing golf at one of his own resorts, and rallying his base in rambling soliloquys rather than preparing administratively for the pandemic no longer just on the horizon, he was not held responsible.

Key to the entire geopolitical framing that brought Trump to the White House was the discursive opposition between globalism (and globalists) on the one hand and nationalists favoring the people and its national state on the other. The fusion of an idealized people with the national state is by no means alien to American political development (Peel 2018). This framing was the one suggested by Steve Bannon in which rather than pitching himself as the agent of Wall Street and as a business-as-usual Republican, the only way Trump could win in 2016 was in bringing into national electoral politics people alienated from both of the dominant parties by the lackluster performance of the US domestic manufacturing sector and slumping median household incomes since the 1990s. In turn, the best way to do this was to criticize the liberal global order and talk about reestablishing a territorial sovereignty over borders and the economy that had been lost with the latest round of globalization since the 1980s. Imposing tariffs and opposing international trade agreements were the main strategies used to pursue these goals, even as massive tax cuts widened the federal government fiscal deficit that could only be financed by foreign sales of US treasury bonds.

At the same time, of course, Trump was himself very clearly a globalizer with his foreign investments in hotels and golf courses. His cover on this was to paint himself as an American everyman down to how he spoke and what he ate. This is a typical move on the part of right-wing populists everywhere. His business “successes” therefore (notwithstanding a long history of bankruptcies and questionable loans) could be viewed as evidence of his managerial intelligence even as he had to overcome the disability of being just another everyman. As a neo-patrimonial figure dispensing favors to his subjects/people, Trump would reward his supporters through punishing foreign interests and by channeling federal resources and tax-favored capitalist investment to their benighted communities (Riley 2017). This self-presentation met with enormous success among a significant portion of the electorate concentrated largely in southern and western states but with enough strength in what turned out to be the crucial states (given the indirect nature of US presidential elections through the Electoral College) of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to give him a victory in 2016 even as he failed to achieve a majority of the national vote. As a caveat, I should note that both he and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had the largest negative approval ratings of any presidential candidates since polls had asked the question (Agnew and Shin 2019).

The claim to a national people as the primary constituency, even though we know that Trump supporters tend to be a very particular demographic-cultural grouping, is central to the entire populist rationale. In the US case this rests first and foremost on ideas about the founding groups and their racial-ethnic profiles. These, of course, are people of primarily Western European ancestry like Trump himself. When Trump first declared his presidential candidacy, as he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in New York City in 2015, he made his case centrally by declaring what he was against, in the case at hand, Mexican immigrants crossing the southern border of the US and defiling the national space by their very presence, to which his answer would be to build a wall and otherwise close off the United States from the rest of the world as best he could. This was Trump’s national-populist promise.

The Retreat of the Federal Government Since the 1980s

While representing “his” people, presumably a national constituency at least in theory, Donald Trump has also been heir to a set of ideological positions that have been to a considerable extent contradictory to his national-populist claim. These were apparent in his 2016 campaign but became glaringly obvious in the years in office. Certainly, hostility to professional expertise and science and disdain for disinterested journalism are often fundamental components of right-wing populism (e.g., Gerson 2020). But in the contemporary United States they are frequently connected popularly to government. President Ronald Reagan famously announced in his inaugural address as President of the United States that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Reagan did not so much have professional expertise in mind. But he certainly wished to trim and limit the role of the federal government. He opened the door to doubts about the very idea of the “public interest” and disinterested pursuit of objective knowledge. This reflected a longstanding political current in the United States increasingly dominant since the 1960s in the Republican Party suspicious of the expanded role of the federal government in enforcing regulations on business and civil rights on the population at large. At the same time, however, as noted by Janen Ganesh (2020): “Republicans seem to mistake the public’s cynicism about ‘government’ in the abstract with indifference to actual services and fiscal transfers.”

The very term Federalist was redefined to mean the exact opposite of what it meant to the writers of the US Constitution (e.g., Agnew 2005, pp. 102–18; Edling 2003). Thus the right-wing Federalist Society is in fact largely anti-federalist in orientation, belittling and undermining the roles of the federal government that Madison and Hamilton had championed (see, e.g., Ketcham 1986; Hamilton et al. 2014 [1788]). Trump has picked up on this truly anti-federalist viewpoint in his attacks on the purpose and expertise of the federal government tout court and in relation to the experts in government agencies such as the EPA, the Department of the Interior, the Department of State, the FBI and the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense. Shrinking the role of the federal government thus fulfilled the view that markets and maybe local governments were always better than the central government and that there is no such thing as the public interest (e.g., Frank 2008; Brown 2019).

The Reagan years marked the beginning of what has been called the neoliberal assault on the role of the federal government in managing the US economy and providing for the expansion and protection of fundamental civil rights. From the neoliberal perspective, the best government is that which does least, except insofar as it favors privatized solutions and capitalist interests over public institutions. In practice this was to declare an open season “to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests” (Packer 2020). It was an organized reaction against the so-called liberal-Keynesian view that governments should use fiscal policy, government spending and tax increases to stimulate demand during economic downturns. In its place neo-liberalism variously encouraged monetary as opposed to fiscal policy and tax cuts, particularly on the wealthy and business, as supply-side stimulus. It also preferred private to public provision even of goods, such as healthcare, that most people might reasonably regard as better made available on a public basis. Trump certainly governed in this neoliberal vein (Packer 2020).

At the same time, Trump inherited and cultivated the anti-federalist vote that came out of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and led to the Republican strategy since Richard Nixon of hunting for white voters in the US South (Maxwell and Shields 2019). From this viewpoint, the federal government represents both the hated “Union” that won the Civil War and the imposition on the South of norms and regulations that do not fit their “heritage.” This heritage, as Maxwell and Shields (2019) brilliantly deconstruct, consists of an amalgam of white racism, patriarchy, and religious zealotry used to justify the other two. In this construction, the “Deep State” to which Trump frequently refers, typically associated with right-wing conspiracy theories, is not the bugaboo that libertarians might associate with limiting access to certain calibers of guns or imposing vaccinations, although these can be present too, but more the sense of a national-level government that imposes rules such as affirmative action, restricts local law enforcement, enforces environmental regulations, and insists on the basic equality of all citizens in the eyes of the law. With more than a nod to a Confederate imaginary of the United States, Reagan in his day often used the locution “these” United States to emphasize the sovereignty of the states against that of the federal government. Trump’s recourse to the rhetoric of culture war over abortion, gay rights, immigrant undermining of American “culture” and so on all are designed to appeal to a constituency that sees the federal government (particularly the federal judiciary) as useful only in the negative sense of restricting its enforcement powers in the jurisdictions where they live rather in terms of an affirmative role in providing public goods and services on an equal basis nationwide.

The net effect of these two trends toward an anti-federalist conception of the federal government has been to produce an increasingly paralyzed and ineffective national government apparatus. Beyond this, however, the impact has also been to invest in a sort of “Darwinian” federalism in which the states are essentially left to their own devices without the necessary support and leadership of the federal government (Cook and Diamond 2020). This federal failure was on full display in relation to the crisis spawned by the spread of Covid-19. If rather than the either/or logic of the dualist vision a practical polyphony had been at work, the states and the federal government would have operated as alternative and coordinating power centers. So, rather than asking if some function, like public health or pandemic management, “belongs” to one tier or another, we should ask how overlapping and coordinating power operates and can actually improve how some issues are addressed. What is of most use in the distinction between dualism and polyphony that Schapiro (2005-6) makes is that it draws attention to values of plurality, dialogue and redundancy in the latter over against those of uniformity, finality, and hierarchical accountability associated with the dualist vision. The point is not to ennoble the polyphonic alternative conception normatively so much as see it as methodologically more useful in terms of the workings of multi-tier governance in practice, for example in relation to managing a pandemic. In the crunch, Australian and German federalism seemed to exhibit more of this polyphony than did that of the United States.

The Spatial Paradox of Trump’s “Populism” and the Covid-19 Pandemic

So, at the same time Donald Trump has appealed to a conception of a tightly walled and contained national-territorial homeland, he is also heir to a weakened federal government and federal system that is the outcome of years of systematic degradation at the hands of anti-federalists of several types. On the first count there have been the years of systematic underfunding of national agencies devoted to health and welfare (e.g., Himmelstein and Woolhandler 2016). This reflects a bias against public funding (and federal taxation) and a preference for private initiatives with limited regulatory controls. On the second count there has been a trend to leave all sorts of issues, such as health care finance and provision, entirely to the states and localities (Kettl 2020). This reflects in part the view of the federal government as a usurper of local “heritage” and traditions, and the dangerous enforcer of equal citizenship and rights. It is not so much that a case cannot be made for effective local and regional democracy but that the federal role as a coordinator and manager has been systematically sidelined because of an anti-federalist ideology that has completely vitiated Trump’s claim to represent an idealized national-people walled off from the rest of the world.

Trump himself weakened the federal government in very specific ways since arriving in office in 2017, not least in relation to public health management. Trump’s neo-patrimonial promises referred to previously as important to his 2016 campaign for President were largely forgotten. The promised investments in national infrastructure and in replanting manufacturing industry came to little or nothing. Would these have finally mattered to his reelection? Perhaps not, but more importantly he made numerous promises to address the Covid-19 crisis practically rather than just rhetorically but without much delivery that may well have come back to haunt him in November 2020 (Drezner 2020). His main achievements in office were a giant income tax cut for the wealthy and business in 2017 and the appointment of numerous ultra-conservative judges to the federal courts. Even as he continued with his populist-nationalist rhetoric, Trump systematically degraded the functioning of the US federal government (e.g., Bergen 2019; Rucker and Leonnig 2020). Federal government departments had thin or acting leadership for long periods. Many of the political appointees running their agencies were utterly incompetent for or opposed to the charges they received. Regulations and rules were rolled back across the board from education to the environment, transportation, and healthcare. Anti-corruption measures and procedures were undermined and unenforced (Shaub 2020). Trump even left the US Postal Service, the oldest existing federal agency, out of the massive public financing package addressing the economic effects of the pandemic. This is symbolic of the entire attitude to the utility, or from the anti-federalist perspective, the futility, of the federal government.

Crucially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal pandemic warning system was dismantled as a leftover from Obama; the CDC, the main federal government agency charged with preparing for and managing disease outbreaks, had its budget gutted; and Trump left the states and their governors to fend for themselves without much of any real federal policy or plan to speak of (Haffajee and Mello 2020) Simultaneously, Trump also exhibited a complete disinterest in collaborating with other countries, including longtime allies, in addressing the pandemic. This would have been to resurrect the dreadful global international order that he has consistently decried. He attacked and then withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization for being too pro-China and as if it were to blame for his own months’ long passivity. On the positive side, the US Army Corps of Engineers and the vaccine development program, Operation Warp Speed, provided the basis for excellent responses, respectively, in helping hospitals deal with tenting hospitalized patients and promising a conclusion to the pandemic though mass immunity by way of vaccination. Made possible only because of federal government action in both cases, the latter, however, then fell foul of the continuing lack of proper coordination between the federal government and the states in rolling out the vaccines beginning in December 2020 (e.g., Smith and Choi 2021).

Repeatedly, Trump returned again and again in 2020 to the populist idea that the pandemic was the product of travelers, particularly foreign ones. He substituted this for the idea that once the virus was present within the country, it was tracing and isolating people (as in “community spread”) who test positive that should take center stage rather than simply restricting international travel. Returning to his obsession with immigrants, he obscured his mismanagement of the pandemic by announcing a total ban on immigration as if immigrants were the continuing source of infection (NY Times 2020). Yet as time went by the federal government seemed less rather than more effective in testing for the virus (Lim 2020). The states were left carrying the can, so to speak. Finally, in his daily press conferences early in the pandemic Trump was in full populist mode: accusing hospital staff of pilfering face masks and other Personal Protective Equipment, contradicting the public health experts, peddling his own doubtful cures like a snake-oil salesman, and instead of showing any grasp of the managerial issues facing his government, verbally assaulted the media representatives present and dispensed advice that was the opposite of that he had given the day before (e.g., Wright and Campbell 2020; Rucker and Costa 2020; Lipton et al. 2020).

Conclusion

In the end, therefore, President Trump’s populist potential in addressing a national problem like the pandemic through coordination between federal and state governments proved impossible to realize. This was not simply because the populism he represents is inherently oppositional and rhetorical rather than practical. It was more because a constituency committed to limiting rather than empowering the federal government elected Trump. At the same time, and reflecting this anti-federalist electorate, he was also the prisoner of a longstanding set of ideological-institutional trends in the US that have systematically weakened the role of the federal government in managing across other tiers of government and thus laid the groundwork for the failures manifest in the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. The displacement of a polyphonic version of federalism by a rigidly dualist one since the 1980s arguably undermined the possibility of an adequate federal response, notwithstanding Trump’s own problematic approach to the pandemic crisis. In this context his national-populism could only ever be a fake version of the real thing. The dualist vision of US federalism that Donald Trump inherited finally proved fatal for a large number of Americans.