Stephen H. Legomsky, Reimagining the American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government
Stephen H. Legomsky, Reimagining the American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
Thomas More’s 16th Century Utopia was hardly the first book on the “Ideal City.” I mean, even Plato wrote one. To give just a couple of U.S. examples, we have been blessed with wonderful works by Edward Bellamy, Tom Paine and Henry George. Indeed, around the time of the Constitutional Convention, Federalists and Anti-Federalists were producing aspirational pamphlets by the dozens. And after a bit of time, political theorists and other observers started turning out numerous books and essays, often lambasting the Electoral College, the Senate, single-member districts, “first-past-the-post” voting schemes, the power of lawyers and the courts, the “imperial presidency,” the two-party system, and on and on. I’ve actually written such a book myself, and though it was undeniably pie-in-the-sky, the work being reviewed here seems to me even more quixotic.
Among the problems to which utopians of the majoritarian variety have occasionally called attention are the allegedly deleterious effects of a federal structure on democracy.# But advocates of decentralization have been quick to respond that only states can be depended upon to save citizens from anti-democratic tyrants at the national level. Of course the nature of any particular “reforms” of a federal architecture as well as the intensity of the advocacy on behalf of such changes will usually be a function of what the states or the National government is up to at the time, as well as of the identity of the advocates. For example, if a bunch of U.S. state governments want to allow slavery, private ownership of cruise missiles, or the imprisonment of transgender athletes, and the Congress or the President is opposed to those plans, “progressives” can be expected to want the subdivisions to be slapped down and made subject to national rule. But if the current President is a Trumpian character whose questionable self-enriching activities stem largely from a desire to immunize himself and his party from any future electoral defeats, the idea of states’ rights will become more attractive to “the left.” That much is quite well known.$ But Legomsky's proposal is particularly audacious: I admit anyhow that I can't think of any other book written over the last 200 years that presses for the total removal of states from U.S. governance. And that idea is the propulsive idea behind Stephen Legomsky’s captivating Reimagining the American Union.
Now, when I mention the work’s audacity I don’t mean to suggest that Legomsky actually believes that his Shangri-la has much chance of exploding into being during the lifetime of anybody reading his book. He understands that it is a Swiftian fantasy. But he points out that every once in a long while, such proposals–given solid explanations and persistent advocacy–have become realities. He therefore wants to make a compelling case that Americans would be better off without states–not only because these topmost federal subdivisions have regularly shown themselves to be destructive of democracy, but also because, being wasteful and inefficient, states are entirely unnecessary. Cutting out the middle man, by coupling a unitary national government with thousands of municipal governments having the authority to provide necessary local and regional services is Legomsky’s answer to what he takes to be the country’s existential problems. And it can't be denied that he makes a very compelling case. It may in fact include the most comprehensive and detailed itemization of what we have lost and how we have lost it that anybody has put together to date.
Legomsky understands that many Americans have fierce attachments to their states of residence, but suggests that, e.g., one might still be a fervent “Razorback” without Arkansas having a government: after all, no area would need to lose its current boundaries, flags, cuisine, accents, or football teams. (And, I suppose, each could continue to defend any of its historical missteps and keep insisting that of all the states it is and has always been best). Rather, it is only the elimination of state governments that Legomsky seeks. Those who are devoted Hoosiers or Michiganders are claimed to have nothing to fear from his program.
As said above, concerns involving the deleterious effects states have had on U.S. democracy are not new. Suggested methods of handling these worries have ranged from solutions like (i) a “National Popular Vote” compact – an arrangement which requires no dialing down of state authority, since it relies on states having the ability to contract with their neighbors; through (ii) specific state-weakening alterations like elimination of the Electoral College or the power to set Congressional districts (or even abolition of the Senate) that would ensure that Congressional delegations appropriately reflect wildly differing state populations; to (iii) Legomsky’s proposal to simply eradicate state governments altogether.
It can’t be denied that both (ii) and (even the likely toothless) (i) are roads that have proven impossible to traverse very far to date. As Legomsky is shooting for a more radical change, and the others are quite well known, I will here mostly focus on (iii) – likely the dreamiest suggestion for changing the country since the Single Tax.
Legomsky begins his travails with a discussion of how we got stuck with states in the first place. He insists that those who claim that it was precisely these “sovereign” entities that brought the U.S. into existence are just making noise. On his view, “Muttering the word ‘sovereignty’ doesn’t add anything to…arguments” in favor of state governments. (I note, however, that just a few pages later he indicates that he uses “democracy” generally to “describe any system built upon popular sovereignty, majority rule…and political equality,” and he continues to use the expression “popular sovereignty” so frequently that it is hard to believe he takes the term “sovereignty” to be akin to an expletive.)
I have no objection to the interesting history Legomsky gives here of the creation of the U.S. Constitution, except for wishing that it hadn’t leaned so nearly exclusively on the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. This desire of mine stems from a belief that in a work supporting a unitary arrangement, so great a reliance on just those two sources is bound to result in folks like James Madison and James Wilson (the latter “Founder” being the chief opponent of the radically democratic and short-lived Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776), coming off as the “good guys.” I mean, it can’t be doubted that the Federalists wanted a much stronger central government than the Anti-Federalists did, and in that respect they are allies of Legomsky. Nevertheless, many of the reasons they had for their positions were quite different from his. In fact, as Beard and others have argued, the Federalists were to a great extent not just selfish and fearful of “the people,” but rapacious epistocrats.
Furthermore, Publius never expressed the slightest interest in eliminating the states. Madison’s compatriots were generally more interested in ensuring that the larger jurisdictions (where they happened to live) were not short-changed. And, of course, in the end they were willing to take half a loaf to get anything at all that seemed preferable to the Articles of Confederation.🗡
Whether or not the actions taken by the Constitutional Convention exceeded their mandate is an interesting question, but it is one that is difficult to get into very deeply if the notion of state sovereignty is senseless. In any case, as I entirely agree with Legomsky on the basic democratic problems engendered by federal systems, there is no reason to get into that matter in detail. I propose, therefore, to skip it and assume here that as soon as subdivisions are created, it is impossible to avoid difficult problems on the majoritarian front.
It must be pointed out that while discussions of the counter-majoritarian effects of our Constitutional defects can now be found in a huge number of books, journal articles, and popular media pieces, Legomsky does a particularly good job of running through how little democracy we now have in the U.S. due to the combination of GOP prioritization of winning over every other conceivable public policy goal, with the availability of gerrymanders, the Electoral College, single-member legislative districts, voter suppression laws, the Independent State Legislature doctrine, inappropriate input into judicial appointments, suits for national injunctive relief, and the near-silencing of Democrat-controlled urban areas. And, of course, he demonstrates the ways in which all of these rely on state mischief. Legomsky's use of current election data, his deep knowledge of the relevant case law, and his devotion to majoritarianism (except with regard to a fondness for super-majorities& in areas where I believe multiple simple majority votes spaced over specified periods would actually be preferable) provide readers with a plethora of what seem to me to be unrebuttable arguments for relieving states of their ability to continue to deliver deep wounds to what’s left of democracy in the U.S.
Legomsky also devotes considerable space to arguments that claims of the efficiency and experimentation benefits provided by government decentralization are now mostly obsolete or can be taken over by cities and towns. His Chapter 4 is intended to “demonstrate that state government is…a needless source of additional regulation, additional taxation, and inefficient duplication of functions – in short, a waste of taxpayer money and a pointless burden on the citizenry.” The unitary national government is said to need nothing more than the assistance of cities, towns, villages, counties, etc., sometimes bound into contractual relationships with each other.
Legomsky provides ten “factors” (rather than specific criteria) that he believes should be involved in determining whether it's the national government or the localities that should be in charge of governing. I won’t list them all here, but to give a sense of what he takes to be important, he tells us National action is vested with the relevant powers if “fundamental rights 2 interests are at stake,” there are dangers of “geographic economic inequalities,” or there is a good chance that local governments might try to shift harms to neighboring populations. On the other hand, Legomsky claims that localities should be handed the controls when, e.g., “there is a particularly strong reason to vary the policies to reflect the distinctive needs or political preferences of the local populations,” “knowledge of local conditions is imperative,” or “local governments have already amassed a great deal of experience in this area.”
This is a relatively short chapter, and, as might be expected, there is quite a bit of handwaving in it, with terms like “fundamental,” “danger,” “knowledge,” “imperative,” “distinctive,” “needs,” and “great deal” left vague. It is sketchy enough that one may wonder whether a future Legomsky might be needed to write a book about why we can’t continue to let municipal governments wreck everything. But I don’t myself see why all this should have to be nailed down at present. One might simply insist that states must go, and we will figure out how to handle all of the areas in which they have either done pretty well or have messed up to a fare-thee-well as we go along. It may even be that for specific functions removing states and replacing their current activities would cost more. That seems to me a price that those who insist on self-government should be willing to pay. In any case, I won’t go into any of that here. Instead, I will just assume that Legomsky has effectively demonstrated that either states should be prevented from continuing to do much of what they now do, or that they ought to be abolished altogether.
As it happens, I think that Legomsky makes a compelling case for the preferability of complete abolishment. I note, however, that if one of the principal benefits of states is (as suggested in Legomsky’s Chapter 5) a Madisonian diffusion of governmental authority, it probably doesn’t matter too much which choice we land on. Because in order for a governmental power of type A by government X to be “diffused” by subdivision Y, it seems reasonable to suppose that X and Y both have at least some level of type A authority. So, e.g., whether we remove all vestiges of the ability to muck around in electoral procedures and judicial appointments from states or just arrange for these subdivisions to entirely vanish, there would seem to be no possibility of “diffusion of authority” in those areas.
Given that each manner of progressing would leave us with extremely daunting legal and administrative hurdles, what should we aim for? Let’s simply suppose that after pondering the matter for a sufficiently long period, we eventually decide that Legomsky is right that the best thing to do (say 10% better than its nearest alternative) would be to (somehow) abolish the states. If we add this decision to our prior one according to which there is a dire need for states to at least be stripped of most of their power, it seems to nevertheless remain the case that deciding which should be our principal goal will be a matter for expert game theorists.*
Let me explain why. It is well known (and Legomsky provides a primer for anybody who happens not to know this) that, in our extremely difficult to amend Constitution, the single hardest provision to change involves the two-member-per-state Senate. It's also the case that that particular “compromise” may well be the most pernicious element among our Constitution’s multiple countermajoritarian aspects. Because of these two facts, let us estimate that amending the Constitution in every manner required to emasculate state governments short of abolishing them completely has no better than a 5% chance of ever occurring (at least without requiring something tantamount to a revolution that would completely throw out our founding document and require us to start from scratch). Now, let us go on to hypothesize that, based on Legomsky's arguments, it would be better to go whole hog here for what we will have assumed to be a result that is 10% better: the complete elimination of our federal system and its replacement with a unitary polity.
The problem is that we can't infer from our two stipulations alone that we should aim for elimination of states because it might also be true (and I think it actually is) that the probability of ever attaining that “best of all outcomes” is closer to only 2%. That is, if we set the likelihood of achieving state emasculation short of abolishment at 5%, complete elimination must be given a lower probability. Why? Because, whether or not irrational, attachments of millions of Americans to their “old Kentucky homes” as well as to their belief in the alleged reliance on “state sovereignty” by the glorious intellects of the golden-tablet-bearing “Founders” make Legomsky's most favored alteration even more fantastical. And it should be noted here that not all of the attachments people have to their state governments are actually irrational, because if we assume the increased efficiency of a unitary polity, then we must infer that jobs, prestige, and power would be forfeited by thousands of individuals under Legomsky’s proposed reform.
That's why it would take a brilliant game theorist – and substantially more defensible assumptions than it’s reasonable to suppose that any mere mortal can make regarding both the relative preferability and the likelihoods of attainment of the two goals – to make anything like a plausible determination of what we should be aiming for. But either way, Legomsky’s book is exactly the place to begin one’s work.
—---------------# Arguably, it is quite difficult to make federal systems compatible with majoritarianism, so if one wants to insist on “majority rule,” it will be difficult to retain traditional systems of federal subdivisions. I outline the difficulty here.
$ It might seem amusing to watch so many past “states’ rights” Republicans now swarm toward the idea of a powerful unitary national executive, or see numerous former backers of national safeguards against, e.g., local vote suppression and other electoral mischief now remind us on TV that the Constitution wisely gives over most electoral authority to the states. But, as I have recently argued elsewhere, the root of these changes isn’t really either hypocrisy or fickleness, but, rather, precisely what we should expect of rational agents: https://luckorcunning.blogspot.com/2025/11/a-distressing-realization-for.html For a recent example of a sincere democracy backer giving up all hope that the Trump Administration will retain any shred of majoritarianism, see Rick Hasen, “I Wrote a Book in Support of Nationalizing Elections. Trump Changed My Mind” in Slate (2/3/26). In Hasen’s there is no abandonment of democratic reforms for some tastier policy goal, but rather a setting aside of an ambitious democratic reform in an attempt to retain any semblance of self government at all.
🗡On the other hand, to Madison’s credit, the Electoral College arrangement we ended up with was not his first choice. His preferred (and surely preferable) Congressional selection scheme is not mentioned here.
* Those who have seen how bad I am at managing my Fantasy Premier League team will know very well that they should not depend on me for anything resembling expertise in game theory.
& FWIW, I also lack Legomsky’s affection for (or at least absence of hostility toward) bicamerality. I’m with Bentham on that matter. Furthermore, as Barney Frank once said to an old boss of mine after first getting elected to Congress, the U.S. Constitution is good on how differences between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government are to be handled: it provides a way to win (say with vetoes and overrides or through judicial review). But it is silent on how differences are to be resolved when the twoLegislative Houses can’t agree with one another.
About the Author
Walter Horn is a philosopher of politics and epistemology.
His 3:16 interview is here.
Other Hornbook of Democracy Book Reviews
His blog is here