In what should be an eye-opening discussion, here is a real progressive, Alexander Moss, who is resigned to moving much of governance to the states — or is he?
Alexander Moss – The Defederalized Democrat
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Summary
Alexander Moss argues that America’s deep polarization and federal paralysis call for “strategic decentralization”: shifting more policy-making power to states while preserving nationwide floor standards for civil rights and social insurance. In a wide-ranging conversation he traces how cultural divergence, Senate malapportionment, executive overreach, and corporate oligarchy have hollowed out democracy, then explains why empowering states—much as Brandeis envisioned “laboratories of democracy”—could unlock progressive experiments in health care, climate action, and economic justice even under a hostile presidency.
- Moss defines “defederalized democracy” as greater state autonomy backed by immutable federal guarantees for voting rights, Social Security, and Medicare.
- He warns that executive-order governance, whether by Trump or Biden, signals institutional failure and increases the risk of authoritarianism.
- Demographic and cultural divergence, combined with a 100-million-citizen “empire limit,” make one-size-fits-all federal solutions increasingly brittle.
- Oligarchs publicly deride government but still rely on federal power—especially the military and trade enforcement—when their global profits are threatened.
- Robust civic education and critical-thinking curricula are essential to counter division, yet right-wing book bans reveal how anti-democratic forces fear an informed populace.
Viewed through a progressive lens, Moss’s thesis becomes a rallying cry: harness state activism to raise labor standards, expand Medicaid, and turbo-charge green jobs, while fighting nationally for voting rights, fair courts, and redistributive funding. Decentralization should never mean abandonment; it should mean building power closer to the people and making the federal government the guarantor, not the opponent, of justice.
About The Author
Alexander Moss has a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Davis. Moss has been writing on this topic (federal-state relationships) since 2022, with the publication of “A More Perfect Union (Briefs): Reimagining the United States as a European Union-style Federation.” In that book, he examined a scenario in which the United States would add another layer between the states and the federal government. His latest book, The Defederalized Democrat, vastly expands, updates, and improves that research. It moves from a theoretical “what if” to a more grounded, active analysis.
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Alexander Moss’s forthcoming book, The Defederalized Democrat, lands at a moment when progressives confront an unresponsive federal government and an emboldened right-wing coalition determined either to hollow it out or weaponize it. Moss, a self-described “pro-state progressive,” argues that the left can escape this stalemate by embracing a new kind of federalism: one that pushes decision-making toward the states without abandoning national safeguards for civil rights, social insurance, and macroeconomic stability. Early excerpts, a brisk presales climb on Amazon, and Moss’s blog posts all sketch a pragmatic blueprint for decentralization that resonates with the frustration many activists feel after a decade of congressional gridlock and Supreme Court retrenchment.
Moss builds on a rich tradition of “progressive federalism.” Yale Law School dean Heather Gerken popularized the concept, urging the left to treat states as “dynamic venues for dissent”—places where voting rights, climate policy, and labor protections can advance even when Washington stalls. Gerken’s scholarship reminds liberals that the New Deal’s centralizing impulse always coexisted with Justice Brandeis’s faith in “laboratories of democracy.” Moss extends that insight: he does not call for the libertarian evisceration of Washington, but for a rebalancing that treats state power as a shield against a potentially “feral” presidency.
Critics who fear that red-state governments will entrench reactionary rule miss two realities Moss highlights. First, many transformative policies already rely on state leadership. Consider climate justice. The Brookings Institution notes that one-size-fits-all federal climate mandates often fail to meet the specific needs of frontline communities. In contrast, resilience plans funded by Washington but designed locally show greater equity and durability. Second, progressive states can set national precedents: when California linked zero-emission vehicle mandates to a thriving clean-tech sector, Detroit followed rather than lose its largest market. In Moss’s framework, the federal government provides floor standards and fiscal backing, while states innovate beyond these standards.
Yet Moss refuses to romanticize decentralization. He acknowledges Brookings’ research warning that the United States has entered a perilous phase in which red legislatures nullify municipal civil-rights ordinances and blue jurisdictions retaliate in kind, threatening the basic principle of equal citizenship. To navigate that danger, he sketches “guardrails” that progressives must fight for nationally: statutory rights to vote, unionize, marry, and control one’s body; automatic stabilizers such as Social Security and Medicare; and progressive revenue sharing to prevent a race to the bottom.
The urgency of those guardrails becomes clear when one examines the Trump administration’s current campaign to shred what remains of the social safety net. The drive to eliminate the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and hundreds of similar initiatives illustrates how quickly executive fiat can plunge millions into precarity. In Moss’s telling, decentralization without a federal backstop becomes mere abandonment. Decentralization with a backstop, by contrast, creates room for states to move more quickly on childcare, broadband, or community-owned power, while guaranteeing that no resident’s dignity hinges on their ZIP code.
Progressives, he insists, should treat this moment not as an invitation to retreat but as a call to reorganize power. That means campaigning for ranked-choice voting and independent redistricting so statehouses reflect popular will; forging interstate compacts on clean energy, drug-price negotiation, and data privacy; and demanding “fiscal parity” grants that reward—not punish—states that lift wages and expand the commons. It also means confronting the neoliberal myth that productivity depends on centralized austerity. As Moss reminds readers, California’s economy rivals Germany’s precisely because its voters repeatedly endorsed higher minimum wages, ambitious climate rules, and immigrant inclusion—policies neoliberals decried as job-killers yet which produced the nation’s most dynamic growth.
In sum, The Defederalized Democrat reclaims federalism from conservative idol-worship and reframes it as a tool for egalitarian renewal. Moss challenges progressives to stop treating Washington as the only battleground and instead cultivate a vibrant mosaic of state-level democracies tied together by universal rights and redistributive guarantees. The path is fraught—authoritarian forces exploit every loophole—but the prize is a resilient, multi-layered republic in which popular majorities can finally govern. By marrying the moral ambition of the New Deal to the democratic pluralism of today’s diverse states, Moss offers a route around the constitutional dead ends that thwart national progress and leave working families at the mercy of Beltway dysfunction.