Is Restructuring the Answer?

Joel Seligman discusses Stephen H. Legomsky’s radical call for restructuring the American republic.

By Joel SeligmanJune 6, 2025

• Law

• Politics

IS RESTRUCTURING the answer to many of the United States’ most pressing social problems? Washington University professor emeritus Stephen H. Legomsky thinks so and concludes, in his superb new book Reimagining the American Union, that abolishing state government is the most urgent challenge for those who seek to create a true democracy. State government, he argues, is “the single greatest obstacle to genuine democratic rule. It is also a needless source of fiscal waste. Together, these harms far outweigh any benefits that state government might be claimed to supply.”

Legomsky is under no delusion that “abolition of state government is anywhere on the immediate horizon.” But he invites you, in his erudite and sweeping review of the defects he perceives in the current structure of the US government, to imagine an America without state government:

The hypothesis [this book] tests is that, all things considered, the national interest of the United States would be better served by a two-layer (national and local government) unitary system than by the current three-layer (national, state, and local) federation. In that hypothetical system, the functions currently performed by state government would be redistributed among the national government, the local governments, and various inter-government partnerships. The country would cease to be a union of states. It would become a union of its people.

Reimagining the American Union offers a different type of scholarly analysis of what many perceive to be constitutional defects, such as two senators per state regardless of population, the electoral college rather than direct majority elections for president, lifetime judicial appointments, and such state-level problems as gerrymandering and a myriad of voter suppression laws and practices enacted despite the 15th Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Legomsky, in the manner of a Humboldtian scholar who focuses on the whole biome rather than individual flora and fauna, sees the defects of our current political system not by atomizing each of these into separate legal analyses but by viewing the entire system as flawed because of the political compromises of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. These compromises made possible sacrifices of majority rule beyond those necessary to protect the two other fundamental elements of democracy: popular sovereignty and political equality. We have instead achieved, in Legomsky’s view, a political system with “a systematic bias in favor of governance by a partisan minority.”

In historical terms, the Constitution was justified as far superior to the dysfunctional Articles of Confederation, which all but collapsed in the years preceding the 1787 convention, or as geopolitically necessary to achieve unity among 13 colonies with strikingly different attitudes towards slavery. Without a unified United States, there was a fear that the colonies would be conquered in whole or in part by Great Britain, France, or Spain, each of which was vastly larger in population, military might, and the ability to finance war. The Constitution was, in the view of modern legal historians such as Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar, a survival pact. From George Washington’s point of view, what towered above all other concerns in the adoption of the new constitution was that the United States had to be strong enough to survive. Bicameralism, two senators from states regardless of population, and the lack of meaningful steps toward the abolition of slavery were necessary compromises in the eyes of the framers to create a country that now has grown from being virtually bankrupt with less than four million people to the largest world economy and military with over 340 million.

In Legomsky’s view, our system of governance has not sufficiently evolved. He writes:

Nor is majority rule the only democratic casualty of the constitutional flaws and state actions that are the subject of this book. Political equality has also fallen prey. Indeed, the two fault lines are causally related, for it is political inequality that has bred minority rule. Only by awarding some citizens more say in the electoral process than others has it been possible to achieve minority rule on so regular a basis.

Fair enough. Many scholars agree that the biases of the electoral college, the withering away of the protections of racial and gender equality, the pervasive influence of money in a political system without an effective means of public finance to fund at least national elections, and the partisan tenor of recent Supreme Court decisions are urgent problems that need to be addressed. Few would argue with Legomsky’s second key argument for reform—that ending state government could achieve substantial savings by eliminating such fixed costs as that of state legislatures, the state executive branch, and each state government’s physical buildings, furniture, and equipment.

But here is the rub. Without state government, how do you run the country? Legomsky explains:

I am proposing here a true unitary republic that retains ample space for decentralized decision-making—not the wholesale transfer of all, or even most, state power to an ever-expanding national government. But instead of decentralization occurring through a combination of state action and whatever powers each state chooses to delegate to its local political subdivisions, decentralized power would be exercised by the local political subdivisions directly. They could act on their own or in partnership with either the national government or other local governments. Either way, they would no longer need the permission of their state governments, because the latter would no longer exist. Their only legal constraints would be the US Constitution and other sources of national law.

In detail, Legomsky lays out six general factors that favor reassignment of current state responsibilities to national responsibility—such as “the subject area is one in which fundamental rights or interests are at stake” or “national action is needed to address serious geographic economic inequality”—and five factors that favor assignment of particular subject areas to local authority, most notably “the subject is one in which concentrating the entire power in a single national government would be too dangerous.” He then devotes much of his fourth chapter to selective illustrations of how reassignment would work in key functions of state governance, such as public health and safety, public assistance, criminal cases, education at all levels, land use, city and town planning, infrastructure, environmental protection, licensing, elections for national office, and business regulation.

In chapter five, Legomsky carefully examines the various benefits that are often claimed for state government—for example, diffusing government power, tailoring laws and policies to the varying preferences of the country’s subnational populations, interstate competition, and Louis Brandeis’s oft-cited “laboratories” of innovation. He argues that, despite their facial appeal, these claimed benefits do not really exist, or exist but are minor in practice, or could be achieved at least as well by the national government in some cases, local governments in others, or intergovernment partnerships in still others.

Make no mistake: Reimagining the American Union is a call for a type of revolution that the United States has not experienced since the absorption of the original colonies into a new Union, including the 1787 Constitution’s national governance Supremacy Clause. Even the Civil War, which led to the redefinition of minority male political rights, did not sweep this far. Abraham Lincoln’s first goal was to preserve the Union. Legomsky would go considerably further. He wants not merely to reimagine the United States government but to remake the Union.

Legomsky recognizes that, under the current Constitution, this type of revolution is highly improbable, at least in the short term. Under Article Five, to initiate an amendment requires either two-thirds of both houses of Congress or two-thirds of the several states to call for a convention to propose an amendment. Ratification of new amendments then requires approval by either three-fourths of the state legislatures or three-fourths of the state delegations to a constitutional convention. As scholars have observed, the US Constitution is the hardest in the world to amend. Since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, only 17 subsequent amendments have been adopted. Compare that to the average state constitution, which has been amended 150 times.

Let me nonetheless accept Legomsky’s challenge: would abolition of state government be wise? A powerful argument can be made that it would prove highly difficult to manage. Under most circumstances, replacing 50 states with 90,000 local governments could be a recipe for chaos. When our financial system all but fell apart in 2008–09, the one theme that virtually every serious proposal made for reform of financial regulation was to reduce the number of regulators to achieve better informed, more effective implementation of the governing standards and rules, as I elaborated in the final chapter of my 2020 book Misalignment: The New Financial Order and the Failure of Financial Regulation. The breakdown of our intelligence system preceding the 9/11 attacks similarly led to a tightening of coordinated controls of our many intelligence agencies through the director of national intelligence. Legomsky’s response to these concerns is that, under his proposed criteria for redistributing the current state functions, those subject areas that present a special need for uniform treatment would be logical candidates for national regulation rather than local.

To be sure, there have been successful efforts to weaken or eliminate local governments. Most are in the history of tyrants such as Alexander the Great, Julius and Augustus Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin and Stalin, and Hitler. In historical terms, achieving what Steve Bannon once allegedly characterized, in 2013, as his ambition to create a “Leninist” government meant seizure by the Soviets of national bank assets, tightening of press censorship, strengthening of the police state, termination of democratic elections to a national government, and control of the economy, initially through collectivization of agriculture and manufacturing. Napoleon transformed often powerful local governments into 83 departments administered in each case by a single prefect answerable to his national government. Hitler, by decree early in the Nazification of Germany, empowered the national government to take virtually complete control in the federal states such as Prussia or Bavaria as necessary. This power was buttressed by the power of his private armies, the SA and SS, and by control of the media.

Legomsky’s achievement in Reimagining the American Union nonetheless is considerable. By contemplating what a wholesale change in our governance structure would mean, he helps us better understand the interdependency of constituent parts and makes the case not only for a wholesale revolution but also for incremental change. His calm analysis is marked by an air of humility. He knows that what he proposes is improbable and not likely today to be politically popular. Still, he fervently urges that it is wiser than what we now have.

Politics is the art of the possible. We have grown accustomed to the broad pendulum swings of national politics. When the goddess Fortuna swings the pendulum back, Legomsky, in this superb work, has provided a guide for what we could seek and why.