Federalist Renaissance?

A libertarian pundit joins the federalist bandwagon, and suggests that "progressives" may be doing the same.

It seems that the trial lawyers have really caught the political imagination of the Left in America. Progressives, disaffected by the results of the most recent federal election, have hit upon a new strategy: forum shopping. Or, as it used to be called, federalism...

For the uninitiated, "forum shopping" is a strategy under which lawyers suing big companies (think, particularly, tobacco companies) scour the country for the perfect jury pools (poor and angry, uneducated and gullible) in order to secure the perfect verdicts and awards (guilty and large, respectively).

Now, the progressives want to move the forum of modern political debate from the federal level, where they've -- to put it charitably -- not done so well recently, to the states and cities. The twist is that they believe this way they can cater to the smarter set.

...progressives are beginning to realize that it's extraordinarily difficult to foist your values on other people -- and maybe they should just stop trying. Now, this isn't quite as good as recognizing that it's wrong to try to force your values on other people. But it's a start.

We don't have to read each other's newspapers, watch each other's cable news networks, go to each other's concerts, browse each other's Web sites or sit through each other's movies. So why should the outcome of every major political debate be binding for almost 300 million Americans spread out over a continent?

...With an open-ended, complicated and potentially catastrophic War on Terrorism to occupy the federal government for the foreseeable future, might this not be the perfect political coalition to start exploring: people on the right and left who just want people on the other side to leave them alone.

Let the federal government deal with what it's supposed to -- national security. Let the states and cities sweat the small stuff. It could be the beginning of a federalist renaissance.