This is also why states rights is such a powerful drive – states are the fundamental political unit when it comes to ownership, control, and distribution of land and capital. It’s also the political unit that is most readily controlled by landed interests because they are geographically large regions of mostly unoccupied land. Municipalities and smaller units have the unfortunate tendency to be filled with people, mostly non-landowers, and those people have always had that damnable desire for agency and at least the pretense of self-rule. In a country that has acquired in order to ensure political freedom, democracy is the pitch but the freedom is overall a lack of public accountability in the form of a government that owns and controls land and capital. I mean, it’s not like the U.S. was ever not going to be capitalist.

But “democracy!” And that means that the non-landowners also want their own political and economic freedom, but because of mob rule (which the Federalist Papers were written to propagandize against) too much democracy threatens capital. And that’s why you got the Connecticut Compromise and the U.S. Senate – to temper populist sentiment and mob rule.

Take a look at your state governments. Look at what they actually do, and more importantly, look at who comprise their membership. Also take note that most states’s governments were set up with state senates being as equally antidemocratic as the U.S. Senate all the way until Reynolds v. Sims (1964) and “One man, one vote” forced state senates to redraw all of their districts based on populations instead of some other basis – usually counties, where land and capital ownership generally determines all political power – which had the overt purpose of checking the democratic impulses of the population centers and the rabble that vote in cities.

It’s not a coincidence that every appeal to states rights in the federal context benefits those with capital and real property over those who do not. It’s not about personal freedom, it’s about political and economic freedom and who controls how the state enforces relations between parties, especially between owners and everyone else. Real property is predominantly state law (and exclusively state law in family and probate matters, obviously). Contracts are predominantly state law. General police powers – health, welfare, morals, and safety – are only held by the states; federal police powers only exist over federal jurisdiction or in the limited context of constitutionally enumerated powers. States can police themselves over damn near anything; the feds can only police over limited economic matters and sovereign powers like immigration and foreign affairs.

Anyway …