Something we could learn from inter-war Europe is that democracy led to dictatorship. Put differently, the inability to make it work, or the deliberate undermining of its mechanisms, moved the people from a government at least principally designed to answer to the people into one where the people demanded a strong enough excuse to foment tyranny.
In post-WWI Europe, their new parliaments were bumbling multi-party circuses incapable of anything. That’s my kind of government, but in post-WWI Europe, this leads several nations to do what the US Congress so often tries to do. Give the responsibility and risk to the Chief Executive and then complain to anyone who will listen when they don’t do it how they’d like.
From there, it is not much of a leap to arrange for expanded emergency powers that then inevitably turn your democracy into a fledgling despotism (recall COVID, if you don’t think that would ever happen near you anytime soon).
America, of course, is not Europe. It is a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy. There is no history of aristocracy in the traditional sense. States in the US can tell the Feds to take a hike, and most of them can manage their people with little effort. They have all the mechanisms in place. Independence from federal oversight and interference is easily achieved, hampered most often by the state’s addiction to “free” federal money that is anything but human nature.
But assuming they are prepared to address life without money laundered through the general government, states can do their own thing. Still, they have to do it using democracy, which only works if you allow it down to the smallest possible level of government restricted by a constitution that prohibits any majority from denying any minority of its natural rights. Otherwise, you are not too many steps away from the dictatorships that plagued Europe last century.
That might explain the political left’s love affair with it. You only need 50 + 0.1 percent to bully the rest of them and force them to your will. You will most likely find you need significantly fewer, but you get the point. Things can go downhill rather quickly without protections for those 49.9 percent or a way for local government to protect you from those bullies.
The Constitution does that, but only if it is taught, understood, enforced, and defended. Otherwise it’s just some words on paper.
