The following article was published in my college paper at Brooklyn College:
The results of the 2004 election paint a portrait of a heavily divided country. On the one hand, the Northeast and the Pacific West voted heavily for John Kerry. The center of the country and the South almost exclusively voted for George Bush. At the moment, those numbers mean that the Republican Party has a decisive advantage in the federal government.
It has meant an expansion of the Republican majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and a basic realignment of the country in a more decisively Republican direction. Effectively, more than half of the country has rejected government-assisted health insurance, and increase in the minimum wage, and other issues, in favor of an opposition to gay marriage and abortion.
If we lived in a purely national system, this would pose an extreme problem. If the federal government made all the decisions affecting citizens, a slim majority of the country could dictate to a sizable majority what services they could expect from their government, and any number of other functions.
Worse yet, it would allow a slightly more powerful region--the South--to dictate to the other regions on the nature of government. However, we live in a federalist system, which means that a sizable amount of the governmental power in this country lies in the state governments.
Because the Democratic Party has maintained at least nominal control of the federal government since the mid-'60s until recently, most liberal states, like New York, have relied upon the federal government to provide funding for services, like welfare and Medicaid, that it wished to provide.
Now, the southern `red' states have begun to reject federal funding of these programs, and have taken control of all three branches of the federal government. However, this does not preclude Democrats in states like New York from picking up the slack. If the federal government no longer can fund certain social programs because of extensive tax cuts not supported by New Yorkers, nothing stops the New York State government from increasing local taxes to pay for those services.
It simply means that liberal New Yorkers, now in a clear minority, can no longer force Idahoans and Texans to pay for those programs if they don't want them. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, liberal states reasserting their rights in this federal system will probably ease the growing culture war that has caused the red-state-blue-state mess that so divides the country.
In fact, the framers of the constitution retained a powerful role for the states on the explicity assumption that regional differences would make a national government untenable. Maybe it's time to prove James Madison right on that.