"Today when politicians and scholars speak of "states' rights," they are invariably referring to conservative efforts to curtail the advance of civil rights policies, which are associated with the federal government thanks to the work of the New Deal, Great Society, and Warren Court. Sean Beienburg shows that this was not always the case, and that there was once a time when federalism was associated with progressive, rather than conservative, politics. In Progressive Federalism, Beienburg tells an alternative story of federalism by exploring the states' efforts in the years before the New Deal to shape constitutional discourse to ensure that a protective welfare and regulatory governmental regime would be built in the states, rather than the national government. These state-level actors not only aggressively participated in constitutional politics and interpretation, but they specifically sought to create an alternative model of state-building that would pair a robust state power on behalf of the public good with a traditionally limited national government. Current politics generally collapses policy and constitutional views, such that being progressive or conservative on one means that one is progressive or conservative on the other, but Beienburg shows that this was not always true, and indeed many of those most devoted to progressive policy views were deeply committed to a conservative constitutionalism"-- Provided by publisher.
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