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Our Independence Day is behind us, and it is neither unpatriotic nor sacrilegious to acknowledge that the United States is changing in profound ways.
Increasingly immobilized by zero-sum politics, the federal government remains powerful in theory but is losing much of its capacity to solve many of the nation’s most pressing problems.
Governing authority is gradually drifting downward — and outward — to states, cities and metropolitan regions that can still act with speed, competence and public trust.
More than 30 years ago, management scholar Kenichi Ohmae anticipated this shift in his book “The End of the Nation State.” He argued that cross-border metropolitan regions — not nation-states — would become the primary engines of economic growth, innovation and competitiveness.
Today, the San Diego-Tijuana region illustrates much of what he envisioned. It’s a deeply integrated binational economy built around biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, logistics, research and tourism. Increasingly, its economic logic is shaped less by Washington or Mexico City than by regional partnerships and global supply chains.
California offers perhaps the clearest example of this evolving model.
With an economy approaching $4 trillion, the state rivals the world’s largest national economies. Yet California’s importance today lies not simply in its economic size but in its growing role as a laboratory of governance whose policies often influence national and international markets.
When Washington has stalled, California has frequently moved ahead.
It has adopted vehicle emissions standards that exceed federal requirements, enacted some of the nation’s strongest consumer privacy protections through the California Consumer Privacy Act, and expanded its own climate initiatives even as federal priorities have shifted.
Because companies often find it impractical to operate under separate standards, California’s policies frequently become de facto national benchmarks.
California is hardly alone. Innovation, investment and population growth have become increasingly concentrated in a relatively small number of metropolitan regions — San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Boston, Austin, Miami and others.
These metropolitan economies are often more connected to global markets and peer cities than to large portions of their own states. Their priorities increasingly diverge from slower-growing regions. And when national policy proves gridlocked, they pursue alternatives through interstate cooperation, regional initiatives and direct engagement with international partners.
More than forty years ago, journalist Joel Garreau made a similar observation in “The Nine Nations of North America.” He argued that North America functioned less as a unified political system than as a collection of regional economies shaped by geography, culture, infrastructure and trade rather than by political boundaries.
When I first read Garreau while living in Washington after serving in the federal government, I found his thesis intriguing but ultimately unconvincing. Today, it seems remarkably prescient.
Across health care, infrastructure, housing, climate policy, education and economic development, federal institutions that once set a clear national direction increasingly struggle to build consensus.
Americans experience the consequences through rising costs, uneven public services and widening regional disparities. In response, governance is quietly being reorganized. Rather than waiting for sweeping national reforms, states and metropolitan regions are assuming greater responsibility for solving practical problems.
This transformation is not the product of any single administration, although recent political polarization has accelerated it. The underlying forces — globalization, technological change, demographic shifts, economic concentration and ideological polarization — have been reshaping American governance for decades.
Health care provides one example.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, several Western states coordinated public health policies, data sharing and emergency planning when federal guidance became inconsistent. While the federal government remains indispensable in public health, these state-level collaborations demonstrated that regional governance can emerge quickly when national leadership falters.
Climate policy reveals the same trend.
When the United States withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement during the first Trump administration, California continued to pursue ambitious emissions goals, entered into numerous memoranda of understanding with foreign governments, and hosted international climate summits. These actions stopped short of diplomacy in the constitutional sense, yet they reflected a state increasingly acting as a global policy actor within America’s federal system.
What is emerging is neither the collapse of the United States nor a serious movement toward secession. Rather, it is a reconfiguration of American federalism: a more decentralized, networked nation in which states and metropolitan regions exercise growing practical authority even as formal constitutional powers remain unchanged.
Far from threatening democracy, these regional centers of governance may represent one of its most important adaptations. In an era of institutional paralysis, they offer a pathway toward innovation, responsiveness and problem-solving that national institutions often cannot provide.
If the United States hopes to remain competitive and cohesive in the decades ahead, it must recognize this transformation rather than cling to an increasingly centralized model that no longer reflects how much of the country actually functions.
For better or worse, California is no longer simply participating in American federalism. It is helping define what American federalism may become.
John Eger is a professor emeritus in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at San Diego State University. Previously, he served as an advisor to President Gerald R. Ford and as a senior vice president of CBS.
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