Domination and self determination are central to all conflicts. People want self determination down to the lowest common denominator...so tending toward diversity and complexity difuses conflict. Nations with the most self determination (chaos) have the least propensity for revolution (radical change)...complexity = stability. If I were smart and an academic, I'd like to write a treatise on entropy in social systems. Orrr...I could be totally wrong.
Even so, State governments have no check over the Federal government's power. A Centralized Government with unequal representation is still not Federalism. If the States still chose their Senators, the Federal government wouldn't have been able to steal half of the power from the States that it has.
Be very careful in trying to apply entropy to anything above the chemical level. Sometimes it holds, sometimes it doesn't. It's a Thermodynamic theory. It only occasionally works in human events by chance.
We've seen the weakness of "factions" from lobbies such as the NRA and the AARP. They've dominated their respective policies despite being the minority in public opinion. In democracies, the principle is that you need 51% to win, but in practice, you can win through securing a majority consensus within that 51%. One reason is the human tendency to reduce complex factors into simple models and figures. What's simpler than black and white? Do all NRA members believe gun control is tantamount towards ditching the 2nd Amendment? Another way to look at it would be putting all the complex voices on an equal setting. All things being equal, they would follow a Pareto law distribution, where ~20% of the voices win. The link goes into discussion over weblog popularity (which began even) and the Pareto ratio. Provincialism occurs often in order to interfere with that 80/20 rule by diverting it to their regions. Who's to say, given that all things being equal in 30 years, that the Kurdish region would be the most influencial in an idealistic Republican Iraq? Yet deep seated rivalries from within other factions would try to reduce it into a region to be exploited for oil. If that should happen, the Iraqis and the Iraqi Kurds, in particular, do not have a tradition of power sharing set from idealistic founders as we do. They would be more inclined to secede for a stronger national identity than butt heads for the sake of complexity and the slight hope for dominating the nation with their regional agenda. Then again, I'm not as well read or scholarly as I'd like to be, so I could be totally wrong.
Huh. Actually, I do live here. And, have lived in Texas for 23 of my 31 years on this earth. I do share the Texan nationalist sentiment, but I think you're underselling how American Texans make themselves out to be. While we may not see eye-to-eye with the New Yorkers and the Californians, I'd say most Texans still think of them as "one of us." I think Texans would, for the most part, hate to hear that 20 million Americans on either coast don't want to be co-citizens with us anymore. California and New York and the heartland are all part of the American identity, even for Texans.
Last I checked the States do get to choose their own senators unless that whole election last November was a sham. I will agree that the Federal Government is more powerful in regard to the States than envisioned by the founders but that still doesn't mean that Federalism is dead. While Senators might be willingly give more power to the Fed. the States still elect those Senators and representatives and have the ability to elect ones who will change the law to shift power back. Further the electoral college still means that even the President has to pay attention to State concerns to win.
