This article is an excerpt from The Fourth Branch: How State Government Can Save Our Union.

President Reagan entered to a standing ovation. It was the last year of his presidency, and he was feeling, as he often did, nostalgic. “I’m not joking when I say that every one of the eight times I’ve met with you these eight years, I’ve wished more like you were in our Congress,” the president said to his audience of state lawmakers from each state in the country. They were part of a group most Americans had never heard of, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC for short.

“And yet I’m also glad you’re where you are: leading our conservative revolution in the state legislatures of America,” he continued. “Already you’re leading not only the states but the federal government as well in an agenda of hope for the future. In areas like tort reform, drug legislation, AIDS testing and research, welfare reform, privatization, and education reform, you’ve been way out in front of the pack.”

Following the president’s dulcet tones, a lanky man with an impressive mustache stepped behind the presidential seal. This was New York state senator Owen Johnson. “Mr. President, we’re very honored that you’ve met with us again as you have in the past,” intoned Senator Johnson, every syllable dripping with his hometown of Babylon on the south shore of Long Island. “We’re grateful for your longstanding support which you’ve rendered to ALEC. We’d like to take this opportunity today to present you with a token of our appreciation.”

When I entered the New York state senate’s new Democratic majority in 2009, Owen Johnson was still serving. It was the only time in his 40 years that he suffered the indignities of the minority. He was 50 years my senior and treated by his Republican colleagues like a legend; they all called him “OJ” without irony, as though he was the most famous American with that nickname. For years, “OJ” had served as the chairman of the important Finance Committee, which oversees New York’s gargantuan budget.

Though we were colleagues, he was playing the power game at a different level than I had even considered. I would have been shocked to learn that “OJ” had spoken on a program with the president as part of an annual trip to the White House. And I wouldn’t have understood that the role he was playing there, as chair of ALEC, made him even more powerful outside of our chamber than he was within it.

President Reagan understood exactly why it was so important. His politics depended on his vision of states’ rights — a federalism steeped in specific symbolism.

During his successful campaign for the White House, when he’d delivered a major campaign speech laying out this vision for states’ rights, among the country’s 3,000 counties he’d coincidentally chosen Neshoba County, Mississippi — by chance, the place where three young civil rights activists had been murdered during the Mississippi Freedom Summer 16 years earlier, in 1964.

He called upon the same vision of state power to justify his administration’s effort to unravel the effective and popular government programs built from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society — the “reforms” and privatization for which he thanked the ALEC lawmakers. Arguing for states’ rights was more popular than arguing against clean air to breathe and water to drink; affordable healthcare for parents and their kids; a country connected by dependable highway, aviation, and communications networks; and plentiful opportunities for dignified work with good wages and conditions.

“When we talk about federalism here in Washington, we’re really talking about putting the states more and more in charge,” he said to “OJ” and the ALEC lawmakers. “And that means that if what we conservatives believe in, if the principles that we stand for, are to succeed and prevail, we will need more conservatives like you in our state legislatures.”

Though Reagan drew on a symbolic connection between the power of states and his right-wing vision, the idea that these two goals were inexorably linked was a myth. There was nothing inevitable about it.

Linking state power with a certain ideology wasn’t the goal of the people who literally wrote the book on federalism: Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison didn’t collaborate to write the 85 essays of The Federalist Papers with any partisan goal. Ideologically, they didn’t agree with each other on most things. But one of Madison’s conclusions in the papers has become particularly complicated: “The first and most natural attachment of the people will be to the governments of their respective States,” he claimed,........

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