CCD Weekly Seminar Series: Prof. Zachary Elkins

Progressive States Rights: The Forgotten History of Federalism. 

In Progressive States’ Rights: The Forgotten History of Federalism (2024), Sean Beienburg shows there was once a time when federalism was associated with progressive, rather than conservative, politics.  In the years before the New Deal, state-level actors sought to pair a robust state power on behalf of the public good with a traditionally limited federal government. Current politics generally collapses policy and constitutional views (where a progressive view on one policy also assumes a progressive view on the other), but in this talk, based on his recent book, Beienburg shows that this was not always true, and indeed many of those most devoted to progressive policy views were deeply committed to what we would today call a conservative constitutionalism.