If you believe that what the world needs — what America needs — is efficient expert management, then you will pursue policy goals that emphasize size, scale, homogeneity, systematization, and regimentation. And your preferred instrument almost always will be the federal government; 50 states doing things 50 different ways is incompatible with your vision of intelligent expert administration. (Of course I am simplifying here, but I do not think that these characterizations are unfair or uncharitable.) And that is what we have seen from our modern Democrats for a generation: Their pursuit of national power, especially the centralized and centralizing power of the presidency, is an obsession followed often to the exclusion of other opportunities for political power. The Democrats won the White House twice under Barack Obama but were jackhammered at the state and local level, losing 900 seats in state legislatures, more than a dozen governorships, and more than a dozen state legislative houses. This did not seem to bother them very much. They also lost their congressional majorities, which stung more, but keeping control of the presidency — and hence the administrative state — was a great consolation. Their commitment to a Washington-based approach to political and economic life has not wavered.

Unfortunately for them, our Constitution is set up along other lines.