First, there is simply tradition. The very existence of American states, and the American federalist system, is an accident of history, not design. The borders of some of our states are drawn along logical geographic frontiers, but many just happened for political reasons that have been obsolete for centuries. Still, people are accustomed to their states and state traditions. The system has worked for enough people for enough time that it has become deeply ingrained. Tradition alone is never a sufficient reason to entirely rule out change, but one of the central conservative insights is that long-standing things should not be discarded lightly, and the burden is on the people arguing for change to make the case that what worked in the past is no longer tolerable and that the new solution is worth the upheaval. The accidental nature of federalist structures and their internal borders is typically true of other countries with federalist systems, such as Germany, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, India, Nigeria, and Switzerland. In some of those countries, as in ours, civil wars were fought over questions of separatism or federal–state balance, mainly in the middle of the 19th century. Yet state structures have endured there for the same reason they have endured here: The shared experiences of time together created communities with their own political traditions. Second, there is the related question of legitimacy. One of the core goals of the Left today is to destroy the federalist system, reducing the states to mere abstractions. We can see that in many areas, from the attacks on the Electoral College, the Senate, and the filibuster (which in practice preserves the importance of states in the Senate) to efforts to strip states of most of their role in drawing House districts, regulating the registration of voters, and conducting elections. The broader aim is to have as much policy set uniformly from Washington as possible, with state governments simply implementing decisions over which they have little say.