The United States Is Smaller Today Than It Was In 1787

According to Google Maps, it takes 20 hours to walk across Rhode Island on the longest diagonal that's entirely over land, and about 5 hours to bike that same distance. It takes about 10 hours to fly from Maine to Hawaii. When this nation was founded the fastest mode of transportation available was probably the horse, which I don't imagine was much faster than bicycles are nowadays. Now we have planes. The result is that you can get all the way across the country today in only about twice the time it would have taken to traverse Rhode Island, the smallest state in the Union, back at the time of the founding.

And, of course, the time it takes to send a piece of information from Maine to Hawaii is, well, zero seconds. It still would have taken five hours to get information across Rhode Island in 1787, because communication was only as fast as transportation in those days.

Conclusion? This nation has actually shrunk a whole lot since 1787.

It's a somewhat unorthodox conclusion, I know, and certainly in absolute terms it's not remotely true. There's more than twice as much land in the United States now than there was 230 years ago, and about 80 times as many people. But at the same time, it takes a lot less time to travel all the way across the country now than it did in 1787, so much so that you need to look at Rhode Island for something that was as "small" as the entire United States is now back in those days. And communication times have gone to zero, and it's become just routine to distribute a piece of information to essentially everyone in the nation at once.

I think this has serious consequences when we talk about federalism. I think a lot of the thinking about the relationship between nation size and government structure was done back in the day of ships and horses and no electricity, when a big nation like the eastern-seaboard United States took a long time to get news from one end to the other. In that climate it makes a lot of sense to assume that it would be easier to monitor a more local government, and thus one should be wary of putting power in the hands of distant capitals. But we don't live in that world any more, and we shouldn't conduct political theory on the assumption that we do.

In fact I think it's a whole frickin' lot easier to police a single national government than to monitor a state government. Everyone knows who the President is, and the Vice-President, and most know who their own Senators and Congressman are, along with the Speaker of the House (right now, anyway). How many people know who their governor is? Their lieutenant governor? Their state senator? Their State Assembly Majority Leader? The truth is that I live a few short blocks from the Rhode Island state house, and in real terms it's much harder for me to find out what goes on there than it is to find out what's happening on Capital Hill. Or at Westminster, where the same Parliament that the colonial Americans thought was so oppressively distant continues to meet. The relationship between how easy it is to gather information about goings-on and the distance between the gatherer and the goings-on is strictly speaking zero. So can we please, please, please stop pretending that there's something inherently problematic about government over a large area that we need to be concerned about? It's just not true any more.