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By Root 1871 0

and punishment. The important, basic crimes are all exclusively state crimes, or nearly so—murder, armed robbery, theft, rape, larceny, arson. The policeman prowling the streets on foot or in a car works for the city, the county, or the state; the vast majority of men and women behind bars are locked up in local jails or in prisons run by the state. The federal government, however, is no longer a distant outsider, with nothing much to say or do about local crime. It casts an important shadow. There are significant federal crimes—tax evasion, drug offenses, securities fraud, heaps of regulatory crimes. The federal government also gives money to support local law enforcement; and it has a voice in setting crime policy. Its role in the system has grown to impressive size, starting from a baseline of close to zero. Politically, too, crime has become a national issue.

Some sort of shift toward the center was probably inevitable in the twentieth century, when we consider what the country became, compared to what it was. The United States is vast, sprawling, diverse. It stretches from the Arctic wastelands of northern Alaska to the tropical islands that dribble off the tip of southern Florida, and from Maine to Hawaii, with some outlying islands thrown into the bargain. Today the population is over 250 million, of every race and national background imaginable.

The millions of immigrants have, in general, homogenized. Whether they jumped into the melting pot or were pushed hardly matters. Even African-Americans, not wanted in the mainstream, became very much a part of the culture, whether they intended to or not. Today, for the most part, Americans speak the same language, watch the same TV programs, dress and sing and talk along similar lines. People talk about roots and the old country, but it is mostly just talk. They have, in general, shucked off their ancestries like outworn shoes. Movies and radio and TV act as a giant cultural blender, and most people cannot or will not resist.

There are, of course, cultural and geographic dialects; the fault line of race is still jagged and not to be bridged; there is a powerful Hispanic presence, especially along the southern borders; there are Polynesian and Inuit and Chinese and Navajo enclaves, among others. How much real cultural diversity there is, or ought to be, in the United States, is sharply controverted.

American diversity is obvious: a rainbow of colors, shapes, habits, and human designs. The homogeneity is just as real. In parts of the Old World, in the past, every valley had its own dialect, every village was an island; few people traveled outside a short radius of distance. Villages, groups, and towns grew more and more different over time, like the beaks of Darwin’s finches. But America in the 1990s is one country in a blindingly literal sense. Satellite communication and jet airplanes make a mockery of distance and time. Even those too poor or sick or stuck in their rut to move about themselves have a window on the whole country (and the world) through the nearest television set.

One of the most profound trends in the history of government, law, and society in this century is the drift or pull or rush toward the center. The national government has become more and more powerful, has done more and more, matters more and more, fills more and more of our political and social consciousness. Yet the states have by no means withered away. Their governments are more important than ever in an absolute sense—they do more, tax more, spend more. But compared to the federal government, they have consistently lost power and influence. Schemes to revitalize the states, the periodic “new federalisms” and the like, are always dead on arrival. The big show, the main show, is now Washington, D.C.; and the big gun is the president, not the governor or the mayor.

In the twentieth century, the state boundaries have become increasingly porous. They are more or less arbitrary boundaries, to begin with; there is no big culture difference between North and South Dakota, or, for that matter,