Thank you for your extensive response and comments. To answer your direct question first: While I do agree that the federal government is broken in important ways, I'm not quite ready to assert that it's entirely dysfunctional and that most of its power should be turned over to the states.

Believe me, I've wrestled with this question for a long time. I'm drawn to decentralist thinking and to the ideal of participatory democracy. The U.S. is too big and diverse to be a fully unified nation, and I'm fascinated by Colin Woodard's argument that we are several distinct national cultures artificially held together. (See his book American Nations). I was even connected to a group of secessionists here in Vermont for a while.

Yet I keep getting stuck on the potential consequences of emasculating the national government. What you call a culture war is--in part, anyway--a longstanding conflict between the ideals expressed in the Bill of Rights and several key amendments, and local or regional resistance to the practice of those ideals. It is a conflict between the expansion of corporate power on national and global levels and the need to protect the public from the excesses of concentrated economic power, from environmental degradation to mistreatment of labor.

Of course, these concerns reflect a liberal orientation; I do see a positive role for a strong and effective government, and we might just need to agree to disagree about that. But I am sensitive to the need to restrain excessive government power by also honoring decentralized, participatory democracy and regional diversity. There's got to be a balance somehow. Maybe we can start, as you say, by removing genuine "culture war" issues--to the extent that they do not involve constitutional rights-- from the national agenda.