It's not so much the "progressive elite" as a general fact of human politics that in Federal systems power inexorably moves to the center as anything going wron

It's not so much the "progressive elite" as a general fact of human politics that in Federal systems power inexorably moves to the center as anything going wrong in the provinces will be taken over by the centralised state, but never vice versa. Nationhood is the only thing that seems able to resist this tendency at the present time.