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It's not anti-democratic for a higher level government to override a lower level government, no. That doesn't make it necessarily a good idea. Some issues make

It's not anti-democratic for a higher level government to override a lower level government, no. That doesn't make it necessarily a good idea. Some issues make more sense to manage at a higher or lower level, and beyond that of course I have opinions on specific laws being good or bad. What level of government you decide certain policies at is orthogonal to how democratic a thing is*. As a relevant example of higher level authority on zoning, IIRC Japan just has twelve levels of zoning for the whole country; cities can choose which one to use for different areas, but they can't make up a new level. Whereas in the US, every city seems to have a dozen or more variants they made up themselves. Neither of these is fundamentally more democratic than the other. * assuming we're talking about democracies at each level, of course.

ericmay 4y ago
I'm trying to avoid getting into a discussion about exact definitions of democracy, but what I see here is that you're arguing that the bigger a government is the more democratic it is and thus it is justified in imposing its will on other democratically elected governments by virtue of its size and I don't think that those things follow one another. If you want to say that of course a higher (which is typically defined by size, but I guess also potentially authority or ability to enforce rules or some other concern) level government overriding a lower level government could be anti-democratic then we're just arbitrarily picking and choosing what we believe is democratic or anti-democratic which ties back to effectively expressing moral statements of good and bad. Leaving aside natural rights, and the complexities of state sovereignty in the United States specifically.