It would absolutely be more healthy. One of the big problems facing our country is that we have centralized so much power in the federal government (which wasn't meant to have it), that everything the federal government does becomes super contentious. The election of a president should be, in a better world, relatively boring because the real action is happening at the state or even local levels. But instead, the president has so much power to affect things that the elections become a desperate fight as people perceive it to be an existential threat if the wrong person gets elected.

It's been a long process to get that much power in the federal government - it goes back at least to FDR (so, near a hundred years now), and I've seen arguments that it goes all the way back to the Civil War. But I do firmly believe that the centralizing of power is destroying us. We got away with it when the nation was more united in its values and culture, and even then it could be contentious. But today vast swathes of the country share little to nothing in the way of values or culture. Of course we can't get along when such widely disparate groups of people are tied together and a single government body is controlling large portions of their lives.

Fun to see people derive Federalism from first principles.

> It would give the president less power to decide exactly how schools and universities should be run

He doesn’t have that power. But he’s taking it, and the parties who are supposed to be stopping him are uninterested in doing their job.

> “But I wonder if it wouldn't be more healthy for you if the states grew a bit more independent.”

Land borders and water rights. I don’t see it working out.

Secession.