“States’ rights” was supposed to mean “small government” and “local control”. The recent shift toward preemption of local ordinances pulls back the veil and proves that the argument only held sway because there were disproportionately more conservative states than conservative voters at the national scale. Now they’re shifting power back upwards and away from citizens because there are disproportionately more conservative states than conservative cities. States are their last holdout where institutional power hasn’t yet been sufficiently and consistently diluted by their decline in numbers. They don’t give a single, solitary shit about “small government”. They give a shit about conservative government. Everything else, to them, is illegitimate.