Yes, some kind of federal system perhaps, with free movement between them, and a small national government to bind them together, so people can vote with both their ballots and feet. Too bad the progressive elite decided that system was too much of an obstacle to their agenda.
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.
Humanity decided long ago that running our own lives as hunters and gatherers wasn't the best we could do, and we came together to form societies and governments. No matter how you feel about it, you live in a society and have benefited from its public services, and there has to be some group of people to administer those public services.
