Oh, good grief. So if Kansas wants to throw out its government and elect a dictator-for-life, they should be free to do that without any federal government interference? I'll see your Tenth Amendment and raise you the Fourteenth.
No state has a right to deprive its citizenry of the rights they enjoy as citizens of the United States. A state can't violate the Constitution or Bill or Rights just because its legislature thinks this is a good idea.
IANAL, but as I understand it, the reason we have to "incorporate" rights is not "judicial activism," but because of something called
the Slaughterhouse Cases. After
Dred Scott v. Sandford, this was up there on the Supreme Court's historic list of "WTF were they thinking" moments. Basically, it gutted the "privileges and immunities" clause by interpreting it as only applying to a narrow range of rights, as opposed to its original intent of preventing a state from screwing over half is citizenry (the darker-hued ones, as chance would have it). Trouble is, there's so much case law dependent on this interpretation, that admitting the screwup would apparently cause a huge judicial shitstorm. So instead, "incorporation" of a right is just a workaround to say that yes, this particular right of the Bill of Rights actually does apply to the states as well as the Federal Government.