The Urge to Localism

by Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation

In my former life as a professor, and in my current non-professional life, I’ve advocated for a school of thought called “localism.” In an age of administrative centralization, “too big to fail” banking, globalized economic exchange, large-scale “infrastructure” projects, energy-draining supply chains, and agribusiness, human beings increasingly feel as if they are barely participants in their own lives, that “expertise” has been substituted for their practical wisdom as ordinary citizens. It is as if, as one writer penned, we are in the back of a theater with the sound turned off, watching events unfold over which we have no control. We feel powerless and helpless, as if our actions don’t matter. None of this is helped by the obviously silly idea that the single greatest act of citizenship we can engage in is by being one of the 155 million people who cast a vote for president.

Large systems are inherently fragile ones. When one part seizes up, everything else grinds to a halt. Localist systems are resilient, and able to absorb setbacks and shocks. In a localist polity and economy, humans become increasingly aware of their dependence on one another, thus encouraging a kind of civic friendship among one another. Disruptions in the supply chain are minimized in their effect (for example, if you centralize slaughter-houses all you need is one bacterial outbreak and suddenly 330 million people have a meat crisis; if you create large energy grids, a bug in the system brings the whole economy to a halt, and so forth).

The localist believes that healthy social change and growth occur incrementally, with citizens working shoulder to shoulder to shape their communities according to their wishes and mutual concerns and interests. Localism works at the point of a shovel, not a sword. The localist adamantly insists that communities ought to be governed by the people living in them. Localists fear that individuals in distant centers of power will view the localist’s communities as either full of resources to be expropriated and exploited or as disposable places where those “leaders” can park their disposables.

David Brooks characterized localism this way:

Localism is the belief that power should be wielded as much as possible at the neighborhood, city, and state levels. Localism is thriving — as a philosophy and a way of doing things — because the national government is dysfunctional while many towns are reviving. Politicians in Washington are miserable, hurling ideological abstractions at one another, but mayors and governors are fulfilled, producing tangible results.

Localism is also thriving these days because many cities have more coherent identities than the nation as a whole. It is thriving because while national politics takes place through the filter of the media circus, local politics by and large does not. It is thriving because we’re in an era of low social trust. People really have faith only in the relationships right around them, the change agents who are right on the ground.

We have insisted in this space that individuals who are disconnected from one another and detached from their places are always in danger of becoming subjects rather than citizens. Unless they can form their own communities in terms of mutual solicitude and care, they will always be in an insecure state and will look upward to a powerful centralized administrative state to secure their lives and well-being for them. One of the central insights of political thinking in the 19th and 20th centuries is that only by dissolving the natural connections that exist between human beings can central governments expand their power. The most important political development of the last 250 years has not been the triumph of “democracy,” but the confluence of industrial capitalism and a centralized state to erode the power of natural association among human beings, leaving us feeling isolated and lonely.

The best possible responses to anonymity, the loss of liberty, centralization, the corruption of symbols, the coarsening of culture, and the loss of meaning reside in a return to localism. These local places are not mere fodder for the grand schemes of centralizers. They are places where for generations people have lived, died, raised families, and built communities of purposeful and supportive engagement with one another. The political clerisy sees localism, religion, family life as atavistic, as barriers to their schemes of progress. But if you separate human beings from their primary modes of association, you separate them from themselves.

Returning to localism returns us to the conditions in which human liberty, and thus creativity, flourish. As the sociologist Robert Nisbet observed, the great conflict of our age is not between government and individuals, but between government and intermediate groups. “Multiply your associations and be free,” he wrote. An emphasis on localism creates genuine diversity, a variety of ways of life that are compelling to those who live them, but also a difference from which they can learn. As such, it leads to the development and flourishing of genuine culture. American diversity attaches not primarily to our racial differences, but to the wonderful differences in the ways we live, in our habits and traditions. America is at its most interesting when you can go anywhere in it and feel like a stranger. The localist despises the dull uniformity of mass culture and mass society — a nation binge-watching a witless series of Friends episodes where each episode is indistinguishable from the next. Get them out from behind their screens and into face-to-face interactions and projects with each other, and see them flourish. See creativity unleashed rather than stifled by yet another boring moment in the melodrama of Ross and Rachel. (Remember that the word “amusement” literally means the negation of our muse, our creative self.) Nisbet claimed:

The great cultural ages of the past were, almost invariably, ages of social diversity, of small, independent communities and towns, of distinct regions, of small associations which jealously guarded their unique identities and roles. In the competition and rivalry of these … lay the conditions of cultural energy and diversity which gave imperishable works to the world. Culturally, there is little to hope for from a world based increasingly upon mass relationships and upon the sterilization of intermediate associations.

Our political, financial, cultural, and educational institutions are largely inhabited by globalists, those who believe the mobility of capital and labor is both inevitable and enriching. They like to remind the localists that “you can’t turn back the clock,” forgetting that we do it every year. The agents of progress are quick to enjoy the benefits while making someone else’s community pay the costs. (This is the theme of “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight”; but it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son.) The underlying material realities that support the cosmopolitan dream are cloaked in the language of “universal” human rights, abstractions that allow the cosmopolitans to believe they are doing good. Of course, many of our cities and towns and neighborhoods have been eviscerated, leaving them places hardly fit for human habitation.

Think of what the interstate highway system (or, to go by its legal name, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act) did to the thriving black communities in Detroit, or reflect back upon Jane Jacob’s desperate and — God be praised — successful effort to defeat Robert Moses’s plan to plow her neighborhood under his scheme for urban growth. Jacobs understood that the people in her neighborhood would be bearing all the costs while dreamers and schemers and large-scale corporations would be the primary beneficiaries. She also understood what all localists know: that so-called infrastructure plans (what used to be called “public works” projects until they were recently rebranded as “infrastructure”) defer costs, sticking future generations with the wealth-robbing maintenance bills while the generation that builds the projects reaps the short-term economic gains. After the plowing under occurs, the places, if they can be called that, that crop up out of the ruins look depressingly alike. Americans may like the feeling of not being a stranger in their own country, but the price of familiarity is admission to the strip mall with its Cracker Barrels and Marshall’s and Best Buys. Now, driving down any main street in America looks increasingly like driving down any main street in America. We lose variety, distinctness, the fingerprint of the generations who built sustainable towns and cities that consume fewer resources while generating more public revenues per square foot.

To get people to care about their places, you have to create and maintain places worth caring about. Such maintenance becomes increasingly difficult under the conditions of centralization, the move to finance capitalism, and perpetual war. Some years ago I was talking with a student from a suburb of Chicago about going home after she graduated. “To what?” she asked. “My hometown is ugly. There’s nothing there that isn’t also somewhere else.” This truth bears much reflecting on, for among other things it will mean a rupturing of the relationship among the generations. The localist creed pays special attention to the inviolable integrity of the family, and seeks to maintain rather than sever the connections between the generations. The result of eroding those connections will always be a warehousing of our old and young.

Globalists treat localism as if it is nothing more than racism and sexism in another guise. They point to the legacy of Jim Crow as evidence that local communities were the main barriers to progress on civil rights. They argue that traditional institutions such as the family oppressed women, who have now been emancipated to participate fully in the world of mass democracy and market economies. These globalists neglect to mention that neither racism nor sexism are intrinsic to localism, nor has nationalism or globalism been a solution to these problems. Nonetheless, the tendentious emancipatory narrative has kept localism from getting serious cultural purchase.

At the same time, the cracks in mass democracy and cosmopolitanism are beginning to show. Elections in Europe and America evince a growing sense that many in the electorate believe they are bearing the costs while others are enjoying the benefits of globalization. This tension will only increase as sovereign entities will be forced to address their debt problems, their financial liabilities, and their inability to maintain their social programs due to dramatic demographic patterns that can only be corrected through mass immigration. The emphasis on “buying local,” the slow food and farm-to-table movements, those in the environmental movement who believe that only localism can ameliorate climate problems, the rethinking of the financial and environmental costs of massive infrastructure projects and its relationship to mass transportation and cheap oil, the emergence of co-ops and local business alliances, and even the development of local currencies all testify to the salutary material effects of local association, even while the ever-growing literature on the deleterious effects of hypermobility, of mass communications and technologies, and of the emergence of chronic loneliness attest to localism’s psychological benefits.

There are thus reasons to hope that Americans are beginning to realize the meaning-generating virtues of localism, as well its salutary effects for our national politics. The restoration of legitimate public authority can only come from the bottom up. Joel Kotkin, for example, has written repeatedly on how localism can ameliorate the ugly partisanship of our national politics. In a remarkable piece in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Heather Gerken argued that the decentralization of politics is the best path forward on race relations. More and more commentators are realizing that good government, where it is happening, is happening at the state and local level. Where bad government exists locally, it exists only there. Localists don’t encourage exit, but they recognize the right to exit as a condition of liberty. People are re-realizing what Nisbet referred to as “the urge to neighborhood,” with both its demands and its benefits. When something can’t go on forever, it won’t. The grand schemes of centralizers, world-savers, and progressive schemers will have their day, but the human need to be seen, known, and understood must have its day as well.

Discussion Questions:

1. How would you define localism? Do you think it would help solve some of our problems?
2. Why does “scale” matter in human affairs? Does democracy scale well? If not, how might that account for some of our polarization?
3. How well do you know your neighbors? Do you spend more time watching national news or talking to your neighbors?