An Instinct for Politics

CARING ABOUT YOUR NEIGHBORS

You asked about my politics the other week, and I had trouble answering fully. Here's my attempt at a better explanation.

Localism is simply this: power kept near the people who live with it.

Regionalism adds texture: different places are allowed to stay different.

Decentralization is the guardrail: no single center gets to swallow everything.

America was built on all three. It’s been trying to forget that ever since.

The colonies started as little experiments, not one sweeping project. A Puritan village, a Quaker town, a rough coastal port—they didn’t match, and they weren’t meant to. The continent was too large for a single script, so freedom came disguised as clutter: charters, compacts, assemblies, town meetings.

Authority was layered like an old stone wall—parish, town, county, colony—so no single layer could pretend to be the whole landscape.

The town meeting was the first civics class: you argued with people you’d see at church and market. You couldn’t cancel the farmer whose milk your kids drank. You had to bargain. You had to yield. You had to go home and live with what you’d done.

Empire means you vote and forget; township means you vote and then bump into your vote at the post office.

Regionalism kept the country from hardening into one mood. New England’s tight towns, the Mid-Atlantic’s merchants, the South’s plantations, the frontier’s restless farms—each section had its own sins and virtues, its own idols and strengths. That variety slowed things down. It made it harder for a single bad idea to become mandatory everywhere at once.

The flip side is ugly and written in blood: the same regional stubbornness sheltered slavery, later Jim Crow. Local freedom can protect liberty, and usually protect it best; it can, however, just as stubbornly protect injustice.

The soil of self-government grows wheat and weeds with equal vigor.

The Founders understood that scale is a temptation. They didn’t trust power in one pair of hands; they trusted power in many clumsy hands. The federal government was meant to do a few big, boring things: war, peace, treaties, trade. The rest was "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Washington was supposed to be the umpire, not the star player. The national flag mattered; the state seal and the county courthouse mattered more, because that’s where your life actually happened.

This localism wasn’t nostalgia; it was strategy. When power is scattered, you get more experiments and smaller mistakes. A bad law in one state ruins one state; a bad law in the capital ruins everyone at once. A foolish school board can be replaced in one election; a foolish national education regime becomes our grandchildren’s wallpaper.

Decentralization doesn’t guarantee wisdom, but it limits the blast radius of folly.

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Then came the new gods of scale: railroads, telegraph, radio, the national market, the national brand, the national story. Bread that used to come from the town bakery now came in a wrapper from far away. Politics followed the bread. Washington learned to send money with strings; states learned to hold out their hands.

The New Deal, the World Wars, the Cold War—each crisis made central power feel necessary, even merciful. Centralization arrived as a rescuer and stayed as a habit.

To be fair, the center sometimes did what the local would not. Federal marshals had to walk Black children into schools their own neighbors barred. National law had to break the back of local tyranny. That’s the hard truth for romantic localists: "closer to the people" doesn’t always mean closer to justice. Power near home is still power; it still needs chains.

Today we live in a strange reverse of the old order. People know the name of every national pundit and almost none of their city council. They rage about the presidency and skip the school board election. Their real life is governed by people they’ve never met, and their emotional life is captured by people they’ll never meet.

The map in their heads is upside down: the distant feels urgent, the nearby feels optional.

Localism, if it’s to be more than a slogan, means re-righting that map. It looks embarrassingly small: show up at a zoning meeting; coach a team; argue about the library budget; learn your sheriff’s name; start a co-op. It means caring more about your county’s water board than the drama of the week in Washington.

It means accepting that you will never "fix America" but you might fix a crosswalk.

America’s historic genius wasn’t that it trusted "the people" in the abstract; it trusted actual people in actual places and refused to let any one place rule the rest. Once we forget that, the continent becomes just one more province of whatever capital claims it.

The American experiment began with a simple question: how small can power be and still work?

It will end the day we decide that question is no longer worth asking.