Tag Archives: localism

Flavors of Localism

This post, apropos of nothing, attempts to define different strains of thought that fall under the banner of localism. The first two are what we might call intentional forms of localism, followed by two that are cultural and identity-based, followed by two that are generally the province of local elites.

These categories necessarily overlap, and many localists will have aspects of several. There are, however, distinct motivations that underpin each group, which is why I felt the compunction to categorize them. It’s also worth noting that relatively few people think of themselves as localists above all else; it’s often a secondary feature of one of these more pronounced, if fluid, identities. They are all united, however, by an emphasis on action tied to geography or a social network within one’s immediate sphere. To that end, here are the six varieties.

  1. Crunchy Localism

This category is one of the most straightforward, and may be the one that comes most immediately to mind for casual observers: the co-op shoppers and CSA members and backyard chicken-raisers; the vegetarians or devotees of free-range meat; the local craftspeople who try, to varying degrees, to escape box store shopping and big business in general. Their most fundamental concern is typically a desire to protect our planet, meaning crunchy localism is usually associated with the political left, and it’s somewhat unusual in that its localist platform tends to fit fairly coherently with its national platform. That said, it also contains plenty of people who distrust big things in general (both business and government) and can accommodate some more libertine or religious strains of thought.

Strengths: Crunchy localists are acutely aware of threats to the planet and work hard to counter them. They align their consumption with their belief system and generally try to live within their means. This mindset emphasizes genuine quality of food, of locally made goods, and cultivates a homey, sustainable ethos unafraid of a little dirt. It’s also less prone to excess than some other movements; ecoterrorism isn’t exactly a widespread phenomenon.

Weaknesses: This way of thinking has a tendency to attract some doomsayers, and some of its mid-20th-century antecedents were very wrong about, say, the threat of overpopulation or peak oil or other such concerns. There’s also an occasional problem of scale, as shown when people seek to prevent a certain activity in a developed country only to see it farmed out to poorer locales with no labor standards or environmental safeguards, or those who proclaim climate change is the greatest issue facing the nation and then proceed to spend all their time working to ban plastic straws. Such causes are noble, but rather misses the gravity of the problem: is this really where we want to draw out battle lines? Like any movement with an ideology at the root, it runs the risk of collapsing into infighting.

2. Religious Localism

Like crunchy localism, this brand involves the creation of intentional local communities around shared beliefs, and as noted above, some of its adherents are also pretty environmentally conscious. Adherents to this brand, however, aspire not to some earthly realm of unity, but to a community that gives them access to God or some other higher being or state. Groups come together to share in their traditions, whether through a traditional school or an active community of worship or a cloistered retreat or even the occasional compound. While many major religious faiths have an evangelistic or crusading side that strives to bring the whole world along, most also have a tradition in this vein; whether out of deep commitment to a simple and contemplative life or a sense that the world is to depraved to be redeemed, these localists believe they must first and foremost tend to their own garden.

Strengths: Builds a coherent worldview for believers, and few versions create such strong networks of believers: united not only by a shared vision for this world but of eternity, these people can be very loyal to one another. Some communities, like the Amish or the Mormons or subsets of Buddhism and Islam, have remarkable staying power.

Weaknesses: It can be suffocating to those who don’t fully share the view, or even those who begin to question it some; no version of localism demands more of anyone who would wish to join it. At its most extreme, it can drift into cult creation and all its attendant problems. Of all the versions it is also probably most susceptible to reliance on charismatic individuals, who can either use their power over their flock for questionable ends or just see their communities crumble when they fall out of the picture somehow.

3. Traditionalist Localism

In striking juxtaposition to the crunchy localists we find the traditionalist localists: people who just like things the way they are. They tend to be members of a place’s dominant culture, and they don’t see what all the fuss is about messing with it. They’re prone to nostalgia and may be diligent local historians, carrying on small-town festivals and small civic organizations, and they generally don’t get why anyone would want things to be some other way. There’s some overlap here with religious localism, though the motivation, I would argue, is distinct. The traditionalists’ primary concern is not transcendence or their immortal souls; it is just stability. In this category we find a lot of straightforward small-town folk, though when their mindset starts to coalesce into a political movement it can take on a decidedly different flavor: here we find the Brexiters and the French National Rally, and also the flyers of the Don’t Tread on Me flags and that dude in the hut with a shotgun at the end of the road.

Strengths: It’s simple, and the narrative is consistent and requires little thought. It treads on some of the most basic loyalties and asks little else, and as a result can be a powerful motivator. It has proven it can be a fairly successful political movement, and it can also give some unique life and sustenance to longstanding local quirks and traditions.

Weaknesses: Anyone who doesn’t conform to the traditions of the locality will feel stifled by this culture, and it doesn’t much like people aspiring to much beyond it. This brand of localism can drift into jingoism and violence when threatened. It can also descend into painful defenses of old things that don’t deserve defense, lapsing back to some long-lost era and choosing some strange lines in the stand. These can include major corporate brands or some mysterious “way of life” that is an often limited snapshot of a very specific era, at which point it really ceases to be local at all, and instead just becomes reactionary. Its excesses, taken to their most extreme form, are among the worst of any form of localism.

4. Subaltern Localism

This localism features the breakaway movements composed of groups left out of a dominant culture and their fellow travelers. Here we find the indigenous rights groups, the Black nationalists, the tightly-bound ethnic neighborhoods of major cities, and even things like culturally specific charter schools. These are groups of people who are usually excluded, either explicitly or surreptitiously, from the levers of power in a society, and they seek radical measures to create their own spaces where their voices and traditions have a home. While some in these movements may seek to overthrow the existing order, either through nonviolent reform or violent revolution, the localists in this camp, much like the religious groups, are either so jaded by the broader culture or so enraptured by their local work that they don’t spend much time on that level.

Strengths: These local movements are often very empowering for their members. Some of these can build very dense mutual aid networks that can substitute for the failures of a state that does not or cannot do much for a marginalized group. As much as any of the localisms, this one generates some impressive cultural work, both through a flowering of new creative outbursts or through the resurrection of historic figures within the culture or tradition. The memories it unearths can fundamentally upend the way we tell local histories.

Weaknesses: By its very nature, this localism is at risk of being crushed by the dominant culture if it questions the existing order too much; as a result, it can turn to violence and get caught up in some of its related excesses. It also faces some practical questions over how exactly it fits in to a pluralist society. How much space is enough space, and if it involves the formal drawing of boundaries, who else gets roped in with this group?  Does it run the risk of simply re-creating segregation? These groups are also not monoliths, and can be prone to infighting between sub-groups or idealists with competing visions. (It is also the hardest to name, given the alphabet soup of academic terminology for non-dominant cultures facing social exclusion; in this case, I tried to go to the pithiest origins of the general concept, which we owe to Antonio Gramsci.)

5. Civic Greatness Localism

This localism trades on people’s pride in the pride in their homes. It wants to see a local place made great through major civic projects, economic growth, and the development of good publicity. It usually emerges from genuine love for the place and on the surface is one of the least objectionable and most expansive: who doesn’t want their city to look good and have fun things? Civic greatness usually strives to be apolitical, though it can’t always avoid such situations. Its exponents include the local visitor’s bureau and the chamber of commerce, along with many local politicians who do not have any national ambitions. Its members are usually, though not always, members of a place’s dominant culture, and while they can generate mass followings based on the composition of the local population, this is typically an elite-led form of localism.

Strengths: This instinct produces monumental local projects that often come to define cities in the eyes of their residents. It rewards visionaries and unites people behind a vision, and it promotes a positive narrative about the locality. People usually feel good to be behind its efforts. It can take the best of the traditionalist view and put it to good use, and also draws on any of the others if they help feed the narrative.

Weaknesses: As an elite-led movement, this one may not necessarily be very participatory (hey there, Robert Moses). Sometimes its leaders are more into their own projects (or profits, or political futures) than they are into communities. A vague chase of greatness may also lead a place to assume all investment is good, and pursue projects that displace people or have major environmental concerns or undermine actual local businesses as it seeks to bring in non-local money. Because it rather innocently declares that it’s simply out to support a city, its downsides can often be surreptitious, and may not emerge until it’s too late.

6. Liberal Localism

Members of this final category are comfortable with local pluralism and nuance, and cultivate an intense appreciation for their heterodox locales. They thereby escape the traps of the monocultural traditionalists, and while they often share the general goals of the civic greatness localists, they are also willing to be critical and tell the whole history of a place, warts and all. The founders of the urban planning field, from Louis Mumford to Jane Jacobs, reside somewhere in here, as do community development corporations and other organizations that seek to attract plural voices behind a local vision. It has, on rare occasions, been able to rise to something approximating a heterodox national movement: Robert F. Kennedy was a champion before he was gunned down, and a certain brand of British Toryism has done some dabbling here recently. Barack Obama had roots in this world, but did not really govern as a localist.

Strengths: With apologies to some brilliant figures in religious and subaltern localism, this version has the greatest intellectual power behind it. Its appreciation of complexity allows it to see things that other views do not, and its sympathetic but not uncritical view of humanity allows it to both learn from the past and aspire to something better in the future. It pairs a deep diagnosis of local ills with modest but achievable local action plans, and it can point to plenty of concrete projects that its adherent organizations have gotten off the ground. In theory, it can find common ground with any of the other visions.

Weaknesses: This is generally an elite position limited to people with a lot of education (formal or informal) and local passion; it can also lapse into a tendency toward observation and appreciation instead of direct action. While sympathetic to other left-leaning localisms like the subaltern and crunchy flavors, it likely won’t move at the pace that the adherents of those worldviews desire, while the more conservative localisms will be skeptical of its willingness to include many voices. It can sound pretty in theory but be wickedly difficult to deliver in practice.

Advertisement

The Range of Control

Four years ago, not long after I moved back to Duluth and began a job that takes me to Minnesota’s Iron Range with some regularity, I drove down Chestnut Street in downtown Virginia. I nearly ran a red light as I gawked at boarded-up shops and strung-out addicts and imposing old architecture framed against a steely winter sky. The Donald Trump phrase “American carnage” was the first thing to lodge in my mind. I was a witness to the fracturing of small-town America, and I realized just how daunting my new job might be.

I work with Rangers on a daily basis and am the day-to-day economic development staff for a four-community economic alliance, but the coronavirus pandemic has deprived me of any effort to embed myself in the places I serve. Between March and September, I went to the Range exactly once, and that just a brief stop at a favorite coffee shop on a camping expedition further north. And so, eager to view it with new eyes, I guide my Twin Cities friends D and M on a day trip across the Iron Range on a Saturday in early October. M has never been, while D has only been for hockey purposes, so they head in with only loose preconceived notions. Just what do we make of a region that once was the engine of American industry, but has suffered steady population loss since the American steel industry convulsed through its greatest crisis in the 1980s?

We start toward the western end of the Range in Hibbing, the region’s largest city at 16,000 people, and long the capital of the American iron ore mining economy. The drive north from Duluth shows a Range in deep autumn, the trees near peak color and a fresh coolness in the air. For reasons lost on us, the road to the overlook over the Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine pit is blocked off, so we’re denied a vista of the hole in the ground that won two World Wars. We settle for a spin around old North Hibbing, a few vacant streets left from the days before the entire town picked itself up and moved south to make way for the mine. That power of industry to move cities is no relic of the past: just ask nearby Virginia, where the new Tom Rukavina Bridge towers over the Rouchleau Pit after a federal highway was rerouted off of mining land.

Hibbing impresses my travel companions more than anywhere else on this road trip, and the Iron Range’s century-old wealth is evident here. The homes in the center of town have a welcoming, well-tended feel, and the high school and Hibbing Memorial Arena are stunning monuments to past glory. Howard Street, the main drag through the old downtown, has enough refreshed storefronts to make it feel like a cozy slice of Americana. D has brought a Polaroid camera and snaps shots down the street, catching the old Androy Hotel with its columns and arches. M appreciates the crossed pick axe and fork on the logo of the newer Boomtown Brewery, a restaurant whose presence reminds me of a day maybe a decade ago when my mom and I spent a day spinning about the Range and failed to find an adequate lunch spot in Hibbing.

The progress feels uneven, though: whether due to the coronavirus or the proclivities of Rangers who would rather spend a sunny Saturday outside, the Range’s downtowns are quieter than I’ve ever seen them. We feel like we’ve stepped back in time to a preserved Main Street from yesteryear, a sense that D’s washed-out Polaroids under moody skies only enhance. When we make it over to Virginia, there are no addicts on Chestnut Street today; just more quiet, dusty grandeur. They feel like movie sets, a blast from the past; the carnage is gone, but the grit remains.

The Range towns are not uniform. M finds charm in Chisholm’s Main Street as it slopes down toward the rows of flags along a causeway across Longyear Lake. Eveleth’s downtown likewise still has that quaint feel, its hockey monuments adding a distinctive local flavor that D and I both eat up. Gilbert has the largest proportion of boarded-up storefronts, and on the far east end, Hoyt Lakes faces the challenges of any community whose major industry has packed up and left—LTV Steel closed in 2001—and whose housing stock is uniformly dated to a single era. A friend from neighboring Aurora tells a tale of how his high school graduating class declined by a third after LTV disappeared, and the numbers at Mesabi East have only inched down since.

The big news in the central Range these days is the impending merge of the Virginia and Eveleth-Gilbert school districts. These two age-old rivals, just a few miles apart, are shutting down their big, old school buildings and building a new one off the highway between the two. The Rock Ridge Wolverines, leaving aside the misfortune of the identity-devoid lowest-common-denominator name and logo that seems to come with any new school these days, are in many ways a no-brainer. The two districts are next door to each other, have been bleeding students for years, and received a generous funding package to unite and provide their students more resources. Eveleth, Virginia, and Gilbert combined have less land area and population than Hibbing. The new school will pioneer an innovative academy model designed to prepare all students for the reality of the contemporary economy instead of cramming everyone on to a college prep track that may or may not make sense.

Still, it’s hard for anyone with a sense of history not to lament the merger, and D decries the changes afoot at the Miners Memorial Arena in Virginia, which will transform one of the state’s most unique, historic hockey venues into a more modern facility. Perhaps not coincidentally, two towns that have already lost their schools (Gilbert and Hoyt Lakes) are the ones M identifies as the biggest downers on the trip, though Biwabik, which like Hoyt Lakes has folded into the Mesabi East School District based in Aurora, still charms with its Bavarian Main Street theme. As economic development has lurched toward embracing the revitalization of old things and a skepticism of big box new development on the outskirts of town, the realities of enrollment numbers and repair costs for schools militate in the opposite direction.

I am often asked what it will take to revive or diversify the Range’s economy. If the answer were easy, we would have figured it out thirty years ago. The new economic development consensus emphasizes existing local assets, place-based development, and growing local business instead of chasing big new investments from outside firms. Broadband connectivity has become a bipartisan rallying cry, and the tales of kids parked in school and library parking lots after hours so they can do their homework exposes the depth of our digital divides. In principle support all of these things, though the Range has its own unique challenges on many of them, given its distance from major markets and rocky and swampy soil. We plug away and make incremental progress, even as national politics seems to have decided that incrementalism is for the weak.

On this trip, there are signs of that place-based formula going to work. The downtowns look better than they did four years ago. Recreational assets such as Giants Ridge and some new biking networks are certainly bringing in some outside cash and making the place somewhat more attractive to outsiders than it has been. Since the pandemic began, there is strong anecdotal evidence of urban-dwellers poking around the Range for affordable properties where they can live remote lives in wide open spaces, especially on the lake properties that dot the region. (Rarely, however, are those properties inside the limits of the Range’s towns.) The Department of Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation, the state agency that collects a mining production tax and reinvests it in the communities, is now beating the drum of broadband funding and trail networks and downtown revitalization to go along with its longstanding business recruitment war chest.

Mining is still king, though, and taconite mining is not coal mining: while it will have its ups and downs, it’s not going anywhere. The big news this week is the purchase of ArcelorMittal USA by Cleveland-Cliffs, leaving Cliffs as the largest mining company on the Range and one of just two now operating (along with venerable old U.S. Steel). It’s a stunning turn of events; a few years back, ArcelorMittal USA (a subsidiary of the world’s largest steel producer) looked prime to rule Range mining, while Cliffs teetered on the verge of collapse. A series of aggressive moves by Cliffs have resurrected this now vertically integrated American company, and they’ve been on the cutting edge of new pellet technology. At the same time, domination by a single firm is never a reassuring thing, and the Range’s mining future is now in the hands of Cliffs’ bombastic Brazilian executive, Lourenco Goncalves. We’ve come a long way since the days of Congdons and Carnegies.

Any taconite mining intrigue, however, has taken a back seat to other proposed projects on the Range. The proposed PolyMet copper-nickel mine near Hoyt Lakes received all of the permits it needed to mine before the inevitable rush of litigation, while Twin Metals near Ely is a bit further behind in the permitting process. Copper-nickel mining draws more concern over its potential environmental effects than the old taconite mines, and the resulting split has torn apart pro-mining Democrats (mostly the old guard on the Range) and environmentalist Democrats (mostly in the Twin Cities or Duluth) and almost singlehandedly taken down one of the longest-lasting political fiefdoms of a single party. Political implications aside, the copper-nickel debate is a fight for the Range’s soul, and a trip through Hoyt Lakes, the “mining town without a mine” on the far east end of the Range, makes it clear why so many Rangers want to revive the old engine.

After Hoyt Lakes, we head east on the Superior National Forest Scenic Drive, which takes us 60 civilization-free miles clear over to Silver Bay along the shores of Lake Superior. The leaves are brilliant, and from the overlook at Skibo, a golden carpet stretches back toward mining plants on the horizon. In Silver Bay, the parking lot for the Bear and Bean Lakes trail overflows so much that we see people parked half a mile from the trailhead along the road into town. We catch the glow of sunset by the Silver Bay marina and work our way down the shore at dusk, the leaf-peeping traffic stacking up miles outside of Two Harbors. After some dark days in spring, northern Minnesota’s tourism economy has roared back with a vengeance.

The past four years have been hard ones for localists. The escalating rhetoric of national politics has leeched down into every level, with Donald Trump and the leftist resistance as twin poles of totalized worldviews. It’s not wrong: there really are consequences to that national-level debate. But as we drive about, my fellow travelers and I—a heterodox group in our politics—are surprised at the relative lack of Trump signs in a region that became a national poster child for the white working-class flip to the red column in 2016. We’ll learn in a month or so if the romance has faded or if the transformation is now so complete that it doesn’t merit loud signs anymore. But it’s hard not to suspect that something else is afoot here.

As politicians bluster about tariffs and permitting battles carry on in distant courts, the Range sits at cold remove from so many of the trends roiling America in 2020. Its successes over the past four years, such as they are, have come from bipartisan or nonpartisan local efforts to clean up streetscapes and plow in fiber. The coronavirus pandemic has only heightened feelings of powerlessness over forces beyond immediate control, and the inability of too many Americans to make peace that lack of control has been revealing. But even amid crises near and far, humans still have agency over parts of their fates, and those who do seize the opportunities before them are the ones who write history. And because some people have, I have hope for the future of Minnesota’s Iron Range.

Prodigal Pete

Normally the political biography isn’t a genre toward the top of my reading list. These books tend to be fluff pieces that don’t delve too deeply into existential questions; they’re vehicles for votes, not serious plans for governance. Much of that is true of the one I just finished, which I read not because I’m looking to hitch myself to a particular wagon, but because I’d been told it was relevant for people looking for some ideas on how to make things happen in local government. (It was.) But, much to the dismay of my reflexive resistance to zeitgeisty political trends, Pete Buttigieg’s Shortest Way Home fascinated me in ways I didn’t expect.

Sure, I will confess a fondness to millennials with short first names and unpronounceable last names. For some odd reason, I feel an affinity for children of academics who grew up in Rust Belt midwestern cities; those who left for snobby East Coast colleges on what felt like perfectly natural paths, and then sorted out their intellectual worldviews on the road to graduate school. I also can relate to people who took jobs in consulting, spent their 20s in an intellectual and work-driven tunnel that basically closed off dating life, and made their way back to their hometowns out of a commitment to the place and its rebirth. My life story, apparently, is just a knockoff version of Buttigieg’s, though I’m not using this blog post to announce I’m joining the naval reserve or coming out of the closet or running for office. But, hell, I’ve even been told I look like him.

Mayor Pete is having himself a moment right now, and that stems from his ability to bridge across categories. His roots are in Rust Belt America, that swath of the country the Democratic Party forgot in 2016, and he’s a military reservist and a devout Catholic: in many ways, the consummate heartlander. But he’s also a gay millennial who talks of intergenerational justice, one who tries to tap into that authentic hope for the future that has been at the heart of the most successful liberal campaigns of the past half century. He’s at home in a past America and yet a clear step toward a different one, which no other candidate in the Democratic field may be able to say to the same degree. He has less baggage than Joe Biden, more genuine accomplishments to his name than Beto O’Rourke; he is more personable than Elizabeth Warren, more attuned to Democrats who have fallen by the wayside than Kamala Harris, unencumbered by Bernie Sanders’ socialist label, not committed to moderation for the sake of seeming moderate as with Amy Klobuchar.

Still, despite our commonalities, I share David Brooks’ conclusion at the end of his column on Mayor Pete’s momentum: why, given all of his seeming reasonableness, does he think the moment calls for a 37-year-old with no elected experience beyond the local level, the equivalent of Duluth ex-mayor Don Ness deciding he’s going to enter the race tomorrow? (Spare me the Donald Trump whataboutisms, please.) Much of his allure comes from being a blank slate, and the careful relationship-building that makes one a successful local politician has little to do with the partisan war that the national brand has become. It’s easy to project all sorts of hopes and desires on to this type of figure (Barack Obama was a somewhat different flavor of this), and in the right political situation, it can win. It would flatter me to believe this skillset will transfer well to governance at a higher level, but is there any empirical proof of that?

The other critique of Mayor Pete, a somewhat more scathing one, holds him up as the anointed last gasp of a failing meritocracy. People in positions of power like him because his whole biography is one of someone who has done everything right in their eyes: climb the ladder, Harvard, Oxford, McKinsey, the smartest kid in the room taking his natural place. But people who climb that ladder are exceptional, not the norm; can they really govern with any hold on reality for the rest? Is a culture based on merit doomed to sneer down on those who don’t achieve such merit, the natural outcome of a society that has replaced inherited status with a Darwinian race to the top?

South Bend’s mayor is aware he runs some risk of losing touch. He relates one story of a critic who compared his data-driven efforts to those of Robert McNamara, another so-called smartest kid in the room who made a mess of the Vietnam War. I don’t think we yet know enough about Pete Buttigieg to know where he falls on the liberal elitism spectrum, but it’s an interesting critique, and one I’ve commented on before. For that matter, let us not forget that many of the most powerful progressive icons in American history were wealthy traitors to their own class. But to succeed, Buttigieg is going to have to surround himself with people who don’t worship his credentials or intellect for their own sake.

Still, in spite of his obvious shortcomings as a candidate for the highest office in the land, I think there are a couple of other reasons why Mayor Pete is particularly attuned to this current political moment. These three facets are all related.

First, he recognizes that different political instincts are appropriate for different political times. Like a lot of people whose understanding of politics formed as a student of foreign policy (another commonality I share with him), he has a very nuanced understanding of power. His own deployment, his college-era theses, and a fondness for Graham Greene led him to recognize the naïve innocence of the democratizing crusades of a previous era of American government. But today, he recognizes that nihilism, not innocence, is the more pressing moral threat to American political life. Different excesses call for different responses, and Buttigieg strikes me as someone who will want to understand deep root causes before he starts throwing around ideas on how to fix things. His lack of policy detail isn’t necessarily an evasion.

Second is an early appreciation of American decline. It didn’t set in right away: I found myself dutifully copying down Buttigieg’s descriptions of childhood in a post-industrial town, these tales of how he went past abandoned Studebaker factories every day but never registered what they meant, because they rang so true. But as soon as we developed our consciousness of that decline—something I expect Pete found in his Harvard days, but didn’t quite examine in the way I would have liked him to in the book—we know that it can’t come back, and that we have to build something decidedly different.

I won’t claim to know what this looks like as a national platform yet, and it doesn’t seem like Pete entirely does either, but it’s become increasingly clear that neither a return to some socialist ideal nor Clintonite third way progressivism is enough to build a governing majority. The unifying story has to be some out-of-the-ashes sort of narrative that admits all is not well—Donald Trump, after all, understood this superbly in 2016—and re-invigorates it with some optimism. This is why I think the meritocratic critique of Buttigieg may be inadequate: he got off the blind achievement train, found his loyalty to a place that needed fixing, and his ideas of good and bad governance stem from the immediate solutions he found (or, occasionally, failed to find) in South Bend. He is grounded in a way that a wishy-washy moderate is not, and the answer to the nihilist challenge requires that.

Third, Buttigieg understands the primacy of culture over policy. He will certainly need to flesh out his platform if he hopes to go anywhere; he can’t float above the fray between the hardened Hillary and Bernie camps that still divide his party forever. But by focusing on stories instead of the minutiae of policy proposals, he has a chance to bring along many more people than the Elizabeth Warrens of the world ever will. This distinction is especially important for Democrats, who are much more of a cultural quilt than the Republicans are, and need to bridge more gaps to build that governing majority. Like it or not, this is an essential first step to winning a democratic election in a sprawling nation. The policy details are secondary.

I’m not convinced Pete Buttigieg should be the next president of the United States. He has a lot still to prove there. I am, however, far more convinced that lots of small and mid-sized American cities need some Pete Buttigiegs: people who commit themselves to places. People who go out and see what the world has to offer, then bring what they learned home, and do it in a manner marked by humility, not as the golden boys or girls returning home as saviors of the unwashed masses. People who go home because roots are the right things to tend to, because they believe in more than that blind meritocratic chase, and because the grass isn’t really all that much greener in DC or New York or the Bay Area. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

Think Local, Act Regional

Local election season is starting to heat up, with Election Day now three months away here in Duluth. I won’t tip my cards yet, if I ever do; in many cases I’m not even sure who I’ll vote for at this point. But there are a couple of things that the people I do end up voting for will need to have. One is a sense of regional consciousness, and another is an emphasis on the particulars of local affairs rather than adherence to some outside platform.  At first blush these may seem like contradictory strains of thought, but both are necessary for effective statecraft, whatever one’s political orientation.

I focus on a regional perspective because it is all too rare in politicians. It always has been, and probably always will be. When it comes to questions of scale, many see themselves strictly as representatives of the constituents who elect them, meaning their city or district within a city and the arbitrary boundaries that such divisions normally imply. Sometimes this comes with a genuine effort to give a personal touch to the small group of people one represents, while at other times it can just be territorial. But when local leaders block out their neighbors, either intentionally or through benign neglect, they only hurt the people they claim to represent.

Take Duluth, for example. I see a lot of Duluth-centrism in local political rhetoric today; that is, Duluth politicians who are fixated only on things happening within Duluth boundaries. To an extent, I admire this attempt to hold Duluth to a higher standard. But we also can’t pretend that Duluth is an island, or not deeply interconnected with its neighbors and its state. Nearly 60 percent of the people who work in Duluth do not live in it, while over 30 percent of Duluthians work outside its boundaries.

This applies to both city councilors and school board members. On the council side, it applies to the labor market, which is a complicated thing to define but should pretty clearly include Superior, Hermantown, Proctor, Rice Lake, Esko, and Cloquet—at the very least. Attempts to regulate it, however well-intentioned, should recognize how interconnected all of this is. Leaving aside the merits of something like earned sick and safe leave, has there been any effort at all to recognize this interconnectedness in this debate? If there is, I sure haven’t seen it.

Education “markets,” so to speak, expand beyond single districts, a trend we see all too clearly in families voting with their feet and open enrolling across boundaries or into private or charter schools. My scare quotes there show my leeriness about referring to education as a market—and public schools, by dint of requirements that they educate all comers, including those who come from families with no initiative to seek out alternatives, will always look worse than some of the alternatives and give a very warped view of what actually goes on inside the buildings. But this is the environment in which people make their decisions. East-west equity has become a central concern in this year’s ISD 709 school board races, and there are certainly good reasons to fixate on that. But any sort of solution will not come from pitting one side of the city against the other, or gutting one side to prop up the other. If any candidates want to make this upcoming race about east-west equity alone, they’re missing the forest for the trees.

And while they’re not on the ballot this year, I’d say the same thing about regional legislators. It’s great if the Duluth delegation is aligned in St. Paul, but it includes all of five people, two of whom have much larger constituencies outside the city than in it. Duluth’s unique situation within the state should put its members in a position of influence. On the one hand, Duluth is part of Greater Minnesota, and there are a number of cases where it makes more sense to align with the more rural delegation, including others in northeastern Minnesota who would seem to make obvious allies. There is enough interconnectivity with the North Shore and the Iron Range that support for certain initiatives, from broadband to education to infrastructure, should drive Arrowhead legislators to vote as a bloc. But on the flip side, Duluth’s urbanity at times makes the city look much more like Minneapolis or St. Paul, where equity concerns and redevelopment are central issues—and, indeed, its legislators usually vote along with those in the central cities. (In a year that was fairly good for economic development funding, redevelopment dollars were mysteriously absent from the budgets that came from a legislature controlled by rural and exurban GOPers.) In a tightly divided government, there should be scenarios in which Duluth’s legislators have the power to play kingmaker, and if they’re not exploring opportunities to do so, they’re missing the boat.

Without regional action, the Duluth area won’t ever live up to its potential. I’m not necessarily saying greater Duluth should formalize this through government and move in the direction of a Twin Cities-style Metropolitan Council. But there should be venues for greater regional conversations, where appropriate. There are some such conversations, but they are scattered, and not every organization that has the power to make an impact here is using it to its fullest extent. Too often, we see Duluth boldly pursuing some bold and well-meaning push that ultimately has a limited or even perverse impact because it is constrained by its boundaries and lack of broader context, while the outlying areas lapse into a reflexive rejection of those vaguely urban problems beyond their reach. We can do better than this.

Perhaps a more immediately pressing concern of mine is a rise in candidates who define themselves less by the places they serve and more by the principles or political platform with which they identify. These politicians have their lenses and preferred policies, and look to apply those within the region over which they have control (and beyond, whenever possible). It can come in any stripe, from the limited government Republicans loyally following certain tax pledges to platforms promoted by the left. A recent example: while all other candidates balked at a questionnaire asking them to fall in line with a group’s demands, Ray Dehn, the leading vote-getter in the DFL primary in the Minneapolis mayoral race, caused a stir when he said he couldn’t imagine not voting in line with Our Revolution, the leftist organizing movement that has grown out of Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Whatever Dehn’s merits may be relative to the two other frontrunners in that race (a troubled incumbent in Betsy Hodges and a hungry climber in Jacob Frey), this is an immediate red flag for anyone with an appreciation for the ins and outs of local governance. While any number of groups from unions to clean water advocates will make demands from leading candidates, and have every right to do so, any adoption of said platforms should be critically vetted for their particular context, not just aped talking points embraced out of convenience.

Implicit throughout this post has been a mild critique of the Duluth DFL, which is often the only real player in local politics. I don’t mean to trash it; it’s a heterodox bunch, and I know, respect, and am friends with various members of it. But one of the things I’ve always appreciated about Duluth politics, especially in comparison to other cities I’ve lived in such as Minneapolis or D.C., is that it has an independent streak to it that can usually recognize some of the excesses of its dominant party and avoid jumping on the train. Instead of the vicious division in some other places, we see general community consensus on such topics as community policing practices (granting that our demographics limit the centrality of certain racial questions to the Duluth experience) and, at least until the Red Plan, in education. We’ve rejected some vogue ideas with questionable actual evidence in their favor like ranked choice voting, and our campuses have not become hopelessly politicized in a manner that shuts out half the country and drives it to question the very value of higher education. The continued presence of labor in the DFL coalition is also notable, and while I have my critiques of labor, the ability to retain that political base has kept the Duluth DFL from becoming an institution totally out of touch with the working class, as the national party has gone. I groan when I hear some of the petty things that divide members of the local political class, but at the very least these conflicts tend to stay under the table.

Willingness to buck trends and not blindly follow a party line is one of the most admirable traits possible in a politician, and until recently, most city councilors, even if elected behind the full weight of the DFL and labor endorsements, get that to some level. And while I recognize that the Democratic base is fired up in the age of Trump, I hope they’re not losing track of the nuts and bolts and a basic ability to manage neighborhood relationships that drive local politics, which are far more relevant than one’s stance on the source of outrage du jour in D.C.

If I have a goal here, it is to give new life to that old claim that all politics is local. I wouldn’t go that far; some things obviously require state or national action. But I would like to return to a phrase that may seem tautological at first, but that few stop to ponder properly: policy should be made on the level most appropriate for such policy. Some things are genuinely local; some are completely outside the purview of a city council. This sense has eroded in an era in which people get their politics from their favorite network of choice or whatever dark recesses of the internet one’s social media acquaintances happen to inhabit. It is easy to try to simplify the world by imposing national narratives, but the realities zoning disputes and school funding decisions and search for pathways to the American Dream rarely conform to those national platforms. The world is a complicated place, and deserves our respect as such.

Little Things

I’ve had a good and busy week so far, one filled with reminders of why it is I do what I do, and how exactly we have to go about doing it. This goes beyond the day-to-day tasks of work and hockey and other activities, as the world around me finds ways to take small steps forward in a very long game.

This article by George Monbiot, a British activist and radical, circulated through my planning network earlier this week. Monbiot makes a  case that caters to left-leaning readers (this is The Guardian, after all), but it goes deeper, reaching toward a sphere of life both sides of the political spectrum have come to neglect. He’s talking about building “thick” networks of people to share things and ideas and generally just support each other, allowing them to escape the anomie of lonely modern lives and bring up the standard of living. He also makes the necessary point that a large welfare state can indeed “leave people dependent, isolated, and highly vulnerable to cuts.” This isn’t government-driven at all. Regulation alone won’t save us. Monbiot follows up his diagnosis with a refreshing array of real-world examples of British communities pulling together to build participatory little democracies that make life happier for a lot of people. To underscore the nonpartisan nature of the pitch, this actually sounds a lot like the “Big Society” that Tory ex-Prime Minister David Cameron gave some attention, even if it was never central to his agenda. Influential Britons left and right seem to understand what their politics has been missing.

If only we could say the same of the American system these days. But, instead of looking to party brass or public intellectuals, maybe we can look a little closer to home.

Take Monday’s Duluth News Tribune story on the new OMC Smokehouse in Duluth’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. Alone, the lede here doesn’t seem too unique: some successful local restaurateurs have decided to open up a second  restaurant. But this is more than that. The Hanson family’s first restaurant, Duluth Grill, is both a social and culinary institution. Sure, Duluth Grill checks all those eco-friendly and locally-sourced boxes, which any localist will like. But it’s so remarkably popular because it makes damn good food, and anyone who goes there can just taste the difference between it and the competition. I’m not sure anywhere better encapsulates Duluth than Duluth Grill, with its lack of pretention (a former Denny’s!), broader ethos, and ability to deliver a remarkably good product.

Duluth Grill and OMC Smokehouse don’t aspire to just make good food, though; their success in the kitchen allows them to take the lead in the building of one of those dense networks. They’re part of a broader project to remake a neighborhood, and to give life to an area that still feels decidedly Rust Belt. The decision to locate OMC right on Superior Street in Lincoln Park underscores a commitment: this neighborhood can once again be a thriving hub of business, and the leadership from places like Duluth Grill, Frost River Trading Company, and Bent Paddle. The city, with its loan programs targeting local business growth, gets it. This is a chance to revitalize a neighborhood in the best sense of that phrase, and to fill it with new life.

Sticking with Lincoln Park, another DNT article over the weekend highlighted the efforts to bring teachers into students’ homes and build community schools in ISD 709. This is a welcome change of pace from talking about the existence of the gap between the east and west side schools, and a foray into actually doing something to address it. Schools can only do so much with the cards they’re dealt; as I’ve noted before, the west side schools actually don’t do terribly considering the poverty, barriers, and broken homes that plague too many of their students. That reality, however, is no excuse for not trying to do everything within their power to improve outcomes, and this effort to get teachers into homes is an excellent step toward creating a community that can prove demography is not destiny. It’s a simple but crucial step, one that acknowledges the value of humanity and building ties over cramming people into a something formulaic and hoping it spits out good little workers in the end.

These are examples from just one neighborhood, but they go to show why I love this city, and why, for all its travails, it seems to be the perfect place to build the dense sort of community that can withstand any manner of swings beyond. The challenges, which range from that divided school system to a sudden spate of gun violence to a political consensus that seems to be breaking down as a center-left and an activist left left stake out territory, are all real. But these are little ways to build networks that can help to alleviate all of these troubles, and they can bring anyone on board because the basic tenets that support them–cleaned-up neighborhoods, good food, better student-teacher relationships, free chances to learn things, easier access to capital–are things that anyone can support.

I know a lot of people seem to be coming to this sort of worldview in reaction to our new President and his agenda, to the extent that we can distinguish one. I’m fine with that; I welcome fellow travelers however they come. That said, I do want to make something clear: personally, I’m not advocating for positions like this in reaction to broader national trends. I’m doing this because I fundamentally believe it is the right way to do things, no matter who is in power and what is going on in Washington. The intimacy of local politics (in the broad meaning of the word, covering any manner of relationships among people) will always have greater effect over the lives of people than the diktats of an increasingly powerful executive and unelected court system and a occasional input from a rump Congress. Taking part in these seemingly small activities will do much more to make things happen in actual human lives than posting another freaking article on Facebook about why the politicians you dislike are unlikable. (Over the past few weeks, I’ve stopped checking the news more than once a day, and find that I’m just as informed and now have far better uses for my time than I did before.)

Keep it simple. Start local. Start with what you can control. Make some sort of commitment in the next week. It doesn’t take much.

Dead Greek People V: Living in the Shadow of Empire

I kicked off this detour into Dead Greek People after attending a Peace and Justice Series talk at the College of St. Scholastica, so it’s only fitting that I wrap it up (for now, anyway) after another talk. Last night, Duluth was treated to Andrew Bacevich, a scholar noted for his attacks on “American exceptionalism” and U.S. military policy in recent decades. He trashed U.S. military strategy from Vietnam to Iraq, and quoted Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “malaise” speech with approval—the one in which Carter committed political suicide by telling Americans to stop using so much energy and be less materialistic and instead turn down their heat.

So Bacevich must be a flaming lefty, right? Well, no: he self-identifies as a conservative. (To understand why, I highly recommend this article.) Obviously, he isn’t the sort of conservative who would’ve been very popular among other self-identified conservatives in the Bush Administration, and one could argue that, if “conservatism” is something both Bacevich and Ayn Rand lovers would claim, the word has been stripped of all meaning. To get away from this confusing word, we might say that Bacevich’s platform has a whiff of Aristotle about it. (Indeed, he’s a Catholic, and a lot of intellectual Catholics are closet Aristotelians, thanks to the work of Thomas Aquinas.)

The problem is that it’s well-near impossible to apply Aristotle to a modern country, because his ideas—on the definition of freedom, on citizenship, on economics, on the importance of virtue—just don’t compute for most of us moderns. Just look at the comments from the readers on the Bacevich article, some of which are quite intelligent: some people try to cram contemporary politicians into his worldview; some are inclined to agree with some or even most of his ideas, but have one or two disputes that make them skeptical; and some are all on board but have no hope for actually seeing these ideas come to fruition in modern American politics. It is something foreign; something weird. To understand this, and to find the way out of the problem, let’s go back to Athens.

When we last left our Dead Greek People, things weren’t looking terribly good for Athens. The Spartans had won the Peloponnesian War around 400 B.C., leaving Athens seriously weakened. Sparta was the leading power for the next few decades, though Thebes eventually knocked them off, and after that no one really ran the place. Even so, Athens thrived despite its lack of military power. Plato and Aristotle founded their schools, the democracy largely remained intact, and Athens was still the cultural capital of the world.

By the 330s B.C., all this intrigue among Greek city-states wouldn’t matter all that much, either. Alexander the Great came down from Macedon, gathered all his Greek brethren, and set off on a campaign across Asia. The age of city-states was over, and the age of empires had begun. But even when Alexander’s empire fragmented after his death, the Greek influence endured. Athenian thought caught on from far western Europe to India, most importantly in Alexandria, Egypt, where they built a pretty big library to preserve all those ideas. When Europe fell into the Dark Ages after the Romans collapsed, Africa and the Middle East picked up the burden, and Greek philosophy was eventually re-introduced into Europe by conquering Muslims. If it weren’t for Alexander’s imperial ambitions, we probably wouldn’t know the first thing about Plato or Aristotle today.

Even if Alexander was good for the preservation of Greek thought in the long run, he was rather a problem at the time. Up until that point, political philosophy hadn’t thought much about empires, quite rationally pointing out that they were far too big to control. Some of the Tragedies, and historians like Thucydides, made this all too clear. Plato’s Republic imagines the perfect city, not the perfect empire; similarly, Aristotle’s political philosophy takes the community as its base unit, and his entire understanding of human nature comes out of human interaction within those communities. Neither are of much use in explaining life under the new imperial order; what’s worse, Aristotle actively helped bring about the demise of the old world by teaching and encouraging Alexander, and realized his mistake a bit too late. (There are claims that he became involved in a plot to kill Alexander so as to end the madness, though they are unsubstantiated.)

Aristotle

Aristotle teaches Alexander

Massive land empires, you see, are far too large to function as happy little communities in which everyone plays a role. They’re run by powerful people in some distant capital, and while it might be possible to work one’s way into power, the odds aren’t very good. A few groups within the empire will likely take up arms or use other means to protect their more particular identities, but this can be exhausting, and might incur the wrath of the imperial armed forces. Instead, most people become resigned to the fact that they lived in a system beyond their control, and try to carve out the happiest existence they can manage. This brings us to our last Dead Greek Person, Epicurus, who came of age just as Alexander died.

Epicurus, jaded by the political strife all about him, had a very different approach to political philosophy than his Greek predecessors. He had no vision of the ideal state like Plato, nor did he put much stock in an active citizenry living in community, as Aristotle might. He simply counseled that his followers retreat from those grandiose and often toxic affairs, and said the only things that mattered were individuals’ abilities to avoid pain and anxiety. He didn’t have much use for the gods, though if they made people feel better about themselves, good for them. He is technically a hedonist, but he took a very long view of what involves “pleasure,” and therefore wouldn’t counsel people to follow any old desire just because it made them feel good; they had to find pleasure in things they wouldn’t come to regret later on. Epicurus cautioned against falling too far in love: after all, that can cause a lot of pain. He didn’t let gender or class restrict who he welcomed into his school, which he named The Garden.

Epicurus’s ideas have been incredibly durable. His suggestion that people seek happy lives outside the political sphere would prove highly useful for many subjects of the Alexandrine and Roman Empires, and also in many of the feudal and imperial states that came afterward. John Locke, who was probably the most important philosopher for the founders of the United States, thought quite highly of him. His notions of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain were taken up by utilitarians centuries later, and might be seen as the foundation of modern economic theory. One could easily argue that most people are, and perhaps always have been, far more Epicurean than anything else: they care far more about the things that make them feel good or bad than any grandiose political affairs, and they only get whipped up into a political frenzy when someone or something threatens their comfort.

The obvious problem here is that it can be very hard to know how much pleasure or pain certain actions will cause in the long run. Even more problematic, in my opinion, is Epicureanism’s rather dismissive take on human ambition. There is a danger of it wandering over into Stoicism, which again can be a practical approach in some situations, but tries to suppress those ambitious and aspirational urges and make them go away. It can lend itself to defeatism even more than Aristotle’s acceptance of the world as it is, and when people encounter obstacles, it often tells them to simply desire less. It’s practical advice in many ways, but if it’s too puritan, it won’t work for long. Repressed urges tend to erupt in time, often in ugly ways, and shunting those impulses aside and making them taboo doesn’t quite work. They need healthy outlets. This was Aristotle’s approach: acknowledging those animal drives, and channeling them into something good. He was right to see human interaction as some form of politics, even if many people don’t like that fact.

Epicurus’s value, then, isn’t as a guide toward some utopia where we all forget about politics and live happy little lives. Instead, he grounds us, and reminds us that any ambitions we might have beyond tending our own little gardens have to remember where we all come from. Epicurus was no rebel; he simply had a much better grasp of reality than many of his politically-obsessed contemporaries. This is why Bacevich’s ideas don’t jive with our idea of modern politics: despite claiming to be prudent, they’re not something that we can bring about by electing one or two good leaders.

To his credit, Bacevich acknowledged this in his talk. He had a rather pessimistic view of modern politics, and quite rightly suggested that we tone down our expectations for it, and be glad that one or two individuals can’t change it too easily. Instead of building the ideal city or state from the top down, via a national party or some effort to change Washington, it has to start from the bottom up. (Just ask Jimmy Carter.) If we want a world that believes in a human scale instead of being forced to make do with the empires (literal or figurative) we’re stuck with, we need to start at home, and live it in our daily lives. Instead of focusing on the vagaries of politics beyond our reach, we need to change the things we have the ability to change, and closely guard things we think ought to be preserved. For all their differences, that is the enduring lesson of all the Dead Greek People: that human life is grounded in community, and everything else must follow from there. With that as our starting point, we need not be so pessimistic. In that realm, we really can make a difference.

Here’s a related post on Aristotle’s demons to round out this series.

Picture of Alexander and Aristotle from http://www.heritage-history.com/www/heritage.php?Dir=characters&FileName=aristotle.php. Picture of Epicurus from http://newepicurean.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Epicurus-sculpture-crop.jpg

Two Articles Worth Reading

Distractions have slowed my blogging pace, but here are a couple of articles I enjoyed. One came out today, while the other is an old one that I found myself revisiting after writing my last post on here. They are not all that related, though they do both express opinions that I would have frowned upon just a few years ago, but have come to appreciate since.

First, from the British newspaper The Guardian, an article telling us to stop reading news. (Ironic, no?) http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli?INTCMP=SRCH

I’m not sure I could ever cut myself off as the author of that piece did, but there’s a lot to think about there, and I can certainly relate to some of his sentiments. It’s easy to convince oneself that reading lots news is one’s duty if one wants to be an informed and intelligent person, when it is often merely a somewhat more enlightened form of procrastination. I’m all for a healthy dose of vicarious living and sounding intelligent at cocktail parties, but following the news can easily get out of hand. This isn’t without its problems, especially when things do directly affect us, and it’s also difficult to know what the author considers “news”–does that include, say, op-eds? A longer analysis piece in a news magazine? Personal essays? This blog? Still, I agree there is a certain freedom in not being chained to the news cycle.

The idea of slavish devotion to the news was already in my mind this week; when I first heard of the Boston Marathon bombings, my first instinct was to glue myself to a news feed and follow along. But then, as I often do in such moments, I flash back to 9/11. I was at school that day, and while they told us what had happened, they never turned on the TVs. When I got home, my dad–a college professor and generally very well-informed man–wasn’t glued to the news and worrying; he was gardening. Even as an 11-year-old, I was in awe of such composure during a crisis. My understanding of that day was not hurt by not seeing video footage of the falling towers until weeks afterward; in fact, it may have let me think through it better–as well as I could at that age. In a certain way, that was our own little victory over the terrorists: there was no terror in our house. Instead, there was some sadness, some reflection, and then we all got on with life.

Fr. James Schall, a Jesuit priest and recently retired Georgetown professor, always told his students to “never major in current events.”  Such narrow focus, he reasoned, led us to ignore the bigger things. Sometimes I wonder where I’d be if I’d heard his advice as a freshman or sophomore, instead of as a senior–but that’s all water under the bridge now, and there were different rewards to following the route I did take.

Fr. Schall also serves as a good transition into the next piece, which was written by another former Georgetown professor. I had the pleasure of taking a class from Prof. Patrick Deneen in what was the final semester in Washington for both of us; I’d suspect he generally shares Fr. Schall’s disinterest in current events, though I’m afraid he’s the main reason that several of those news links are on the right side of this page. In this essay, he explains his decision to abandon a tenured position at Georgetown to seek out a different opportunity:

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2012/10/leaving-washington/

Prof. Deneen and I come from fairly different places in life, but when it comes to leaving Washington, we have a lot in common. The essay captures much of my own jadedness with D.C., and though coming home since has not been without its frustrations, it was also rewarding on many levels. I may not be able to stay in Duluth long-term, but even if I don’t, localism is (funnily enough) something that can be useful anywhere. As with the news, I’m not sure completely cutting oneself off is the way to go, but there is certainly some wisdom there.