Localism Is A Dead End; It’s All Glocal Now

There is a curious commonality where conservatives and progressives align. Both believe that the local and parochial should take precedence over the global and whole of humanity.

For ascendant right-wing extremists, that means ultra-nationalism; with progressives, it means putting on blinders and being “firmly grounded in local.”

Conservatives, in the United States at least, have a core belief that everything should be privatized. Where they’re coming from is clearly self-serving and corrupt. But it’s hard to dispute progressives’ belief in localism, because it seems intuitively correct. It isn’t.

Fearing centralized authority and feeling overwhelmed by the global polycrisis, progressives maintain that one’s focus should remain at the local level. The idea, so prevalent in progressive circles that it has become axiomatic, is that we must empower people where they live, at the local level.

However, it's surprising how strongly people are clinging to the idea of local approaches, when evidence of the inadequacy of this approach is overwhelming. Local approaches are proving, with few exceptions, less and less able to meet local challenges as the forces and crises of globalization inevitably intrude, and as localities fragment.

The implicit idea that “if it's not working at the local level, it cannot work at the national and global level” is false. Coherence and effectiveness flow from the whole to the parts, not from the parts to the whole -- whereas fragmentation and disintegration ensue from the personal and the particular.

When I moved to Chico, a bucolic town located at the northeastern corner of California’s Central Valley over 20 years ago, I landed a column in the local rag, the Chico Enterprise-Record. There was one condition: I couldn’t write political pieces.

After three years I had strong local readership for my nature-descriptive, contemplative and philosophical column. Moved by a sense of outrage in the run-up to the second invasion of Iraq, I wrote a political piece. It was censored, and my column was cut without notice.

Fast forward to recent months. I crossed paths with the editor of a local news site, Chico Sol, after a meditation in the town’s jewel (the unmanicured park that follows the creek from the college through the municipality into the canyon beyond town). I told her of my experience with the locally infamous E-R, and she expressed interest in reading “Meditations.”

After getting the run-around for weeks, I was informed that ChicoSol is only interested in writing that is “firmly grounded in ‘local.’” The rejection, couched in the dangle of an occasional guest column, was all the more muddled and disingenuous because their mission statement begins with: “To provide cross-cultural feature writing…and encourage and enlarge community discourse.”

I lived in Chico for a couple years as a young man, when Chico exemplified the best of small-town California. Though it’s grown to over 100,000 people, has long hosted a college, and has experienced two of the largest wildfires in the state’s history in recent years, Chico remains a small, complacent town. People are friendly, and on the surface it’s still a good place to live, but nothing of any consequence is spiritually, philosophically or politically happening here.

A lot of smart people have settled (in both senses of the word) in Chico, so the local focus on only what’s happening in “my backyard” has a sophisticated veneer. Consequently, educated adults are all the more negligent with respect to the immense challenges in our de facto global society.

Localism, wherever one falls on the political spectrum, means focusing on what’s happening in my metaphorical backyard; it ends in literally only being concerned with what’s happening in my backyard.

These are synonyms for local: “limited, restricted, confined and narrow.” That’s why exclusively promoting local solutions at the expense of global perspectives and approaches has the effect of ceding the field to hegemonic power and money centers in a globalized world.

People with their hands on the levers of power sit back and laugh at those who beat the same old drum of local control. It's in the interests of multinationals in control of technology, economies and national governance to keep progressives focused on local issues, because that keeps people fragmented and unable to think and act together at the global level.

It isn’t that those who favor grass roots decision-making are wrong; it’s that they become useless when they focus on the local level in order to avoid facing and dealing with the big picture.

Nationalism has become a form of localism, a smokescreen reaction to the globalized power and control by the multinational few. MAGA and its spinoffs are no counter to “the global elites” that right-wing extremists continually excoriate, but a convenient cover for them. They’re so confident in their power over local and national politics now that the richest men in the world blatantly stepped forward and had pride of place at the inauguration of America’s 19th century throwback.

Why do people keep proffering local approaches when they’re clearly failing? I think it's because they fear taking a global approach, believing the scale is too much for them. But it’s exactly the opposite. We are overwhelmed not by the whole, but by the parts. So the more we focus on the parts, the more overwhelmed we become, and the more we contribute to fragmentation and loss of diversity.

As local diversity is erased by the torrent of globalization, it’s no surprise that the reaction of localization would arise. But scale is a horizontal measure, and we’re living in a vertical world, where the same basic issues confront people everywhere.

The cliché “local solutions for local problems” becomes nonsensical without awareness of the planetary crises facing all of human beings. By refusing to see and deal with things as a whole, localism exacerbates of the very problems it purports to solve.

The parts can never make a whole. Though the emphasis on local perspectives has never been so prevalent, the necessity for global approaches has never been so acute.

More often than not however, it’s the counterintuitive, not the received wisdom of the intuitive, which proves right.

Indeed, the assumption that human political problems would be largely solved if decisions were made at the local level is unfounded. It’s true that as much decision-making as possible should devolve to the lowest possible level. But that does not mean that decision-making at the local level can substitute for political philosophy and strategy at the global level.

Martin LeFevre

lefevremartin77@gmail

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