Go Local

Several nights ago, one of my bigger fans, Rachel Maddow, was raving on her show about some of the local solutions to the Gulf oil spill: local fisherman and shrimpers, parishes and towns on the Gulf Coast successfully finding creative ways to stop oil from hitting their shores or marshes. She talked about how collaborative it all was, and how solutions that were working were local solutions, and it really struck me that these localities were laboratories of invention.

It was fascinating to listen to, and I’m not sure Maddow knew entirely what she was actually advocating, but she was on to something: the best decisions for localities are best made by local leaders, not dictated from afar. The liberal narrative, that of course Maddow trotted out as well, is of course that evil British Petroleum is failing to solve the problems with the spill. But it is also equally true that the federal government is even more powerless than BP to successfully intervene at a local level, partly because it does not have the technology or ability to solve the spill. But at the same time, I’m sorry, a federal official being flown in to the Gulf coast does not have a vested interest in solving the problem. That’s not to say that there are not federal employees currently spending long hours trying to solve the mess. But at the end of the day, no one knows how to clean up his or her own locality like someone who lives and breathes there.

This all got me thinking about what American Majority is about: encouraging people to go local and come up with solutions to clean up their towns and states from irresponsible leaders and government. We’re encouraging leaders in the various states to start talking with each other, collaborating on ideas that work, possibly even working on joint projects. We encourage them that they need to organize their communities for freedom: take over school boards, city councils, county commissions, even state legislative chambers, creating robust and muscular grassroots organizations that can help elect the right leaders and then keep them accountable.

American Majority is focused on the state and local because we believe the closer decision making and power is to the people, the more efficient, effective, and responsible it is. But we also believe that the groundswell that will change the country this direction is headed begins with local involvement and change. A true national groundswell from the bottom up will bring about generational change: I’m not interested in changing things for one or two election cycles. I’m interested in changing things for several generations.

There are other reasons why not only we are focused on state and local, but also why all conservatives should be as well. First, most government spending takes place at the state and local level. Granted, some federal money is pushed into state and local, but the facts are that over 50% of government spending is state and local. Second, most government employees are state and local. Of the roughly 23 million government employees, only about 3 million are federal. Which leads to another implication: state and local government employee pensions.  But that’s a topic for another post.  And on a last point, 69% of the current U.S. House began in state and local politics, and 74% of the U.S. Senate did: state and local is where the overwhelming majority of political careers begin.

It’s time to go local, folks, without of course ignoring the massive federal issues like healthcare and cap-and-trade. But if we in the liberty movement will go local, become community organizers for freedom, and have local leaders network nationally with other likeminded leaders across the nation, we will bring about massive change in this country.