The Localist Manifesto
section 12
left or right?
We typically try to make sense of a new political idea by positioning it on the Right-Left spectrum fashioned during the French Revolution to sort out competing strategies for running things as a long-standing monarchy tottered on its last legs. That analytic framework may have worked well enough for the age of democratic revolutions, but it buckled under the weight of new political structures erected in the twentieth century. The dictatorships that emerged on the Right and the Left during the interwar period exhibited common features, and a new concept – totalitarianism – was created to account for them. Thanks in part to the broad popularity of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 with those who came of age during the 1960s, the rebels of that decade were poised to condemn authoritarian structures as such, regardless of whether they sported capitalist or communist trappings. Activism in the anti-authoritarian mode was eclipsed, in contemporary media and later historical accounts at least, by the Leninism that gained credence after 1968 as a next logical step for anti-war and Black activists caught up in the revolutionary euphoria of that period. Anti-authoritarian convictions resurfaced in the two movements – women’s liberation and environmentalism – that managed to outlast both the pick-up-the-gun fecklessness of the late-60s and a conservative backlash that targeted militant and countercultural rebelliousness alike for suppression. Infused now with a feminist-tinged mistrust of all hierarchies and an ecologist’s understanding of just what we are up against, these convictions have taken root and blossomed in grassroots movements determined to challenge the neoliberal order from a non-nationalist perspective. The Robin 99 campaign offers a way to coordinate and focus the efforts of those who have taken up this challenge and to draw anti-authoritarians of every stripe into a movement that can actually secure the liberty and well-being for which they now fight, to no avail, as patriots.
We do not have a king to depose. We have a land to resettle, and for that purpose the politics of Right and Left is worse than useless. It supplies us with insults to lob at each other as we squabble over a freedom and way of life that are unattainable under the regime of banks and corporations. It conjures up the “isms” that rampaged through the last century-and-a-half, prompting us to revisit movements, social systems, and ideologues long and well buried. The annals of history contain little that anyone should want to see come around again. Democratic revolutions that sanctioned slavery and colonialism, communist revolutions that exalted a Party, anti-colonial revolutions ushering in corruption and tyranny – let the dead bury their own. If we are to free ourselves, we must begin by thinking for ourselves.
Once we extricate our loyalties from the global and the national and lodge them instead in the local, politics becomes a matter of making a small place livable for ourselves and subsequent inhabitants, human and non-human. Our attention as citizens is suddenly diverted from the divisive issues that fester in the muck of party politics to practical matters that the inhabitants of a land base must come together to handle. This development holds great promise, as it calls into being new alliances and modes of cooperation far more amenable to our purposes than to the needs of the rich. Native Americans, environmental activists, and small landowners coming together to oppose pipelines; ranchers joining up with Sierra Club types and local townspeople to stop big-money development projects; conservationists and members of logging communities working together to replace clear-cutting with value-added forestry; bikers, urban design visionaries, and city residents of every rank and color organizing to slow the pace, ease the congestion, and soften the edges of city life – these alliances herald the dawning of a politics that summons our most praiseworthy tribal impulses. Such a politics activates our love for the land and validates the joy we experience while communing with mountains, forests, rivers, and wildlife or strolling the streets of a lively, well-tended neighborhood. It shames us for fighting so foolishly amongst ourselves and redirects our outrage towards those who are actually doing the damage.
A politics of revolutionary localism addresses the yearnings that conservative and liberal politicians endorse to win votes but cannot actually satisfy if they are to maintain the support of their financial patrons. Robin 99 eludes the Right/Left trap by identifying values shared by those who now shout at each other from either end of it. She authenticates her promise to see those yearnings gratified and those values realized by implanting them in the heart of a concrete plan of action.
Hearth sovereignty, local enterprise, love-thy-neighbor mutuality, family homesteading – all these features give Occupy the Hearth a conservative cast. One imagines a Merle Haggard soundtrack. Certainly it has a rural twang – a good thing and long overdue, one would think, given the enormities that have shadowed every bright idea hatched in dens of urbane and bookish sedition.
Rural and small-town Americans have wanted mainly to be left alone to live and raise their families as they choose, kick up their heels on the weekends, and be paid fairly for work well done. Whenever possible they have maintained meaningful connections to land, extended kin networks, and community. They have never been much inclined to look to government, especially a distant government, for solutions to their problems. Their mistrust of government renders them susceptible to the appeals of politicians who are as indifferent to the fate of the American countryside as the slickest big city liberal. The mistrust itself, however, is perfectly reasonable. The values that rural folk cling to in defiance of urban modernity are mainly commendable. Robin 99 provides the people who hold those values and share that mistrust with a new political option – one that does not turn them into agents of their own undoing. Rural dwellers are not deplorable but once steeped in the muck of corporate politics and corporate media they enable those who are. Robin 99 calls them back home to discuss with neighbors the issues of the day in a setting where opinions will be as diverse as the individuals who might gather at a town hall or a local tavern to gossip and wrangle. In that setting, their political turn of mind reveals its resemblance to that of America’s premier philosopher of unbending non-conformity – Henry David Thoreau. Opposed to slavery and capitalist money-grubbing, scornful of reformers and do-gooders, disdainful of all parties and governments, firmly rooted in the natural world, happily wedded to the delight and edification to be found in his own neighborhood, Thoreau has much to teach us still about living free and well.
Robin 99 can break the spell woven by snake oil libertarians around the heads of freedom-loving Americans so that they might rediscover, in the idea of localism, what has always been our worthiest tradition of individual liberty and good neighbor morality. That idea, concurrent at once with the village anarchism of Thoreau and the workaday conservatism of rural and small-town America, contains within it the possibility of a revolution more thoroughgoing than any of the revolutions of the modern era. A localist revolution really will transfer power from centralized, hierarchical institutions to the people at the grassroots. The yearning for self-determination – for having a voice in decisions that affect one’s prospects for freedom, well-being, and enlightenment – has been at the root of modern restiveness since ordinary people first realized that it was within their reach. Liberal and Marxist revolutionaries rode to power by appealing to that yearning, positioning themselves in theory and rhetoric as history’s chosen agents of democratic fulfillment. That fulfillment has yet to arrive. Liberal regimes put power in the hands of the rich; communist regimes reserved it for communists. Robin 99 is just you and me, organized to seize power neighborhood-by-neighborhood and then do our best to get along without having to use very much of it very often. The power we wish to consolidate flows from the knowledge of how to make a particular place thrive and the determination, shared by all who occupy that place, to govern it as equals and defend it against anyone who would use it for purposes we deem unwise or unjust.
Those who lean Right politically might notice that Robin 99 intends to locate all civic authority in local assemblies and assign all shared duties to working groups answerable to those assemblies. That’s it – assemblies and working groups … and festivals. No other institutions are necessary for the work of resettlement. Those who are enamored of one Ayn Rand fanboy or another should consider this fact – they want to be President! A libertarian who wants to wield the massive powers of the U.S. Presidency is a libertarian who is pulling your leg or, better, laughing all the way to the bank. Politicians like Ron Paul and his progeny use your mistrust of big government to enlist you in the service of big corporations. The backsides of “don’t tread on me” rebels are dense with the footprints of the most shameless exploiters of working people. Contemporary libertarians also fail the acid test of good neighborliness: they wish to dismantle government without regard for the people who would suffer as a result. Robin 99 intends to dismantle big government, but only after neighborhood polities are strong enough to assume responsibility for the services that national and state governments currently provide. Once local economies and local cultures become expansive and durable, a number of options will present themselves for managing this kind of a transition and administering such political arrangements as might emerge from it. Local assemblies could decide to ignore existing local governments altogether and begin, in their own way, to procure resources (money, labor, knowhow) for the provision of local services. Or they might decide to cooperate with existing city councils and work out a division of labor for this task. A similar decision awaits local assemblies as they contemplate tasks that will still need to be undertaken at state and federal levels. They could go it alone and delegate authority to representatives for such specific purposes as they deem necessary, with a limited mandate and subject to immediate recall if they start to act like those who inhabit the halls of power today. Or, they might decide to leave certain wings and agencies of existing state and federal government in place and work out a division of power and labor with them. Let loose in a setting where these kinds of decisions make up the substance of translocal politics, the idea that one should only pay for what one needs will become a potent argument for political downsizing.
There is no telling now how all this will play out down the road. That is as it should be. The urge to map everything – the belief that a dazzling display of Reason might accurately detail the layout of the future – is a holdover from the days when a linear notion of Progress still held sway in the minds of those who busied themselves with revolutionary thoughts. We should focus our attention instead on a more modest, hence more reliable, insight: after the dramatic decentralization of authority that will follow Occupy the Hearth Day, local assemblies will be making decisions about what it is necessary – and unnecessary – for government to do and how revenue will be collected to do it. With Robin 99 (local citizens) in the saddle, existing governments will be too weak to impose their will on truly self-governing localities. Political institutions, like their counterparts in the economy, would become targets of a controlled demolition designed to liberate decision-making from big, centralized, absentee entities while maintaining such services as are essential to protecting the well-being of the people and their natural environs. We might really begin to cut governmental bodies down to size rather than allowing ourselves to be bamboozled by sleazy free market sloganeers seeking positions in big governments so that they might enrich themselves and the oligarchs who fund their campaigns. Greatness in the Anthropocene will best be achieved by making America small again.
Those who lean Left need to acknowledge the bankruptcy of the grand schemes visualized by nineteenth-century philosophers and implemented by twentieth-century reformers and revolutionaries. These schemes were born at the dawn of the industrial revolution. At that time, the hardening of class boundaries and the gutting that ensued of the rights won in revolutions like the American and the French were the most salient features of the landscape. Those who saw this clearly and mobilized to take action did so either as progressive reformers or socialist revolutionaries. Each believed that the ruthlessness of unfettered capitalist enterprise could only be tamed by big government – respectively, a welfare state or a proletarian dictatorship. Both created new forms of servility and new rationales for behaving ruthlessly. Standing now at the twilight of the industrial revolution, we can also see that social inequality and political subservience are only part of the story. Industrialization, especially on the scale we have witnessed since the last world war, also wreaks irrevocable havoc on the land. When viewed from a standpoint that allows us to see social inequities and ecological destruction, welfare capitalism and state socialism appear equally indefensible. Mix uranium with TVA-scale development and you eventually get Three Mile Island and Fukushima. Join uranium or coal to a state-run program of mega-industrialization and you get Chernobyl and the smog-fouled cities of China. Add to these equations the plain fact that neither of these social systems is compatible with any meaningful conception of self-governance and you arrive at a simple conclusion – these systems are useless for our purposes today. New Deals, Five Year Plans, and Great Leaps Forward – let us be done with all that.
Robin 99 releases those on the Left them from an obligation that has either made them scarce in the halls of government or forced them to rule with an iron fist whenever they manage to gain control of one. Once they assent to the proposition that only a big government has the power to rein in the rapacious behavior of big business, they find soon enough that they must choose between their commitment to justice and their commitment to liberty. Bureaucratic welfare states and single-party dictatorships have proven themselves capable of instituting policies that favor those on the lower rungs of the social ladder, but their manner of leveling the playing field has made them starkly unappealing to those who do not believe that equality should come at the expense of freedom. These citizens then become easy pickings for politicians and pundits all too happy to portray every effort to further the cause of social justice as an inherently authoritarian scheme. As for the Leftists in this dreary tale, they must either stuff their ears to avoid hearing themselves offer lame apologies for authoritarian regimes or hold their noses as they support politicians whose commitment to justice evaporates entirely after reciting the promises needed to secure progressive votes on election day.
Given the woes that have attended every effort to use a big government to secure a proper measure of liberty or justice, the time seems ripe for those on the Left to concede that it may be the wrong tool for the job. If you use a jackhammer to clean your teeth, then you should not be surprised when your smile repels whomever you try to approach. As the workers’ and people’s republics have either collapsed or saved themselves by feeding their working people into the maw of global capitalism, the international Left is now spared this loss of face only to see its once proud legions reduced to an army of nose-holders. The jobs/growth behemoth thereby acquires a fresh supply of cheap laborers and docile dissidents.
The localization of power derails the logic that puts liberty and justice at odds. A revolution programmed to shrink the domain of big business and big government by scaling down the work of making a living and governing a territory pairs liberty and justice in a state of fluid but healthful symbiosis. Partisans of the Left can stop propping up the feeble imitations of either that the regime of banks and corporations allows them to pursue and work instead to nourish the sturdy varieties that grow side by side in local soil. All the problems that now engage the energies of progressives and socialists – global warming and environmental devastation, racial injustice and poverty, student and homeowner debt, lifestyle and gender intolerance – can be more effectively addressed as the big institutions controlled by the 1% are steadily stripped of their power to define, obstruct, and punish. More concretely, it is breathtaking to imagine what the cities in which many left-leaning citizens reside might look like after they are liberated from the grip of landlords. Young people who are drawn to the excitement, conviviality, and artistic camaraderie of urban spaces would not have to scrap so relentlessly for the means to live in one. These residents could join with similarly liberated members of long-standing urban communities to adapt housing options, neighborhood design, and transportation systems to their own needs rather than those of real estate moguls. As the revitalization of small market agriculture and rural life drains away those who only came to the city out of necessity, the work of restoring and preserving the charms of urban life will be eased for the fewer who, out of preference, remain.
Robin 99, in any case, has no ambition to wield the powers of a big government. And for sure he wants no part of the Presidency. He would love, however, to occupy the White House. It is a good building – strong against wind and rain, well-equipped with useful technology, roomy. It would be a good place to house the Working Group for the Stewardship of the Potomac River. Once the Presidency follows real estate into the sweet hereafter, locals from the Foggy Bottom area of Washington D.C. who love the river could take possession of the White House and convert it into a center for restoring the river to good health. Kindred working groups in neighborhoods all along the Potomac could meet once a year at the White House to coordinate plans for water purification and wildlife preservation and to celebrate together the beauty and majesty of this great North American waterway. All 132 rooms would be filled with river people – bass fishers and bird watchers, biologists and geologists, ecologists and chemists, hikers, canoeists, ballad singers, skinny-dippers, rope-swingers, and tailgaters. The White House lawn would fill with firepits and live bands; the air would fill with the aroma of grilled proteins and corn and the sound of vibrating skins and strings. Energies unleashed by these festivities would travel back home with the participants, charging river dwellers from the headwaters to the mouth with strong feelings of shared ecological responsibility and reverence. These sentiments would animate public policy: after Occupy the Hearth Day, locals will have the power to insist that no one who lacks respect for the river – who pollutes it in any way for any reason – will be allowed to do business on it. If you can’t turn a profit without spoiling a waterway, then you need to find another line of work.
That is how Robin 99 will wield the authority of the White House. A place currently given over to every kind of lapel flag banditry – authorizing bombing raids, drone strikes, and internet surveillance; brokering huge giveaways to banks, corporate farmers, and fossil fuel companies; glad-handing with tyrants, thieves, and Senators – would at last be occupied by a genuine, down-home spirit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of a good time. There is a future we might enter with our better selves intact.
Folks on the Right and the Left could learn something from the career of John Perry Barlow. A cattle rancher from Wyoming with a degree in comparative religions and a taste for poetry, Barlow got pulled into the orbit of the Grateful Dead at the tail end of the 1960s. The lyrics he wrote for guitarist Bob Weir added a pastoral streak to the Dead’s hippie communalism. Politically, Barlow usually referred to himself as a libertarian. In his later years, he championed the internet as a brave new world where free speech and free trade might thrive unmolested by censors and regulators. Over the course of his career, his libertarian convictions usually led him to vote for Republicans. In 1978, he worked as a manager for Dick Cheney’s Congressional campaign. Cheney hit libertarian notes in his speeches and, at that time, posed as a friend of what remained of the Wyoming outlands. Once in power, Cheney quickly demonstrated that he valued oil company profits and cruise missiles far more than he did black-footed ferrets and cottonwoods. Barlow walked away from the neo-conservative war party and left this summary remark for fellow libertarians to ponder: “we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way that we worry about government.” Praise be that someone from the Atlas Shrugged end of the ideological spectrum finally had the wherewithal to draw this conclusion and the guts to state it out loud.
Barlow’s story speaks to a key question: where does a social grouping as large and diverse as the 99% find its points of unity? A fixation upon what is Right and what is Left draws a dividing line between those who mistrust big government and those who mistrust big business. Doing so pries apart and places at odds convictions that coexist harmoniously in individuals like Barlow and in movements more concerned with the scale of enterprise than with the forms (private or public) of ownership. Robin 99 fixes our attention on what have always been the basics – land and liberty; tierra y libertad; forty acres, a mule, and a voice. Such unity as we need to achieve our purposes will arise from a consensus that local self-determination in economic and political affairs is a better way to preserve these basics than submission to big government or big business. The preciousness of clean air, unspoiled water, and healthy soil; the value of neighborhood autonomy and local culture; the sanctity of individual freedom and creative self-expression; the honor in work well done and leisure well spent – let these be our defining principles. We can find broad agreement on such principles but only if we first agree to stop fighting as anti-government (but pro-corporate) Rightists and anti-corporate (but pro-government) Leftists. The 1% navigate effortlessly across the private/public border – they have learned to amass wealth in both domains. They must delight in watching the 99% squabble as Rightists and Leftists, since the issues that emerge from those altercations will be addressed by voting for a party that the 1% owns. As our other rights are steadily stripped away in preparation for the new hard times ahead, you can bet that the freedom to enter a booth every four years and vote for a Republican or a Democrat will be the last one left standing.
Occupy the Hearth 