The Localist Manifesto
section 3
politics off the grid
The challenge is figuring out how we might translate a genial vision of local self-determination into a practical strategy for taking over. The difficulty of that task is heightened by the novelty of our situation: the seizure of power we need to orchestrate must be radically different from the revolutions of the past. A politics that might propel us out of our current predicament must somehow 1) stay true to the horizontal/localist/ directly democratic inclinations of contemporary activism; 2) give us the strength and leverage necessary to affect change at the national level; and 3) begin immediately and proceed rapidly, so that we might overtake and then disable the locomotive currently hurtling us towards the cliff.
The rituals of electoral democracy, however corrupt or hollow, still facilitate most Americans’ participation in the world of politics. Every four years, the drama of a Presidential race draws even the cynics into an engagement with the issues placed in the spotlight by contending candidates. Maverick campaigns siphon youthful energy and alternative ideas into the process. Mainstreamers try out new ways to keep voters in the well-worn grooves of normalcy. Candidates of every stripe exploit the fears and insecurities – real and imagined – that have always coursed through the veins of American political life. Those who cannot bring themselves to participate in such a tawdry enterprise still find themselves tracking the poll numbers and engaging, however critically, with the business of politics as currently conducted. It is classic American entertainment – cheap, of dubious morality, with huge sums of money on showy display and rival bands of good guys and bad guys vowing to kick some butt and save the day. It is a garish spectacle for sure, but one that keeps the promise of democracy alive for a people who see no good reason to trade this ideal, even in its tarnished form, for any known alternative.
A covenant that commands loyalty even as it is honored primarily in the breach must be doing important ceremonial work. A Presidential race, for example, allows voters to experience a feeling of common endeavor and shared civic urgency. However hollow as an exercise in self-government, such an event is quite powerful as an identity-affirming ritual. In principle, that is a good thing. In practice, contemporary elections ritualize our lack of democracy and our incapacity to determine our own well-being. Citizens who enter a voting booth now do not exercise their power as self-governing individuals but ceremoniously affirm their willingness to cede that power to the oligarchs who possess a stranglehold on the political process and the economy. Whether they champion the genius of the market or the benevolence of the state, these wealthy overlords use the powers at their disposal to immunize the electoral system from any idea that would weaken their grip on the right to rule. Those who wish to see a system of real self-governance replace the rule of global financiers and their hirelings in Washington need a way to ritualize their willingness and their capacity to run things themselves. We need a way to find one another, begin to assemble the machinery of local self-determination, and then keep track of our progress in that direction so that we will know when we are strong enough, coast to coast, to start taking over.
Is it possible to adapt the rituals of republican governance to the purposes of local self-determination so that the promise of democracy might be realized in a complex modern society like ours? It is, but only after unplugging politics from the grid we now use to generate plausible options. Such a radical procedure requires that we imagine, and then run, an extraordinary candidate – a political agent who can embody a determination to use the mechanisms of electoral politics to disperse power into the various localities (urban, suburban, rural) that we inhabit. The challenge of visualizing such a candidate creates an opportunity for rethinking altogether the function of elections at this critical historical juncture. As localists, we neither need nor desire a candidate who will occupy an existing office and wield governmental authority as currently constituted. The rich have bought and paid for the instruments of centralized governance and they are welcome to them. We should concern ourselves instead with how we might use the pageantry of national elections to organize and build support for a localist movement and enable a reliable measurement of its strength as it grows over time. For those purposes, we do not need to run a particular individual at all. We can run directly on an idea, using the customs of a national campaign to promote it. To do that, we just have to give the idea a name (Robin 99 comes to mind) and then run that candidate for President in an election that we administer ourselves alongside the official one. On election day, we set up voting booths in our neighborhoods and encourage people to vote there rather than at their usual polling place. Since we are operating outside existing institutional structures, we will not need anyone’s approval or authorization to do this. Just secure a building or set up a big tent and make a ballot available for anyone who does not want to vote for a party-affiliated candidate. DIY all the way down. People with computer expertise can easily create a system for recording and counting the ballots at each local site and then calculating the total Robin 99 vote nationwide. The creation of a voting system beyond corporate control would represent a welcome political complement to kindred efforts – farmers’ markets, co-ops, and the like – already ongoing in the economy. Libertarian techies will at last find a suitable political home and work at once consistent with their individualist principles and of service to some real individuals rather than the conglomerates they now serve. The work of what we might want to call committees of digital correspondence will provide a means of coordinating the actions of autonomous localities. The creation of a parallel voting system will also guarantee that we are not vulnerable to corporate manipulation or government suppression. (Recall what happened, in this regard, when tech-savvy supporters of Aleksei Navalny enlisted Google and Apple in their 2021 campaign to unseat Vladimir Putin. A tragic miscalculation born of tech-reverent naïveté.)
The platform for such an uncommon candidate can be uncommonly simple. Robin 99 will not assemble a laundry list of false promises designed to secure votes by stoking the most ill-informed fears of the electorate. Campaigns run on this model have long served both as crucibles for the forging of nativism and racial animosity and as the main mechanisms whereby the wealthy keep their grip on the throne. Robin 99 seeks to make good on a demand that arises organically from the grassroots whenever hard times descend upon those who lack any appreciable wealth. During the height of the COVID pandemic, for example, people who suddenly found themselves out of work and desperate to keep their households afloat insisted that they be relieved for a time of the obligation to make rent or mortgage payments. These payments typically absorb from a third to a half of a household’s income, so a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures provided a very sensible solution to the financial difficulties into which many families in the working and middling classes had fallen. Can we not dare to imagine how these families might fare if that moratorium were made permanent?
Robin 99 accepts that dare. The campaign to elect her creates an opportunity for the millions of people who would benefit immensely and immediately from such a change to imagine it out loud and then plan together how they might make it happen. Our platform needs only one plank – we propose to secure the right to shelter for all citizens.
Volunteers for the Robin 99 campaign will do what volunteers for any political campaign do – sponsor events designed to explain to interested parties what their candidate stands for and build a base of support. Since our candidate does not intend to occupy an office, winning will be determined by our own calculus. Victory for this campaign will be achieved when the number of Robin 99 voters is large enough that people can claim their right to shelter without fear of eviction. That number will have to be large – there may have to be at least as many Robin 99 voters as there are Democrats or Republicans. But on the day when the votes tabulated for our candidate reach that level, there will be much cause for riotous celebration. We might want to give that day a name so that it can be properly memorialized. Call it Occupy the Hearth Day, perhaps – an Independence Day for a second American revolution. On that day, everyone – regardless of whom they voted for or whether they voted at all – will take possession of their homes. We will stop making mortgage payments and paying rent. We will defend our hearth occupations with sheer numbers: if a government sends police to remove people from their homes in a particular neighborhood, local activists can put out a call for enough people to converge on that neighborhood and surround it that the police are rendered powerless. Out of the millions of voters who, by this time, will have come together to support Robin 99 and lay claim to a hearth, we will be able to mobilize tens or even hundreds of thousands of people – whatever is needed – to descend rapidly on any neighborhood targeted by the authorities and protect the right to shelter of all who live there. Police officers now paying nothing for their own places of residence might discover, when the orders come down, that they lack enthusiasm for suppressing a movement responsible for lightening so dramatically their own financial burdens.
Whatever their loyalties, the police can’t be everywhere at once. As hearth occupiers, we are everywhere already all the time. As Robin 99 voters, we adopt a strategy that activates this geopolitical advantage and accustoms us to using it for our own ends. A vote for Robin 99 represents a commitment to participate in hearth defense, either by taking to the streets when necessary or providing logistical support for those who do. In that commitment lies the difference between a symbolic act of protest and a real occupation, between a futile effort to reform a regime that represents the 1% and a substantial first step towards reclaiming actual, physical territory for the 99%.
There is strength in numbers. That is a cardinal political fact, repeatedly reaffirmed by events. This is a way to use that strength to achieve something tangible and long-lasting. We measure our power by counting votes for Robin 99; we project our power by claiming and defending our homes. We operate, literally, on home turf, with all the advantages – tactical and spiritual – that gives us. Having secured the hearth, we will proceed to govern ourselves and plan together how we might secure other basic necessities locally, by our own efforts, and in voluntary cooperation with other self-governing neighborhoods. In the process, we create a way of life where decisions about these basics and our enjoyment of them are not determined exclusively by monetary considerations. We can at last give proper weight in our public deliberations to healthfulness and happiness, scale and impact, artistry and beauty.
Seems a little wild? Let us hope so. If we are to stop spinning our wheels, we must seek out pathways that provide traction into a future radically different from the one that awaits us if we continue to do what we are doing now. If the idea of occupation in its forward-looking and revolutionary form is to find expression in a plan of action, we must be prepared to enter uncharted territory. If we are going to survive, so the song says, we are going to have to get a little crazy.
At the same time, we are already fully equipped for this kind of undertaking. The Robin 99/Occupy the Hearth idea grows naturally out of the everyday experiences of ordinary people. We know how to run a campaign. We exhibit daily a capacity to start things up, make things work, keep things running, and otherwise direct our energies into creative and useful channels. We regularly have proven our readiness to stand together to secure fundamental rights and basic necessities. We show from moment to moment great compassion in our dealings with our families, with friends and neighbors, with strangers when crisis or misfortune brings them to our door. And we do all this while running ourselves ragged making house payments and car payments and insurance payments to banks and corporations, then paying taxes to a government which hands over most of that money to these same banks and corporations while exempting them from the obligation of paying much in the way of taxes themselves. We do this in the teeth of a culture that celebrates greed, domination, and self-seeking – indeed, brainwashes our children to believe that the self-interested pursuit of wealth and power comes naturally to people.
We know better. That is why so many of us cheered Occupy when it materialized over a decade ago. When we feel anger at how the wealthy are ruining our livelihoods and our planet, we are accessing a moral code with deep roots in human history and, for that reason, a voice in our judgments and perceptions. When we acknowledge ordinary people’s capacities for high-minded, warm-spirited collaboration, we affirm the fitness of that code for such tasks as we must now undertake to propel ourselves into a future hospitable to reason and compassion. A direct form of democracy is possible. A way of life that dignifies socially useful labor, gives free rein to our desire for relaxation and creative expression, and values neighborly cooperation along with family-centered enterprise, mutual aid as well as individual initiative – all this is possible. To turn these abstract possibilities into real options, we need only turn the millions of people who expressed sympathy for Occupy a while back into Robin 99 voters today.
Occupy the Hearth 