Libertarianism on the Local Level

I'm beginning to struggle a little bit with my political identity as of late.

Partly, I blame Barack Obama. (No, I'm not going to vote for him, even though he's not fake and he gets it, unlike just about every other mainstream candidate I know, save for Howard Dean.)

The struggle is one that is rooted in pragmatism. When I think about the cities I love, the cities that are appealing, they are cities that are well-planned by a central, guiding authority. People want to live in dynamic places with strong local government initiatives to improve the quality of life for their residents.

San Francisco is the city that springs immediately to mind. It's not a large city, but it's considered in many ways to be on par with New York in terms of its stature of America's finest cities. It's not just its favorable weather - it succeeds because the local government has intentionally created a place that people want to live in, with a vibrant cultural life, numerous educational opportunities, excellent transit, beautiful parks, well-designed civic spaces that foster interaction and community, and so much more.

Each city in the country that puts effort into this attracts knowledge workers, dynamic businesses, and the type of people that are intentional about creating a good community.

Now, I don't doubt for one moment that a libertarian solution would work better- from the bottom to the top, we could have a breathtakingly different society that would be far more beautiful than anything we've experienced. This would not be a cure-all for all of our social ills . . . nothing ever is . . . but most of us can't even imagine what this type of world would look like on a practical level.

This type of society would take a minimum of 200 years to be fully realized, even if we suddenly started now to put these practices into place. Our love of big government is not something that can just be ended and replaced with something better. It is ingrained into our culture and our thinking on such deep levels.

I want to continue to be an advocate for this vision - I want to read about what others have to say about it and learn how to articulate this vision of a libertarian world to those who dismiss it as too far-fetched or idealistic. Where there is no vision, the people perish, and somebody has to carry the vision forward. I certainly want to help.

At the same time, I have to recognize that our lives are lived out in localities. In today's world, those are both real and virtual (Second Life, etc.). In meatspace, though, we can see much more immediate and rewarding results when we decide that we will accept these characteristics of cities we love and cherish. When we think carefully about the idea of place - how we shape it and how it shapes us.

We learn to love the city and nurture its growth, to revel in both its gleaming buildings and grittiness, and we have to learn how to weep for the city when it loses its way.

How emotionally attached are we to our places? Oh, I'm not talking necessarily here about personal buildings - our beloved homes, churches, schools - these are places mostly of nostalgia, and that's a bit different. I'm talking more about neighborhoods and streets. Why do we love them? What makes them interesting? Most of us don't spend much time thinking about this, although we know it when we see it, and we know it very clearly and are inspired by it.

This can even extend to buildings that we come to love - either through simply working and interacting in a well-designed space or lovingly getting our hands dirty in manipulating places that aren't worth as much into treasured enclaves. Those, too, can be beautiful.

No matter how you look at it, great cities and great places are a product of some type of central authority, and if we want to have these types of places, we have to be able to willingly yield to this authority.

The real question is, do I have to turn in my libertarian card to think like this? I don't think so, because I think we have to say that a central tenet of sensible libertarian thought is that the power that may be legitimately allocated to authority varies inversely with the size of the public organization being overseen.

That means that you can run your house and your business any way you like. You can live in a commune with a bunch of other people or set up an business, civic, or social organization with all types of strict rules. But everyone chooses to be a part of these entities and can easily leave at any time. The smaller the organization, the (theoretically) easier it is to leave, and the more chance there is for the free market to work through competition to balance out harmful or less-useful anomalies.

This has to extend to cities and states as well. If we begin to see the hyper-locality as the seat of power, they we may still be able to think like good libertarians - if pragmatic ones. The practical reality is that the more local the organization, the greater the influence it has on our everyday life. (At least, this is my hypothesis - show me how I'm significantly wrong and I'll be happy to change my mind.) How we live our lives at home has a lot more affect on us than what the United Nations decides to do, even though we often seem to be concerned a lot more about the latter.

All this to say that perhaps I need to be more of an advocate for stronger, more influential city government and centralized planning. Our states in these United States need to be seen more as 50 sovereign entities; more like nations that covenant together for the common defense. (Which, of course, is the original intention of the Constitution as I see it.)

Why is our patriotism only confined to our national identity? Can we not see ourselves as Arizonans first? Is there something wrong with this view? Why must we think of our states as divisions of convenience rather than places that inspire us. Why do we place so much of our pride in our national identity? Certainly we used to have much more of a state-by-state identity than we do today (Articles of Confederation, Civil War, etc.) .

It's not that our states are too small, as Joel Garreau and others have written about. It may be that instead they are too nebulous without a sufficient identity.

Is there a stream of libertarian thought that articulates this type of local awareness and advocacy? Should there be? If not, we need to find a way to approach and expand upon this theoretically, since it seems to be an issue that could be vitally important for us as we make strategic alliances with those who identify as Democrats or liberals who are strong on local values, and those Republicans who both speak out and carry out the philosophy of less government.

Yes, it's pragmatism here, and I hate that on a lot of levels, but if we want to see positive change in our lifetimes, even if it's not strictly "liberty in our lifetime", we need to develop this sense of local engagement and how this can legitimately weave into our libertarian identity.