The revenge of the periphery

The 20th century was an era of consolidation and centralisation. Power shifted away from localities, communities and families, moving ever higher up the political food chain. In the ultimate shift, power flowed towards transnational bureaucracies – most notably in Europe, in the form of the EU.

Today, we may be seeing the emergence of a counter-trend: one that seeks to return control to local bodies, closer to where people actually live. The internet and social-media platforms, though destructive in many ways, have also empowered local communities, who now enjoy access to much the same information as those in Brussels or Washington, or in the corporate towers. Many communities, from small towns to exurbs, are benefiting from large-scale migration away from urban cores, as people escape the cities while bringing their skills and knowledge with them.

Centralisation emerged in eras when information was scarce and poorly distributed. The ideal of central control dovetailed with economic growth coordinated by concentrated power – whether in New Deal America or, more lethally, in Stalin’s USSR or Hitler’s Germany.

This ushered in an era of ever larger, denser cities that came to dominate economic and cultural life. Giant cities such as Berlin, New York, London, Paris and Tokyo departed from Aristotle’s model of cities as collections of ‘villages’. Instead, vast agglomerations emerged in which older ways of life were largely obliterated. Urbanity itself, noted the German sociologist Georg Simmel more than a century ago, created a ‘specialised individual’, deeply ‘dependent’ on the mechanisms of the city.

That pattern is now shifting. People in the United States are migrating out of big cities to exurbs and small towns. Much the same is occurring in Canada, where high housing prices are driving people – particularly millennials – towards ever more remote areas. In Australia, too, most domestic migrants have opted for the suburbs and, increasingly, for towns outside the once-favoured state capitals. There is even a shift back to the countryside in places such as France and Japan, where rural areas long assumed to be doomed are beginning to gain ground on their big-city counterparts.

Centrifugal forces are increasingly in command, as ever-improving communications reduce the necessity of locating in dense centres. Once, leaving the big city meant a downgrade in earnings. Today, all 10 of the highest-average-salary metropolitan areas in the US are small or mid-sized markets; none has more than a million people.

The periphery can no longer be written off as a collection of life’s losers. It is increasingly capable of challenging the ‘progressive’, centralising ideologies dominant in great urban centres – often through populist agitation. France has experienced persistent protests against globalisation for undermining local economies. Poland and much of Eastern Europe, emerging from decades of Soviet-style central control, are also pursuing decentralisation. Brexit is best understood as a drive to wrest power from the EU.

In Europe, local control offers an alternative both to forced Europeanisation and to the dominance of multinationals, which tend to concentrate power in national capitals. EU regulations have conspicuously failed to halt Europe’s long decline and have, if anything, hindered competitiveness by imposing costly rules – particularly on energy – that damage peripheral economies. These regulations are imposed by elites far from the communities most directly affected by them.

Central power is, of course, sometimes necessary – in defence, immigration and the setting of basic standards. At times, as in the pre-1950s Deep South, Washington’s intervention was essential to dismantle crude and discriminatory racial policies. But many smaller places, even in the South, have since evolved. Governments once hostile to African Americans now court their votes and are often led by them. In the two decades following the 1965 Civil Rights Act, the number of black elected local officials in the South grew from fewer than 1,500 to more than four times that figure.

In America, the expansion of the state apparatus into areas once governed locally has not always delivered better results. Education arguably performed better when control was local and responsive to community needs than under the federal Department of Education, formed in 1979 but abolished by Trump at the beginning of his second term. And when states and localities misbehave, they are often better placed – Florida provides an example – to address fraud than Washington, which frequently struggles to do so.

Public opinion reflects this reality. Strong majorities tend to trust local government far more than federal authority – three-fifths of Americans lack trust in the federal government on domestic issues, according to Gallup. The same pattern holds in the economy. Big companies, banks and the media attract low public confidence, while small businesses continue to enjoy broad support across party lines.

These attitudes are particularly pronounced among millennials. They may be, as one commentator suggests, more ‘socially conscious’, but they are sceptical of the top-down structures embraced by earlier generations. They are also far less trusting of major institutions than Generation X. ‘Millennials are on a completely different page than most politicians in Washington, DC’, observes pollster John Della Volpe. ‘This is a more cynical generation when it comes to political institutions.’

Localisation may also help address the deep polarisation evident across America and much of the West. Rather than imposing uniform standards on everyone, it often makes more sense to allow cities and states to follow their own preferences. There is little value in forcing common ground between ultra-progressive Portland and conservative eastern Oregon, Texas and California or compelling residents of English market towns or French villages to think and behave like Londoners or Parisians.

The tragic events in places such as Minneapolis underscore the need for federal authority in areas like immigration, national defence and infrastructure. Yet many policies once set locally – education, policing, abortion and transport – have come under sustained assault from Washington’s elites, eager to expand their influence into every crevice of public life, while ignoring the US Constitution’s localist design. Nationally imposed policies often whipsaw communities that cannot easily adapt, whereas localities can change course more quickly and responsively.

Localism has no shortage of opponents. Elites have little regard for local concerns, seeing themselves as uniquely informed and enlightened. This tendency is most advanced in California, where progressives have worked relentlessly to centralise control over education, zoning and other functions traditionally determined locally.

Some on the right, sadly, have mirrored this impulse. Like their left-wing counterparts, they have shown a taste for micromanagement – pushing, for example, for a national ban on abortion as part of a broader cultural agenda. Donald Trump, for his part, has little affection for local control – his passion for domination routinely overrides local institutions. Heavy-handedness, rather than respect for local decision-making, is his modus operandi.

Beyond its democratic appeal, localism is often more innovative than large bureaucratic systems. In America, states can serve as what Justice Louis Brandeis famously described as ‘laboratories of democracy’. Richard Nixon attempted to devolve power through revenue-sharing, granting localities greater discretion over spending. Though undermined by congressional Democrats, the idea resurfaced two decades later when Bill Clinton praised the ‘pragmatic responses’ of both liberal and conservative governors. Such state-level experimentation, he noted, was vital in a country as complex and diverse as America.

In an age defined by the dispersal of people and knowledge, societies need less enforced unanimity and more room for multiple alternatives. Habits of self-government have long underpinned successful civilisations. The Roman Empire allowed cities substantial autonomy, provided they remained loyal to imperium. The Catholic Church’s principle of subsidiarity – the idea that decisions are best made at the lowest feasible level – has been central to its longevity, as has its construction of alternative, non-state institutions.

Localism has been particularly important in America. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, the habits of self-government are learned through civic association. It is at the local level that democratic citizenship is most keenly felt. Some now even advocate the creation of extra-national, self-governing regions, as seen in the duty-free zones emerging in parts of Central America.

Reviving the dynamism of local places offers an alternative to centralisation, whether imposed by state-friendly global capitalists or socialist utopians. Restoring the primacy of localities may be the surest way to recover common sense, efficiency and popular control in a world increasingly threatened by nanny-state progressivism and an ever more conformist, opportunity-crushing global capitalism.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute. Find him on Substack here.