Alternative Editorial: Joe’s not sleepy, but he should wake up to American localism
John King from CNN’s Election Night Coverage
It’s week 31 of what we’ve come to call the Shift, triggered by coronavirus but signifying much more. And this week, we had a little political event to contend with.
For those of us whose forebrain was fully occupied by CNN’s American general election coverage for the last week, the calm centre of it all was the “magic wall”. This interactive screen sat in the middle of their studio, literally like the mystic oracle of the ages. CNN’s smooth officiants (like John King above) stroked and conjured it to life, yielding up the secrets of the election battleground.
And what it revealed, in this very tight race, was a level of American territoriality we hardly even think about: the counties within each state in the Republic. The unfamiliar county names themselves rang out like locales for the Great American Novel - Maricopa, Forsyth, Miami-Dade, Allegheny, Delaware…
Yet as an oracle, the magic wall itself did not project the truth, in many ways. You gawped at states whose geographic mass was solid Republican red, with fragments of Democrat blue, and listened to the pundits speaking of the “metro- and non-metro” divide.
The Atlantic reports (using the calculations of economist Jed Kolko) how “large urban areas remained staunchly pro-Democrat as inner suburbs moved hard to the left… From coast to coast, inner suburbs are voting more like cities—that is, for Democrats—and outer suburbs are voting more like rural areas, for Republicans”. The Guardian puts numbers on the shift: “Biden on average gained 3.2 points in places that are more than 50% urban…Trump, in contrast, averaged a nearly two-point gain in majority rural areas”.
Some graphics visualisers also made valiant attempts to demonstrate that “land doesn’t vote - people do” (see the Twitter embed, left, and here in Fast Company). This showed the vote in terms of blobs of concentrated populations - not acreage.
But the pundits have also tried to overlay college/non-college education over this metro/non-metro split: “Counties with populations made up of more than 20% college graduates saw Biden make an average gain of 3.4 percentage points on Hillary Clinton’s vote compared with just 0.5 points elsewhere…In contrast, Trump secured gains of 2.5 points in counties where more than 70% of the population were white, non-college graduates” (Guardian).
Instant sociology like this, gathered mostly from exit polls, is an entertainment for political anoraks (the polls showing a rise in black and latino votes for Trump are also causing many wings to flap). Yet our experience from the Brexit moment is that deeper social-science study over the coming months will make these divisions much more complicated.
Indeed, there are already projects like the Purple State of America (see tweet embed, right). They colour-code each state in shades between red/Republican and blue/Democrat: the “shades of purple” express how finely balanced each state’s party affilation often is. These visualisation explicitly aim to reduce the sense of polarisation that’s produced from much cruder maps.
So, as the news anchors were constantly counselling from their magic studios during the count: patience please, on the research front.
Yet there are early signs that the Biden camp may well be staring at maps like this, and that they may well be driving their rhetoric towards “national unity”. A unity that aims to transcend what otherwise might seem like the basis of a crippling polarisation in American life.
Look to the civic level for hidden energies, Joe
Check out this fascinating (and rare) campaign interview that Biden gave in October this year, with social worker and leadership guru Brene Brown (here’s the transcript). For one thing, it hardly shows a “sleepy” Joe, but a very lucid and morally powerful Joe - which is encouraging.
Yet there is a fascinating section where Biden condemns the tendency to “devolution” since the 2000s. In Biden’s story, the demand for “city councils and state legislatures” to have “local control” opened them up to big-money influence. He believes they were much more easily swayable than “the entire United States Congress representing 50 different points of view based on geography”.
Continues Biden: “We’ve become awfully regional…we’re a federal system, and the federal system says that we make up for each other’s shortcomings and what we lack”. Biden thus goes on to make the case that big infrastructure needs national commissioning (“Both Amtrak and a water system helps everybody”).
So the warm and fuzzy appeals to patriotic unity - “no Red states or Blue states, just the United States” - seem to have a somewhat harder underlying requirement from policy. Yet with the Senate and Supreme Court looking to be staying in Republican hands, it seems extremely unlikely that Biden will be able to get any of these “national infrastructure” ambitions enacted.
From the perspective of this platform and project, we would suggest that Biden’s corporatist stance against localism is precisely the wrong way to go.
On these islands, we are certainly sensitised against messages like “big, federal-style, union-level government knows best”. The Brexit vote of “take back control” partly identifying the EU in the same role as the US Federal government. (Indeed, many Leave areas, often just as deindustrialised as Mid-West “rust-belt” areas, voted to reject the benefits of EU funding and subsidy).
This dynamic can also be internal to the UK. Look at the yawning gaps opening up between Scotland, Wales, the Northern conurbations, and the Westminster government over Covid responses.
What we hold out, and agitate for, at A/UK is a lower and more creative level of “community power” than this - a more elemental refreshing of civic potential. This is by means of social constructs (like our CANs, or citizen action networks) that revive the sense of power being in the hands of everyday people.
We also want to be eclectic, and sensitive, about how people build the shared feelings that can ground that power. Whether through local trade and media, or culture and leisure, or care networks - often already existing on the ground, not needing to be forged - it’s important to generate a felt sense of “being in common”, through projects of joint action.
As these projects build, polarised positions are subsumed, in the construction of something tangible valued by the community. But in a network age, it’s easily possible to be a “cosmo-localist” also. That means downloading the best of designs, plans and ideas from a growing movement of radical democrats (and sharing your own with them too).
America’s localism may be the key to progress, in a tight spot
From The New Yorker
And as far as the coverage on the Daily Alternative since 2017 is concerned, we have found so much of this level of activity going on in American communities.
Take our post on the “Our Towns” book. In their self-piloted prop plane, The Fallows dropped in on hundreds of small towns that had tiny airstrips. There they found a thriving landscape, where mutual support and creative responses to toughening conditions prevailed, defying the air-war of the party duopoly.
Similarly, the networkers of Vermont’s Front Porch Forum have been quietly building social fabric in their areas one newsletter at a time, steadily across other states and counties, ready to shake the tree of care in times of crisis (their Covid response has been predictably comprehensive).
American laboratories of democracy, coming up with policy advances, are often much smaller, more self-starting and idiosyncratic than Biden’s macro-viewpoint. Take Micheal Tubbs’s harnessing of Silicon Valley, to bring UBI to his stricken city of Stockton (though he currently faces a tight call on his re-election). Or Cooperation Jackson’s pioneering celebration of cooperative forms of making and organising.
Or look at The Strong Towns movement fomented by Charles Marohn, which argues for a fierce, loving relationship to the improvement of your place. Indeed, their credo is eloquently against the Biden view:
Stop betting our futures on huge, irreversible projects, and start taking small, incremental steps and iterating based on what we learn… Stop building our world based on abstract theories, and start building it based on how our places actually work, and what our neighbours actually need today…
A phenomenon that’s a little higher-up from this micro-level would also be the growth of the “community-wealth building” model. This was begun by the Democracy Collaborative in Cleveland, and is now spreading across the planet—but (we are told by Democracy Collaborative’s policy director Joe Guinan) they’re now particularly active and ready to flourish in cities like New York, Chicago and Atlanta.
Is there any way localist processes like these can at least get through discursively, if not policy-wise, to a new administration? Any bipartisan legislation on, say, employee ownership? No point in holding any breath.
The US research we’ve identified at A/UK, on how strong local media and newsrooms reduce political polarisation in communities, could be a policy appeal upwards, urging a change in media regulation (the McChesney “media vouchers” plan (p. 38), for example, are currently being taken up practically by entrepreneurs).
But it’s could as easily be a project from below. Not just crowdfunded by those who would directly benefit - but also, philanthropically, by those in the digital elites (we’ve explored this here). Out of all constituencies, the tech classes should know the need for new kinds of digital media, which increase empathy and reduce polarisation (rather than profit from it).
Trusting communities more is not that new a discourse for the Republic. As the New York Post says, “in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville praised Americans for their ability to form small communities to get things done and saw in the American township a model of participatory democracy and civic spirit”.
Biden often invokes glowingly the small-town values and experiences of growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It doesn’t line up with the rest of his statist, top-down rhetoric, and he should look to this civic level for hidden energies. But it’s objectively a tight spot he’s in. We wish the President-Elect the best of luck.