Here’s a lecture I presented at a meeting of the H. L. Mencken Club, probably the 2018 one:
A Decentralized American Nation?
I’m going to speak about the idea of a decentralized American nation.
The topic’s an obvious one. The Mencken Club has mostly tended paleoconservative, and paleoconservatism was all about having a decentralized republic based on American, regional, and local traditions.
Today the project looks like a long shot. Even so, the concerns that lie behind it are lasting ones that keep popping up, and they always end up finding their way into political and social arrangements.
1 Precedents
The combination of national and local feeling makes a great deal of sense as an ideal. The two need each other to remain sane. And both need other sentiments of attachment, like family feeling and religious loyalties. Rootlessness isn’t good for people. Neither is particularity that doesn’t have a broader setting.
That’s one reason the combination of national consciousness and local self-rule has given rise to such memorable periods of history. The ancient Greeks, with their city-states and attitude toward barbarians, are an obvious example.
On a larger scale, that’s also has been true of Europe. Attachment to European society as something distinct and special, and to national independence within Europe, seem to be declining, but so is Europe.
2 America
In America, both decentralization and nationality have also been important. The trend though has been away from localism and regionalism and toward a sort of abstract centralized nationalism.
That’s the opposite of what Greece and to a lesser extent Europe had, which was local political independence, combined with a concrete overall civilization held together by general ethnic, religious, and linguistic ties. (In the case of Europe, what we call the West is simply Latin Catholic Christendom 500 years after Luther.)
In Federalist 2 John Jay argued that the America of his time had the same sort of unity Greece had, although he didn’t draw the connection. As he said:
“Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”
That was mostly true, since the colonists were mostly British, Protestant, and attached to representative institutions. Without that, if there had been Frenchmen in New England, Englishmen in the middle states, and Spaniards in the South, the union created by the Constitution would have been impossible.
2.1 Centrifugal tendencies
Even so, America was a huge country composed of distinct regions with different economic interests populated by different sorts of people.
Also, it had a tradition of local self-government. London and then Washington were far away, and there wasn’t a national ruling class, so local people and associations had to look after public affairs. They got used to it and liked it that way.
So it’s not surprising that the federal union was a limited one devoted to particular practical goals like common defense and a common market.
Nor was it surprising that early on there were a number of initiatives toward opting out of the union: interposition, nullification, threats of secession, and then secession itself.
2.2 Consolidation
All the talk of opting out came to an end after Appomattox even though the points of national unity noted in Federalist 2 were disappearing.
The outcome of the war was of course a big part of that. But there were other influences pointing toward a unique sort of nationalism.
American life was becoming less local. Industry and commerce were growing. Transportation and communication were becoming faster and easier. We had new states and millions of immigrants. Urbanization and war uprooted people, made government much more active, and required some sort of ideology to justify it all.
The result is that national institutions became more important and nationality become more abstract, propositional, and ideological.
3 Current state of affairs
Most features of that situation are not specifically American. Throughout the West we’ve been seeing uprooting and mixing of peoples and a decline of local attachments of any sort.
The growing support for effectively open borders and the uncomprehending and often hysterical response to Brexit show how far the trend has gone.
The fundamental tendencies that support it are the same elsewhere as in America. Localism made more sense when distance mattered more. You had many more connections to people who were physically closer. And local traditions were stronger when populations were more stable and life was less industrial and standardized.
Today we have a global economy, online commerce, and chain stores. Those things don’t have much to do with locality.
Especially among the high-credentialed people who run things, we have mobility. That means, among other things, a brain drain from the provinces. It’s hard to have localism if too many go-getters attend a few top universities and move to a few big cities.
We also have the Internet, with people socializing on Facebook and amusing themselves on Youtube. It’s hard to have any sort of localism if people spend all their time looking at screens. On the screen it doesn’t matter whether something’s next door or in Sumatra.
And of course we have constant mass immigration from everywhere.
4 The two parties
As a result of all this, the big political divides in America today are not really local or regional. To the extent they have to do with geography they mostly depend on how dense the population is.
Instead, they have to do with demography, social class, and most of all how people connect to the world. That last point is basic enough to make them take on a religious quality.
People who still connect to the world personally and locally—through family, church, neighborhood, and hometown—tend conservative. Those more oriented toward formal institutions and national and global networks—ambitious professionals, young people who haven’t married and settled down, big city people, social misfits, people who aren’t part of the historic core population—tend progressive.
Social trends are multiplying the people who tend progressive, both in numbers and importance. Immigration is of course a big factor. Apart from that, religion is constantly debunked and denounced. Particular connections of any sort are denounced as racist. The family has been deprived of its functions and redefined out of existence. And young people don’t grow up since there’s nothing for them to grow into, so they remain disconnected.
There is sporadic opposition to these trends but it’s populist and therefore lacks stable leadership. Also, the changes in technology and social organization behind them seem unlikely to go away any time soon.
5 Localism
All these conditions make localism seem increasingly unrealistic.
“States’ Rights” and the 10th Amendment still have some fans but they’ve mostly disappeared from public discussion.
There are some small magazines like Chronicles and a few organizations like the League of the South and maybe this one.
Decades ago there were literary and artistic regionalists. The Southern Agarians in the 1930s are the most recent major example. But there aren’t many of them any more.
There are a few odd or eccentric cases, like Wendell Berry and Bill Kauffman. I suppose you could add Garrison Keillor, except he doesn’t seem to like Minnesota or Lutherans.
There are people who mostly believe in nice things, like the website Front Porch Republic. And then there are high end consumption goods like craft beer, farmers’ markets, and locally sourced food.
So we’re left with odds and ends. In Europe there seems to be more localism, like Scottish or Catalan nationalism, but it has a deeper historical background, and mostly seems parasitic on the connection to the EU. They want to emphasize their connection to the more universal instead of the more local entity. I’m not sure how local that would turn out in practice.
6 Nationalism
Nationalism has had more staying power.
It’s meant a variety of things depending on what it’s been opposed to.
Originally it mostly had to do with unified and effective government. In Europe that meant making the king stronger than the nobility, local jurisdictions, and the Catholic Church. In America it meant establishing the federal government under the Constitution.
As time went by, and especially with the French Revolution, the emphasis shifted from unification of states to unification of peoples. If the people of a state had a common language and culture they would be able to act collectively. They thought that would make them stronger, and the government thought it would make it stronger as well.
That effort ended with two world wars that were blamed on nationalism. So after the Second World War it was discredited in Europe. The Europeans were all second-rate powers anyway, and they needed the Americans to defend them from Russia, so nationalism wasn’t going to get them anywhere. In America nationalism had become sufficiently abstract and ideological to merge into internationalism, and it became an aspiration toward global empire. It still had a use, so it stayed with us.
Today the new nationalism in the West isn’t really about any of these things. Instead, it’s basically defensive. It stands for defending what remains of local traditions and autonomy over against things like the EU. It’s rather like Third World nationalism, which gave form to the desire for independence from colonial empires.
That was the point of Brexit and Trump’s election.
7 What to do?
With all this in mind, what should we do?
Nationalism certainly seems better than the globalist alternative, but how much can you expect from it if the people at the top all hate it because they feel more connected to their opposite numbers elsewhere than to their own countrymen?
And how much should we want it without localism? What good is loyalty to American pop culture and the political culture of a multicultural post-rule-of-law empire?
Even so, people require some way of balancing change with stability and universality with particularity. The problem is how to do that when modern conditions dissolve stable particular connections.
This isn’t a problem that is going to remain unresolved forever. The future belongs to those who show up, and without stable particular connections there won’t be many children. So whoever solves the problem wins. Darwin gets the last word.
Also, universal commercial and bureaucratic networks won’t work without competent people who trust each other and at some point are willing to put the common interest first. But where will they come from? You need prerational loyalties to hold society together. Will loyalty to global society and its institutions be strong enough to trump personal interest and keep the social wheels turning effectively?
Life goes on. The obvious response to disintegration of civic loyalties and the consequent end of orderly and rational public life is a return of basic pre-rational connections. As in the former Soviet Union we’re likely to end up with ethnic conflict, combined with criminal and semi-criminal mafias, gross public corruption, and increased reliance on religion.
So an increasingly multi-ethnic country like the United States is likely to end up less like the West as it has grown up since the pagans were converted and populations stabilized in the early Middle Ages than to the traditional Middle East. Syria and Iraq may well be be the future of America. Something like that seems to be the natural form for a radically cosmopolitan society, and I’m not sure why we will avoid it.