Liberal political philosophy is centrally concerned with the challenge of pluralism. We live in a society of many religions, cultures, and political persuasions. A standard question concerns the outer boundaries of this pluralism: what is the range of practices that can be accepted or at least tolerated, and which practices must be deemed unacceptable? How big is the tent?
I argue that our disputes over the outer boundaries of liberalism are shaped partly by its inner boundaries—that is, by the divisions between the different political jurisdictions within a federalist institution. It is easier to share a tent if its rooms are designed the right way.
Nationalized Politics and Its Consequences
There is something admittedly quaint about focusing on federalism and local politics. American politics is utterly dominated by national controversies, and state and local politics increasingly mirror national dynamics rather than focusing on their own backyard. This is, I suggest, an untenable foundation for liberal politics. If all we do is party-line vote based on our national party affiliations, then politics amounts to a winner-take-all battle. What this battle promotes, when fought over and over again, is not progressivism or conservatism but illiberalism: the stakes come to seem so high that the other side cannot be allowed to win, and the ideological lines come to be so sharp that compromise cannot even be considered.
Nationalized politics promote not progressivism or conservatism but illiberalism: the stakes come to seem so high that the other side cannot be allowed to win, and the ideological lines come to be so sharp that compromise cannot even be considered.
Much of this is familiar. We have heard pleas for political moderation and comity, paeans to the American politics of the mid-20th century, time and time again. They seem both boring and woefully out of touch: you simply do not win elections by promising to be nicer than the other guy. Asking for a return to the old ways is hopeless if that means waiting for politicians to suddenly commit to disarmament, or for voters to suddenly favor it.
But we may, I think, learn lessons from the fundamental structure of both the American constitutional order and public opinion. We know that voters persistently approve of local politics more than national politics. This holds across a wide range of issues, from trust in political representatives to the assessment of the economy. The national economy—the single most important driver of national electoral politics—is only the aggregate of all the various local economies. But voters systematically and consistently think that their local economy is significantly better than the national economy. Needless to say, not every local economy can be above average. This single fact suggests that the American public is persistently irrationally dissatisfied with national politics. Because national politics dominates local politics in attentional salience, this means the public is, in some sense, irrationally dissatisfied with politics as a whole.
There is a simple logic to this: individuals have a considerable degree of choice over where they live, and therefore move, on the margin, to places that they prefer. This is often called self-sorting. The idea of self-sorting is sometimes elevated to a core political principle: to the extent that people are free to move, this seems to help legitimatize the coercive force of the state. I spend a lot of time on points like this in my dissertation, Place-Based Liberalism. But here my point is more prosaic. People obviously already self-sort to some degree: liberals move to coastal California or New York City or Colorado, conservatives to Texas or (in recent years) Florida. It only makes sense that this would result in at least somewhat greater average satisfaction with lower levels of government. But political attention is heavily nationalized. If people are happier with local politics but more engaged by national politics, they will be more dissatisfied with politics overall than they ought to be. Further, self-sorting into different political locales will not serve as a release valve for political conflict if people are focused on zero-sum national conflicts rather than the diverse local level at which we can all be winners. (Or, more carefully, where there can be many more winners.)
Rebuilding Local Politics
Liberalism would be better served at both a practical and theoretical level, then, if citizens oriented themselves to a greater extent—of course not completely, just more—to local rather than national politics. I want to discuss three ways in which we might move toward a less nationalized politics. First, we might engage more deeply with the communities we interact with most in our own lives. Second, we might attempt to regulate some of the technologies that have taken attention away from our backyard and channeled it to nationalized conflicts. Third, and most fundamentally, we might try to strengthen the self-sorting logic of federalism such that citizens have greater and more practical reasons to engage in local politics.
Liberalism would be better served at both a practical and theoretical level if citizens oriented themselves to a greater extent to local rather than national politics.
The first approach is the simplest but least systematically actionable. Perhaps we should simply see that nationalized politics has become poisonously combative and look closer to home. Ezra Klein, toward the end of Why We’re Polarized, reverts essentially to this path. Changes in political culture are not just a matter of institutions and policy. It is a worthwhile hope that people might simply decide to engage more deeply not just in local politics, but in local life more generally. No one forces us to learn all the key national political players rather than our city council members, or to spend our time on social media rather than in local public spaces. In general, people of all types spend significantly more time at home than they used to. This contributes to what Marc Dunkelman calls, in The Vanishing Neighbor, increased emphasis on the “inner-ring” social relationships of the family and “outer-ring” social relationships (so to speak) with mass media, to the detriment of the “middle-ring” of the community—in short, the level of local life and governance. If we simply made more time for the middle-ring, we would presumably care about it more and be a little less distressed by the conflicts of outer-ring national politics.
In one sense, individual action is the solution; but in another sense, it is not much of an approach. It is like addressing the health impacts of sedentary lifestyles by saying, “Well, people ought to exercise more.” We need to understand why local politics collapsed and how to begin the process of rebuilding them. The second approach targets technological changes as its culprit, and especially the rise of ever more compelling and ever more personalized mass entertainment technologies. It is widely claimed (although it is difficult to give a knockdown argument) that social media usage, in particular, directly contributes to partisan polarization. That is probably true. But even non-political entertainment technologies contribute to political dissatisfaction by crowding out in-person communal activities that would strengthen one’s “middle-ring” attachment to a particular place. To the extent that individuals live in atomized media environments, there is little reason for local society to be salient to them. This is especially pressing because entertainment technologies have become so compelling that they verge on addictive: not only social media (or more broadly, algorithm-driven entertainment), but online sportsbetting and, increasingly, artificial intelligence “companions” threaten to take up so much of our time that little is left for anything else. This seems like a recipe for ever-increasing discontentment, which can be directed mainly into national political conflict.
One idea, then, would be to regulate and restrict entertainment technologies directly, especially those that seem addictive (Although it is a difficult philosophical question to cash out the relevant sense of and criteria for addiction). Jonathan Haidt has recently brought significant attention to banning smartphones in schools. That would be a start, and I favor policies in this direction, both on the grounds discussed in this essay and beyond. But it is difficult to imagine such regulations going nearly far enough to address the more fundamental issues: paternalistic policy for school children is one thing, but extending that policy to everyone is quite another. Optimistically, perhaps a better school environment would lead more people to take individual action, as in the first approach. But that seems optimistic indeed.
The third and final approach is, in one sense, more dramatic but also avoids certain political and philosophical perils. My dissertation focused on the appeal (and problems) of empowering local politics. If local governments simply had more authority, they would presumably become more focal to politics, at least in some cases. And to the extent that local politics became focal, national politics would be crowded out, while local self-sorting could do its work. Now, some issues here are constitutional—the US Constitution gives significant deference to states, but the purview of local authority is essentially at the discretion of the states. Constitutional reform is not a very practical path forward. But the school smartphones example is illustrative. Local governments often do have a lot of policy discretion, often much more than they actually exploit. How could we promote more distinctive, and therefore more salient, local governance?
The distinctiveness of local governance is linked to the mobility of individual citizens.
The distinctiveness of local governance is linked to the mobility of individual citizens. Self-sorting in federalist institutions requires literally moving. The ability to move provides a fallback resolution for political disagreement—if you do not love it, you might truly be able to leave it—but also the prospect of discovery and progress. If you do not love it, you might be able to find it. This is not far-fetched or antithetical to American institutions: Yoni Appelbaum argues that the ability to move away from repression and toward economic opportunity and cultural cohesion was, in fact, the lifeblood of American society for much of its existence. It is only relatively recently—especially in the last fifty years or so—that American society has become, in Appelbaum’s word, stuck.
Being stuck in one place, particularly in the era of home entertainment, does not seem to facilitate greater investment or engagement in local society. Instead, I suspect, it mainly fosters resignation: if I do not like where I live or how I am governed, and I cannot do anything about it, it is easier to retreat into the home and channel my dissatisfaction into anger at national politics.
There is, then, a natural and already-burgeoning agenda for a better and more local politics: the movement for greater housing affordability, especially as channeled through the idea of housing abundance. If we built a lot more housing, it would become cheaper to move, more realistic to move toward opportunity, and more crucial to govern cities in ways that make people want to move there. Local politics in America have, in a perverse twist, most potently made themselves felt via NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) politics that have stifled mobility. Giving Americans back their freedom to move would, however, reinvigorate all the other (and far richer) dimensions of local governance. It is local communities that find ways to live together, or to fall apart.
Connected to the point above, I would also mention the considerably smaller niche of interest in redistributing wealth and providing welfare through cash payments, rather than in-kind transfers of goods and services. This is most often discussed under the heading of “universal basic income,” but it is unnecessary to go that far when trying to complement housing reforms and promote mobility. For instance, public housing or housing vouchers tend to cut against mobility. If one has to make it to the top of a long waiting list to get public housing (or a rent-controlled apartment), then there is a massive disincentive not to leave thereafter. Similarly, if one has a housing voucher that is only usable in a certain jurisdiction. Simply giving people money significantly promotes their flexibility in these dimensions, especially with abundance reforms that make the housing dollar go further. If mobility is the flywheel of vibrant local governance, there are clear and practical paths we can take in that direction.
An “Easier” Liberalism
Some readers will recognize a lot of philosophical influences here, from Robert Nozick to John Stuart Mill to Chandran Kukathas. But I want to conclude by returning to the issue of pluralism. Here, the principal influence is John Rawls. I suggested that a fundamental problem of contemporary liberalism is the nationalization (which goes along with the polarization) of all politics. Liberal politics is fundamentally about compromise; that means its fundamental question concerns the limits of acceptable compromise.
Liberalism, as we know too well, is a hard business. Federalism and mobility might make it a little easier.
One of the best ways to compromise is to live and let live. But that does not work very well in national politics, because we are all governed by the same national government (whether we like it or not). This is not the case locally: we are governed by many different local governments, so many more of us can get what we want there than is possible nationally. If even a handful of political issues could be taken off the national agenda and returned to the provenance of local governments, we might lower the stakes of national politics a little and make individuals a little more satisfied with how they are governed as a whole. Liberalism, as we know too well, is a hard business. Federalism and mobility might make it a little easier.
Travis Quigley is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. His work is in political philosophy and normative ethics, with a special focus on the functioning and principles of liberal political institutions. His papers have appeared, among other places, in The Philosophical Quarterly, The European Journal of Philosophy, and Utilitas.
