Though often overlooked, counties are key to a reinvigoration of local politics across the nation.
Though often overlooked, counties are key to a reinvigoration of local politics across the nation.
I n 2018, Yuval Levin declared that “our country is badly in need of renewal. And given our strengths and weaknesses just now, such renewal certainly seems more likely to start at the bottom. This is a time to go local.” Levin was right in 2018, and events since — from Covid to George Floyd and January 6 — have only highlighted the need for renewal in 2022, calling to mind more extreme words: recovery, restoration, even rescue.
Whichever of these descriptions one prefers, the national and state governments are as unlikely agents to bring it about now as they were then. One reason for this is party politics. Political parties exist to win elections. The winner-take-all, single-member-district system of elections that prevails across almost all the United States means that only two parties can consistently compete at the national level. Winning elections on such a large scale means communicating to astronomically high numbers of voters, and that requires each party to present its positions in as clear, simplistic, and distinct a manner as possible. The two-party system doesn’t necessarily create polarization, but it encourages and nourishes it. Once political polarization exists among voters, it is in the interest of both political parties to sustain it.
This political polarization has been driven primarily by increasing ideological polarization for more than a decade, with Americans on either side of the partisan aisle increasingly separated by principles or worldviews rather than by party allegiance itself. This trend has only accelerated since Trump’s election in 2016, the Covid pandemic, and the nationwide reckoning on racial justice, leading Pew researchers to claim in 2021 that “America is exceptional in its political divide.”
The national government has been the focal point of this bitter and seemingly intractable divide, as dramatically evidenced in the events of January 6, 2021. State government officials have inherited the divide from their participation in controversial policy-making and association with national party labels. Neither the national nor the state governments have been able to mitigate the effects of extreme polarization. National and state-level efforts to improve civic education and civil discourse, though helpful in some ways, have similarly failed to make a dent on this front. Americans remain hopelessly divided on “core American values,” and that will continue to stymie renewal efforts at the national and state levels for the foreseeable future.
Another reason national and state governments are unlikely to catalyze the renewal we need is the inertia that attends centers of power. The good reasons to change the status quo usually fail to persuade most of those who benefit most from it. Indeed, there are few George Washingtons among us. People who have devoted their lives to playing by the rules of the game are unlikely to want to change those rules when they are winning, making those with the most influence today the least likely to bring about any kind of change tomorrow.
But the most basic and decisive reason we can’t look to the national and state governments for American civic renewal is that the American experiment was always, from the beginning, an experiment in self-government. The “self” in self-government means, first and foremost, an individual human person. Because of this, American civic renewal is not only “more likely” to start at the bottom — it must. As Thomas Paine put it in Common Sense, the Revolutionary Americans sought to “begin government at the right end”; i.e., from the individual human being outward rather than from a king, queen, president, or member of Congress down a chain of command. If we wanted Chinese civic renewal or Russian civic renewal, we could start at the national level; but if we want American civic renewal, we simply have to start locally.
The difficulty with American civic renewal, then, is that it has to happen both locally and nationally at the same time. It also has to happen politically, and not simply via a social (or social-media) movement; as Alexis de Tocqueville would remind us, democracy at the social level can and often does coexist with political tyranny. People can and often do prefer equality to freedom. Political freedom is the safeguard of individual freedom, but it is also much more labor-intensive. Self-government is hard work.
To solve this problem requires identifying a political unit that is tied to small areas and populations and that covers the entire territory and population of the United States. Neighborhoods are too small to count as properly “political.” Cities and towns are generally of the right size, but they miss large parts of the territory (and smaller parts of the population) of the U.S. The political unit that best fits the bill is the county or county-equivalent. Counties, then, are the site where American civic renewal will be decided.
Aiding this reinvigoration and shining a light on the importance of counties is the newly launched organization Counties for American Renewal (of which I am the founder). Though they are often overlooked, counties provide most of the day-to-day services upon which we rely: law enforcement, hospitals, parks, utilities, transportation, building regulation, sewer systems, and many others. During the Covid pandemic, for example, counties often took the lead in providing public-health guidance and services for the people living within their boundaries. In elections, counties administer the casting and counting of ballots.
What’s more, counties do all of this in a nonpartisan way. The sheer practicality of the local-level problems that counties handle tends to transcend partisanship. Should we build a water pipe going through residential neighborhoods? Should we renovate a library or build a new park? These questions bring people together and frame disagreements in a way that large-scale abstract problems do not, preventing polarization. Indeed, coalitions relating to practical problems shift with the particular problem, unlike artificially rigid political parties.
A modified version of the argument about factions in Federalist No. 10 works best at the local level of the county: The more directly practical the set of problems, the less constant and rigid the factions; the less constant and rigid the factions, the more likely that the influence of factionalism itself will weaken; the more the influence of factionalism weakens, the greater the likelihood that solutions will be reached with reference to “justice and the general good” (Federalist No. 51) rather than partisan rancor.
The dysfunction and radical instability of our national and state politics in the U.S. will not disappear with one election cycle. Likewise, having the right leaders in place can delay, but will not do away with, the consequences of our profoundly divided and miseducated political culture. In this crucial moment, the promises of the Constitution’s Preamble can be realized only by refocusing our efforts and resources on local politics across the nation. Counties hold the key for such a reinvigoration. Investing in them now will pay dividends both for us and for generations of Americans to come.