U.S. Localism: the solution to Hyperpowerism and Globalism Run Amok?

Dan Riehl at Riehl World View argues that American Localism can emerge from a return to an anti-Federalist ideology. That won't be so easy given that the Left and Right in today's America have taken Federalist policy far beyond what the early American Federalists envisioned.

Britisher Phillip Blond's version of Localism seeks to work within the framework of his country's Conservative party. I'm not so sure the same can be tried with America's Republican party.

Americans have been dodging the fact that both our major political parties no longer have a middle or strongly opposing viewpoint: the GOP party is simply the Conservative party, and the Democrats are simply the party of the Left.

Yet both the Left and Right in America have converged in the most destructive ways. Both have abandoned American foreign policy in favor of what can only be called hyperpowerism -- the belief that as a hyperpower the United States government can't have a truly American foreign policy and instead must act from a position that is an awfully queer mixture of globalism and imperialism.

And both parties have embraced a form of federally backed economic globalism that subverts the free market to what Blond neatly sums as "a model in which competition is reduced to a cartel of vast corporations maximising profits by discouraging competitors and minimising wages by joining with the liberal left to encourage mass immigration."

All that said, Dan's pithy essay is on the right -- or perhaps I should say "correct" -- track:

"Localism" as Ideology by Dan Riehl

Keep in mind, this isn't the localism we'll soon be fighting in the free speech debate we're discussing. It has nothing to do with that.

[...]

The Left has nothing to offer an America as we envision it. They are the party of a repeatedly failed collectivism. But the corporate-Republican embracing of Globalism carries with it threats to America, as well.

The extreme of a potential new conservatism for the Right can be seen now in the survivalist mentality. And that's no solution at all. Hopefully somewhere in the middle is a ground that both accounts for the driving need for globalism, but does better on quality of life issues the Right has ignored for too long.

Really there needs be no new great invention of a politics for America -- it can simply be a turning back to anti-Federalist views, which appreciate the need for more power to reside within the States. At the State level, power should be left within cities and towns as much as possible.

I believe one can accommodate the political aspirations of [Phillip] Blond into America's existing framework. So it's more radical in contemporary thought than traditional practice given our History. The question is, how do we turn the power flow up to the Federal Government around?

Accomplishing that would get us a long way toward where we might want to go. From there, it's understanding the economic model that would work within the political paradigm, while taking globalization into account. [...]

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This entry is crossposted at RBO with her usual great taste in illustrations. Love to know where she found that pix of the "globalist" American flag.