Localizing our disagreements

Imagine if the U.S. and Europe Union merged, forming one central government over all of us. Before you start singing Sam Cooke's What a Wonderful World, keep in mind that would make the U.S. subject to all the socialist whims of the EU. While the Leftists in America would be tickled pink, the rest of us would be hopping mad.

Mind you, this isn't intended as a knock on the EU. God bless their socialist hearts. It works for them, but I don't want to live in a country where an oversized central government decides everything. I will be happy to be friends with the Europeans, but don't ask me to live under their oligarchy.

However, we don't have to go to that hypothetical extreme to realize we have a similar situation in America today. Politics is more polarized than ever here, as demonstrated by the Left's gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over Donald Trump's election. If Hillary Clinton had won, a similar reaction from the Right would probably be seen.

Fortunately, there is a solution to polarization, and it doesn't involve forcing anyone to live the way you want, or you living the way someone else wants.

Joel Kotkin at the Daily Beast has the answer, in his editorial, "How the Left and Right Can Learn to Love Localism: The Constitutional Cure for polarization":

The ever worsening polarization of American politics—demonstrated and accentuated by the Trump victory—is now an undeniable fact of our daily life. Yet rather than allowing the guilty national parties to continue indulging political brinkmanship, we should embrace a strong, constitutional solution to accommodating our growing divide: a return to local control.

Such an approach would allow, within some limits, local constituencies to follow their own course, much as the Founding Fathers suggested, without shaking the fundamentals of the federal union. Localism, as I label this approach, would address the sentiments on both right and left by reversing the consolidation of central power in Washington.

What Americans across the political spectrum need to recognize is that centralizing power does not promote national unity, but ever harsher division. Enforced central control, from left or right, polarizes politics in dangerous ways.

Over the past 100 years, Americans have faced growing concentration of power in Washington. FDR may have started it, but Washington has been growing more and more powerful since then, especially when politicians of both Left and Right try to solve all of the world's problems (as they see them) using central government authority. This is a no-win situation.

First off, Left and Right rarely agree on what the problems are, let alone how to solve them. Handing either side centralized power only offends and alienates the other side, when it doesn't scare them mercilessly.

Part of our problem is the belief in one-size-fits-all politics, which assumes there can be only one solution to all political problems. Needless to say, everyone believes their own solution is the right one. (Of course, this can't be true, since only MY solutions are the correct ones!)

If we can return to letting local politicians, from state level on down, we can end this polarizing politics that isn't healthy for this country. Then California and Texas can return to liking each other, even if they don't agree on each other's politics.