Beyond Boundaries
Across the country, people in small towns and cities are experimenting with new ways to create change. While we have experienced a national catastrophe on the presidential level, municipal governments are showing deep resilience as citizens find ways to address income inequality, climate catastrophe, and basic needs for health, welfare, and education.
Writing in The Nation, John Nichols talked about the “radical experiment in community-guided governance and cooperative economics” emerging. Along with the election of Chokwe Antar Lumumba in Jackson, Mississippi, Nichols documents progressive victories from “Cincinnati to St. Louis to South Fulton, Georgia.”
“The list of victories thus far on this year’s long calendar of contests—mayoral, City Council, state legislative, and even statewide—is striking,” Nichols argues. “Many of them are unprecedented, and most are linked by a growing recognition on the part of national progressive groups and local activists that the greatest resistance not just to Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan but to right-wing governors could well come from the cities and states where the day-to-day work of governing is done. Municipal resistance is crucial.”
These victories begin by saying “no” but they do not end there. Instead, Nichols explains, “They recognize that an alternative vision can be proposed and put into practice in communities where taxes are levied, services are delivered, commitments to fight climate change are made, resolutions to establish sanctuary cities are adopted, and questions about poverty, privatization, and policing are addressed.”
He continues, ”These victories make a powerful case that a new resistance-and-renewal politics is sending a signal to conservative Republicans and cautious Democrats alike about the ability of bold progressive populists to win in every part of the country.”
The radical potential of local governments to create new forms for enacting values of cooperation, care, and commitment to sustainable ways of living is precisely why the right wing is assaulting the very idea of local government.
In Michigan, we have seen violent attacks on local sovereignty. Embedded in right-wing Republican thinking is the idea that local governments exist only at the behest of states. Michigan Attorney General and would-be governor Bill Schuette said in defending Emergency Manager Laws that people “do not have a constitutional right to local self-government.”
Current Governor Rick Snyder demonstrated this notion recently as his Receivership Transition Advisory Board (RTAB) overrode a unanimous city council vote in Flint to place a moratorium on liens on homes with delinquent water bills.
As journalist Curt Guyette explained, “The decision to strike down the moratorium highlighted yet another prong of an anti-democratic receivership law—the same law that created “emergency managers”—that also resulted in the lead contamination of the city water supply and a prolonged, deadly outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease…The RTAB has complete authority to reject budgets, revenue decisions, and major contracts approved by the elected council and mayor. Calling it an “advisory is really a misnomer.”
We are in the midst of a struggle for the soul of our country. What values will we live by? Will we care for one another and our earth or will we continue a system of survival of the greediest and most vicious, destroying people and places for the benefit of a few?
Communities that care for one another are providing real alternative directions toward a better future. But these communities are vulnerable to the whims of state governments in the hands of right-wing politicians funded by corporate dollars. Thus, as we create new forms of local governance, we need to be forming new associations of support and resilience, creating ways of linking ourselves together beyond the boundaries of the State.