Reviving Localism in America

One of the distinguishing characteristics of American dynamism is that, at its heart, the United States is an intramural, competitive enterprise. Competition among cities, regions and states for people and investment has been essential to our success as a nation.

Interstate migration has always allowed people to “vote with their feet” and escape a bleak environment for a more promising one. Until the end of the 19th century, this primarily meant moving from the East Coast to the West. “The peculiarity of American institutions is,” noted historian Frederick Jackson Turner, “the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people.”

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Then came other mass movements, including the “great migration” of six million African Americans from the segregated South to the less stringently racist cities of the North. Today there is a reverse migration—among African Americans but also the rest of the country—to the less regulated, lower-tax states of the Southeast and Intermountain West. Throughout our history, this battle between and within regions has allowed individuals and businesses the luxury of choosing the kind of environment they preferred or that fit their essential needs.

Implicit in America’s “competitive federalism” is the ability of states and localities to be different and freely pursue ends of their choosing. To be sure, some federal intervention against state and local prerogatives is necessary, as was the case with attacking legal segregation, enforcing basic health and safety standards, or bringing electric power to remote regions. Yet increasingly this federal role has grown so intrusive that it now impinges on what has long been the bulwarks of local control, such as zoning, schools, and policing.

A full version of this chapter can be found on pp. 1-7 in the volume “Localism in America” edited by Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute and Joel Kotkin of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism.