Your States, Your Cities

[Kamaji]

Your States, Your Cities

American politics, like American life, is more than D.C. and the federal government.

JANUARY 15, 2022

MICAH MEADOWCROFT

This was going to be a different column.

The federal government, made up of three branches as it is, provides a convenient typography for political actors and reformers. There are people whose theories of politics—that is to say, theories of power and justice—focus on the executive, with its quadrennial presentation of a diadem to a new small Caesar; others emphasize the balanced scales of priestlike judges, Anubis weighing the heart of the law and the feather of progress; meanwhile, many still look to the circus of the legislature, that ringed fantastic show where the backwoods meet boardrooms and Mammon cracks his whip.

That sort of taxonomy piece is common enough to the weekly columnist, who has to get in his reps and sets even in a slow news week. Maybe I’ll write it someday, but I probably won’t; after all, you can write it yourself now. Just sort the factions of whomever (the “new right,” commentators, Twitter personalities, etc.) into their primary branch of government: one, two, three.

I was diverted from this plan by a conversation with someone who works in state policy, though, and the realization that the hypothetical column, like so many other parts of our public discourse, takes D.C. as the default. But American politics, like American life, is more than the federal government.

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There is no great virtue to a healthy conservative infrastructure—policy centers, leadership development, or what have you—in a comfortably red state, though I certainly don’t advocate complacency (big “philanthropy” is not complacent, and is coming for you). The test is whether Americans on the right—perhaps not the Republican Party, I’ll admit, though in some cases it’s the tool readiest at hand—are willing to fight for blue states and blue cities. It is tempting to abandon San Francisco and California to the spiritual desert, or desert literally if water infrastructure there continues on its current course, but that is to leave behind an inheritance, to commit an impiety. After he had been restored to the plain of Jordan by Abraham and his warriors, Lot needed angels to draw him out of Sodom.

The right has, against the left and its egalitarian sameness, a commitment to distinction, to orders of difference and responsibility and the true diversity found in places and peoples living according to their laws. Law and order is not a cage from which the citizen must be freed, but the trellis on which the individual, the family, the tribe, and the city can flourish and grow. To let a garden be overrun with weeds is not to return it to some born-chainless natural splendor, but to waste good soil, to let fruit to rot on the vine, to aid the advance of decay.   

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/your-states-your-cities/