All Politics is Local

Where the struggle for understanding begins

MOIbiPhoto by Lance Grandahl on Unsplash

A former Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, famously said: “All politics is local.” 

Usually this is interpreted as a comment on the importance of grassroots politics.  Campaign locally, build party support locally.  Attend Bar Mitzvahs, funerals, and County Fairs.  All important parts of the folklore of American politics.

It is, however, a more interesting and important insight.  You understand human need and aspiration at the local level.  Nowhere else.  If you want to understand how politics might meet real needs and solve real problems, look next door. Joblessness, hunger, homelessness, security, childcare, support for age-incapacitated adults, is not only seen and felt, but understood at the local level.  The “buck” may “stop at the top” (most settle there) but its absence is felt on the streets and in the homes of real people.   And if you want to follow the trail of “why,” you must start at the bottom. 

I always argued that “community organizer” was an excellent preparation for a President of the United States. 

Without the emotional intelligence of firsthand experience, one wanders in clouds of rhetoric, rubbing sacred icons, and following time-worn, not time-honored, advice. 

Nothing is more destructive of one’s belief in democracy, or the human future, than Committee Hearings, Senate debates or Presidential statements.  Hot air, compressed by larger than normal lungs, and exhaled.

To make the right connections, to see patterns of cause and effect, you have to start with the results, with life as lived by ordinary people on the streets of American towns and cities.  Drug addiction, lack of workers, poor health, unpaid debt, polluted water, ravaged land ---all local.

They are “explained” up.  Because they are caused down.  And you find the causes, the work to be done, by starting at the bottom, at the local level, where the real world begins.