Some people have pointed out that when I moved to Alberta, I also moved from the left to the right politically. They assume this happened because my basic values changed.
That is true in some areas. Age, faith, marriage, children, business, and responsibility have all changed how I see the world. But it is not the whole story.
On one of the biggest political questions of my lifetime, I am not convinced that I moved very far at all.
I was intensely against globalism when I was on the left in the early 2000s. I am against it now that I am on the right.
Back then, opposition to globalism was part of the culture of the left. We read Adbusters. We watched multinational corporations swallow local businesses, move production across the world, flatten cultures, manipulate governments, and treat people as interchangeable economic units. We argued endlessly that we needed to stop Starbucks, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Walmart from destroying businesses in other countries and regions.
We protested institutions such as the G8, the G20, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. We were suspicious of decisions being made behind closed doors by political leaders, corporate executives, economists, and unelected international organizations.
The concern was not that people from different countries were cooperating. Cooperation is often necessary and good. The primary concern was that power was moving farther away from ordinary people.
Decisions once made by families, workers, communities, cities, and countries were increasingly being made by institutions that ordinary people could neither influence nor escape. The larger the institution became, the less accountable it seemed to be. These institutions would wipe out culture, uniqueness, and personhood in the name of greater profits and growth.
Globalization seemed to be built around the idea that if something was cheaper, it was obviously better, even if it killed every bit of individuality along the way.
When I was younger, this was understood as a left-wing criticism.
Then something changed.
The Institutions Did Not Become Less Powerful
The multinational corporations did not go away. International organizations did not become more accountable. Governments did not suddenly become more transparent, restrained, or respectful of local communities. Anyone who says otherwise is either a fool or lying to you.
Over the past two decades, these institutions have accumulated more authority, more information, and more influence over daily life.
What changed was their political meaning.
Rather than being treated as representations of right-wing power, the institutional left gradually stopped viewing centralized global power as something dangerous and began treating it as something necessary.
The corporations were still enormous, but many of them now spoke the approved social language. Hell, many hired some of my activist friends to run departments such as diversity and inclusion.
Nothing really changed, though. International institutions were still distant and unelected, but they employed the correct experts. Governments were still capable of coercion, but coercion became acceptable when it was directed toward approved goals.
COVID made this change impossible for me to ignore.
Many of the people who would once have protested international summits were suddenly demanding that governments, corporations, technology platforms, public-health institutions, and employers coordinate to enforce a uniform response across entire populations.
The very political culture that had taught me to distrust concentrated power now treated suspicion of concentrated power as irresponsible or, worse, criminal. People argued, in all seriousness, that others should lose their jobs, be excluded from public life, be confined or isolated, and be treated as threats because of personal medical decisions concerning their own bodies.
This was especially strange because the argument was rarely limited to whether a particular policy was wise. Increasingly, the position was that ordinary people, local communities, churches, businesses, and even regional governments should not be permitted to make different choices.
Somehow, the same crowd that once objected when the IMF said, "This is the correct decision because we are the experts," regardless of how many people were hurt or how many cultures were wiped out, was now making precisely the same argument.
The experts had spoken. The institutions had decided. Everyone else was expected to comply.
I had heard that kind of reasoning before. In the early 2000s, we called it globalism. In less polite periods of history, we at least recognized the danger of governments and corporations coordinating to control ordinary life.
I Prefer the Word Localist
I used to call myself an anti-globalist, but that only describes what I oppose.
The better word I have adopted over the years is localist.
I strongly believe that decisions should be made at the lowest level capable of making them responsibly.
The individual should decide what belongs properly to the individual. The family should govern family life. Communities should handle community matters. Municipalities should make municipal decisions. Provinces should address matters that genuinely require provincial coordination. Countries should deal with national concerns.
Authority should move upward only when the lower level cannot reasonably solve the problem, and it should be very difficult for higher levels to take over that authority arbitrarily.
Power should not move upward because local responsibility is inconvenient. It should not move upward because people at the top believe they are more intelligent, enlightened, or morally advanced than the people below them.
This is not a rejection of government or cooperation. Some problems genuinely require larger institutions. A town cannot independently manage national defence, monetary policy, or an international river system, as much fun as it would be to imagine a City of Spruce Grove militia.
More importantly, the burden of proof should rest with the authority seeking more power.
Why can this decision not be made locally? Why must everyone follow the same rule? Why should the people most distant from the consequences control the outcome?
Too often, there is no compelling answer.
When there is no compelling answer, the power should remain at the lower level.
This Is Also a Catholic Idea
I was surprised when I discovered that Catholic social teaching calls this principle subsidiarity.
Higher authorities should support lower communities, but they should not absorb responsibilities that properly belong to individuals, families, associations, churches, municipalities, and other smaller institutions.
That ordering matters because human beings do not live as abstract members of a global population. We live in particular places, among particular people, with responsibilities that begin close to home.
The individual belongs to a family. The family belongs to a community. The community exists within a city or region. Those communities form a province and a country. The country participates in the broader world.
The larger levels are real and sometimes necessary, but they should not erase the smaller ones.
This is one reason I find parts of modern anti-colonial politics so ironic.
Colonialism imposed the categories, priorities, and institutions of powerful societies upon communities that had their own traditions and ways of governing themselves.
Yet some of the people who speak most loudly against colonialism now promote a single global understanding of race, identity, justice, education, family, and political morality. Every nation and community is expected to adopt the same vocabulary, recognize the same social categories, and reorganize itself according to the same ideological framework.
It is presented as liberation, but the method is remarkably familiar.
In practice, it often becomes North American academic categories exported to every culture on Earth, presented as universally binding, and enforced with an iron fist. A powerful class of institutions develops a universal moral system and then exports it to everyone else.
Real pluralism should allow peoples, nations, cultures, families, and communities to remain meaningfully different. Respecting another culture does not require dissolving it into a global mixture in which every society holds the same approved opinions.
People can cooperate without becoming interchangeable.
Civilization Learns Through Many Experiments
From a combinatorics and optimization perspective, localism is not only a moral preference. It is also a practical system for discovering better ways to live.
It is a way of optimizing a complex system by allowing experimentation.
Human beings rarely know in advance which policies, institutions, technologies, or social arrangements will work best. We learn through experimentation.
Again and again, when a small group decides it has discovered the universal answer and forces it upon everyone else, the results are disastrous. Mao's Great Leap Forward and Germany between 1939 and 1945 are obvious examples.
When power is distributed among many cities, regions, communities, and nations, different groups can try different approaches. Most will be ordinary. Some will fail. A few will produce remarkable results. Other communities can observe those successes and adopt what works.
Yes, some failures will hurt because an idea does not pan out. That is not necessarily a flaw in the system. It is part of how everyone else learns.
Growing up, when I worked on projects and got nowhere, my father would tell me that I had not wasted the day. I had learned ten different methods that would not work.
Historically, there are many examples:
- The Italian city-states developed under different laws, governments, commercial systems, and civic cultures. They competed with one another, borrowed from one another, and produced extraordinary advances in finance, art, architecture, political thought, and commerce.
- Early America also benefited from this kind of decentralized experimentation. States and communities governed differently, developed their own institutions, and learned from one another.
Neither society was perfect. Local control does not automatically produce justice, and history offers many examples of local communities behaving terribly.
Yet decentralization limits the size of failure and multiplies the opportunities for success.
When one city makes a mistake, the damage may remain within that city. When one community discovers a better approach, others can copy it.
Centralization turns the process upside down. That is a bad thing.
One theory is chosen at the top and implemented across the entire system. Local knowledge is treated as an obstacle, and dissent becomes a problem to be managed.
When the central authority is wrong, everyone is wrong at once.
Centralization does not merely permit a bad idea to spread. It can make escape impossible and turn a contained failure into a national catastrophe.
My Problem With Climate Politics
This is a large part of my frustration with the politics surrounding climate change.
The question of whether human activity affects the climate is different from the political question of who should have authority over energy, transportation, land use, agriculture, industry, housing, and daily life.
Even accepting the strongest claims about climate change does not automatically justify centralized global control.
It is important to remember that Alberta is not Belgium. Parkland County is not downtown Toronto. A family living on an acreage does not have the same energy or transportation needs as someone living beside a subway station in a high-density city.
Different places have different climates, resources, industries, geography, infrastructure, and ways of life. A policy that works brilliantly in one place may be wasteful, destructive, or absurd somewhere else.
Yet climate politics is often presented as though acknowledging a global problem requires accepting a global ideology, a global regulatory framework, and a narrow set of approved solutions.
Meanwhile, the people demanding austerity from ordinary families continue to gather internationally, at extraordinary expense, to decide which sacrifices everyone else must make.
I fundamentally reject that conclusion.
Let cities experiment. Let provinces develop different energy strategies. Let companies compete to build better batteries, reactors, solar systems, transportation networks, and industrial processes. Let farmers, engineers, communities, and families discover what works in their own circumstances.
Successful ideas will spread because people can see their value.
A reliable battery does not need an ideological enforcement campaign. A cheaper source of energy does not require moral intimidation. A technology that genuinely improves people's lives will be adopted because it works.
That is how durable progress usually happens.
Perhaps My Politics Changed Less Than It Appears
I no longer consider myself a man of the left, but I still recognize the young man who distrusted the G20, multinational corporations, and institutions that operated beyond democratic accountability.
He believed that human beings should not be reduced to consumers in a global economic system. He believed that culture, place, and community mattered. He believed that powerful institutions should be questioned, especially when they insisted that their authority was necessary for everyone's benefit.
I still believe those things.
What changed is that much of the left stopped believing them.
It embraced the institutions it once opposed because those institutions adopted its language. Corporate power became acceptable when corporations displayed the correct symbols. Technology companies could censor people as long as they called it safety. Government coercion became public responsibility, and cultural standardization became inclusion.
I did not become a localist because of COVID, climate politics, or the political realignment of the past decade.
I was already one.
I simply found a better name for the principle I had been trying to defend all along.
Power should remain close to the people who live with its consequences. Families, communities, cities, provinces, and nations should be allowed to remain real. They should be free to make mistakes, correct them, discover better approaches, and persuade others through success.
Civilization does not need one perfect plan imposed upon everyone.
It needs thousands of imperfect communities, each free to learn.