How to Use Local Democracy Against Democrats and Bureaucrats
a blueprint for urban dissidents
It is no secret that in the Seventh Party System, urban centers are Democrat power centers. Within these power centers, Democrats create political machines of corruption you would not believe. State jobs and monetary grants routinely go to friends of Democrats, votebloc clients, and leftist footsoldiers via fiscally irresponsible programs, sometimes with innocent-sounding names and objectives.
You may think I am exaggerating how common this is, but I put it to you that the corporate media ignores even the worst cases. When President Biden was openly courting Senator Manchin as the deciding vote in passing the Build Back Better Act, he appointed the Senator’s wife Gayle Manchin to chair the Appalachian Regional Commission, a powerful agency worth billions. At a time when Sen. Manchin was in the headlines everyday, and his homestate was receiving disgust in his name, no newsmen who routinely wailed about the End of Democracy blinked an eye at this obvious ploy to buy Manchin’s vote— a ploy that succeeded when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed thanks to Manchin.
If you didn’t hear about corruption at the highest level, why do you think you’d hear about it happening in your local city hall? It’s hard enough to get basic news about the official acts of city halls. These city halls control untold millions of dollars, and pay the salaries of people who despise you and your way of life. We sometimes hear about the worst of these, but even then the supposed opposition we have in the Republican Party is all-too-ready to compromise to the ever-advancing vanguard. “$1000 for a pride themed film festival? At least its not $10k and being shown in the schools, right?”
There is an opportunity to weaken these political machines, while at the same time implementing sound policy in a way Democrats cannot easily combat philosophically or politically. This policy is municipal deannexation.
In America, it is common for municipalities (the legal corporation, not the underlying urban metro) to grow geographically, but it is not common for cities to split, or deannex geography. This is obviously because politicians don’t like making their own office smaller. Good luck asking them to even deannex a single neglected street near the city limits. What this dynamic creates is obviously a ratcheting mechanism of centralizing urban power. This is the underlying wealth which urban political machines rest on and extract from.
For example, I currently reside in Huntington, West Virginia, a Democrat sludge machine in one of the Union’s reddest states. The Democrat mayor, with years of city management experience and nothing to show for it besides loyal political clients, is now running for Governor. One wonders how he imagines he could possibly sell to voters the prospects of turning the entire state into Huntington.
Huntington has annexed three other municipalities that I know of- Central City, Guyandotte, and Westmoreland. All of these are communities of their own and could scarcely be expected to do worse than the current regime at providing municipal services.
Westmoreland specifically isn’t even in the same county as the rest of the city. That county line is a real barrier for Huntington Police, who can’t do the normal thing of closely working with the same county. That county line is also along a physical barrier and floodplain. Guyandotte is similarly separated, and is an older municipality with a longer history than the city that now owns it. Guyandotte is separated from Huntington by a highway, a large bridge across the Ohio River, a floodwall, and the Guyandotte River. How does that make sense, if your concern is anything other than merely growing the Huntington’s city administration for its own sake? City officials have no need for the ideal of local government.
But deannexation is set to become a lot more common. Just this month, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled against lower courts to allow the creation of a new city of St. George from area in southeast Baton Rouge. It’s been a decade-long fight for the citizens of St. George, who believe they’ve been neglected by Baton Rouge.
This is an extremely powerful new political process, and Republicans must use it as a tool of power. Republicans must immediately seed innumerable efforts to deannex multiple sections of numerous cities. We can justify these efforts with all sorts of commonsense causes, from idyllic localism to a preference for natural borders over “imaginary lines”.
Though it is not necessary, it would also be beneficial to allow these smaller, more manageable municipalities to adopt direct democracy. Not only will it further weaken Democrat operatives who have evolved to thrive in the swamps of municipal administrations, but I believe it is more beneficent form of government.
Is not the ideal of democracy in America the small New England townhalls where citizens vote on things directly? Thomas Jefferson, author of The Declaration of Independence, believed they were "the perfect exercise of self-government and for its preservation." Is that not the purest reflection of the original democracy of Athens?
The Democratic Party has no objection to this. It’s in their name! Republicans will catch them on the back foot ideologically. They may obfuscate with questions they know are meritless, such as “How will smaller municipalities provide expensive services?” (the answer of course being that municipalities already work together on all kinds of services), but I believe voters would see the Democrats’ grasping at straws for what it is— the politicians struggling to not have their power weakened, wealth diminished, and ego insulted.
There are allies to be made in the business of breaking up political machines. Aspirant local leaders will no longer be kept out of the halls of power. Republicans must run cover for “first amendment auditors”, those who film and/or annoy public officials in the interest of transparency in the same way Democrats run cover for violent criminals.
This, being good policy and not just political tactics, will result in dividends for us citizens. No longer will accountability be lost in administrations evolved to specifically avoid it. The buck will stop with the town assembly. We have only to see whether Republicans can press the advantage.