I wonder if there's another way of looking at this. Burnham's big idea is "place, not party". The beauty of the politics of place is it can be scaled up (England as place) or scaled down (my town as place). Localism can be seen as a cousin of nationalism, and reinvented for the age of identity politics.
I think attentiveness to place is going to be essential to politics and culture going forward. And attentiveness to place at multiple, embedded levels, as you point out. I certainly feel the salience of it very strongly. I suppose what I’m trying to explore in this piece (which is just a fraction of my thoughts on the subject!) is how the conditions of modern life complicate matters in this area, undermining our efforts to find belonging, pride, agency etc.
it not just the government that vertically integrated and centralized to a greater extent than it had been, its also that banking/finance, industry, academe, and the parties all centralized as well. IMO, we'd have to decentralize those too or else not much changes other than the most of the same stuff occurring but some of it done by different people
I wonder if there's another way of looking at this. Burnham's big idea is "place, not party". The beauty of the politics of place is it can be scaled up (England as place) or scaled down (my town as place). Localism can be seen as a cousin of nationalism, and reinvented for the age of identity politics.
I think attentiveness to place is going to be essential to politics and culture going forward. And attentiveness to place at multiple, embedded levels, as you point out. I certainly feel the salience of it very strongly. I suppose what I’m trying to explore in this piece (which is just a fraction of my thoughts on the subject!) is how the conditions of modern life complicate matters in this area, undermining our efforts to find belonging, pride, agency etc.
it not just the government that vertically integrated and centralized to a greater extent than it had been, its also that banking/finance, industry, academe, and the parties all centralized as well. IMO, we'd have to decentralize those too or else not much changes other than the most of the same stuff occurring but some of it done by different people
A brilliant piece with profound implications not just for our politics, but how we are able to think our place (!) in society (?). Highly recommended.