An Antidote to Abstract Anger: Localism and the Renewal of American Civic Life

The most corrosive battles in American politics no longer take place in town halls but on screens—algorithmic arenas that reward contempt for strangers. That abstract anger clings to us like static, carried into the grocery store, the parish hall, the school pickup line. Political scientists call the malady affective polarization: a visceral loathing of the “other side” that outpaces any substantive policy dispute.

What follows is performance, animus—a war of identities waged at national scale, severed from the humble but ennobling labor of governing a place. And unlike other social divides—of race, gender, or class—where norms restrain the open expression of prejudice, no such constraints apply to partisanship. Hostility toward political opponents is not only permissible but often modeled by leaders themselves, giving license to everyday animus. (Iyengar/Westwood, Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines, 2015).

One lesson of our moment is that the more politics becomes nationalized and digitized, the more our social trust shrivels. Daniel Hopkins calls this the "The increasingly United States": our habits of attention now flow “upward,” toward national parties and personalities, while local attachments wither. National media and party cues flood every civic nook; the PTA and water board recede behind Washington melodrama.

Against this abstraction there is an old remedy with American roots and Catholic resonance: localism, the deliberate re-centering of our political life in the places where we share risks, taxes, sidewalks, and graves. The claim here is not sentimental. It is philosophical, empirical, and somewhat conservative: the best way to reform the tone of our national life is to recover the practices that make neighbors out of strangers.

Against this abstraction there is an old remedy with American roots and Catholic resonance: localism, the deliberate re-centering of our political life in the places where we share risks, taxes, sidewalks, and graves.

Scottish-American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre saw our condition coming. In After Virtue, he describes a civilization that still mouths moral words but has lost the shared grammar that once gave them sense - this extends also to the political. We possess only the “fragments of a conceptual scheme,” hence the “interminable” quality of our public disputes. In that vacuum, emotivism takes hold: moral judgments become “expressions of preference, attitude or feeling,” and debate slides into manipulation.

The alternative MacIntyre offers is Aristotelian and countercultural. He defines a practice as a “coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity” by which we learn standards of excellence and pursue goods we can achieve only together. And he adds the luminous reminder: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story… do I find myself a part?’” - a central theme of Concordia Discors Magazine. Local self-government—budgeting a school district, siting a firehouse, restoring a marsh—is exactly such a practice. It takes us out of emotive performance and into shared work.

Catholic social teaching, with its suspicion of abstraction and esteem for mediating institutions, gives this argument a doctrinal backbone. Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno states the principle succinctly: “It is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do” (1931). The Church (and the European Union) calls this principle subsidiarity—“among the most constant and characteristic directives” of her social doctrine (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §185, 2004).

Subsidiarity is not a mere preference for quaintness. It is a judgment about human dignity: persons thrive when they can assume responsibility for the common good at the scale of the family, the parish, the township, and the state, and when larger authorities support (rather than supplant) those efforts. A localism worth the name will therefore strengthen the concrete associations that Alexis de Tocqueville admired. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations,” he wrote; such "science of association" is “the mother of science” in a democracy because they teach citizens how to act together (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835–1840).

Subsidiarity is not a mere preference for quaintness. It is a judgment about human dignity: persons thrive when they can assume responsibility for the common good at the scale of the family, the parish, the township, and the state, and when larger authorities support (rather than supplant) those efforts.

Scholars often assumed that digital “echo chambers” were the main engine of extremism—that people became radical by hearing only what they already believed. The evidence is more nuanced. Americans’ media diets are not sealed; many encounter opposing views online. Yet such exposure often increases hostility, because it happens without the moderating presence of real-world bonds (Bail et al., Exposure to Opposing Views on Social Media Can Increase Political Polarization, 2018). A tweet from a stranger, ripped from context, does not challenge; it provokes. It hardens stereotypes, fuels anger precisely because nothing compels recognition of the other as a neighbor, co-worker, or fellow worshipper.

The evidence [of polarization] is more nuanced. Americans’ media diets are not sealed; many encounter opposing views online. Yet such exposure often increases hostility, because it happens without the moderating presence of real-world bonds

The problem, then, is not the absence of difference but the absence of embodied encounter. Online, disagreement floats free of any shared purpose, consequence, or risk. Offline, in a town hall or school board, difference is unavoidable but also accountable: you must find common ground to balance a budget, repair a bridge, or plan a festival. Localism restores that grounding. It re-sorts identities by place rather than party, embedding political conflict in a web of cross-cutting ties—parent, parishioner, coach, taxpayer—that temper abstract hostility. Put simply: where the digital sphere breeds anonymous rage, the local sphere compels practical cooperation.

Put simply: where the digital sphere breeds anonymous rage, the local sphere compels practical cooperation.

The social-psychology behind this is sturdy. Gordon Allport’s classic “contact hypothesis” holds that sustained, cooperative contact across group lines—under conditions of equal status, common goals, and institutional support—reduces prejudice (Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, 1954). Decades of meta-analyses affirm the point (Pettigrew/Tropp, “A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory,” 2006). Local boards and volunteer projects create precisely these conditions; they turn faceless out-partisans into indispensable collaborators on problems we cannot solve alone.

Meanwhile, the trust dividend from local action is real. Americans persistently rate local government more favorably than the federal government—61% versus 22% in recent Pew data—and express greater confidence in local officials (Pew Research Center, 2024; Gallup, 2023). This is not proof of virtue; it is a clue about scale. We trust what we can see, challenge, and improve.

Meanwhile, the trust dividend from local action is real. Americans persistently rate local government more favorably than the federal government.

Tocqueville’s “art of association” is not dead, but it must be relearned. Consider Hands Across the Hills, a grassroots initiative that brought together progressives from Leverett, Massachusetts and conservatives from Letcher County, Kentucky for sustained dialogue and exchange weekends. Its point was not to stage a televised reconciliation but to build face-to-face understanding and friendships that could outlive a news cycle. Or consider Madison, Wisconsin’s 2019 police-chief search: instead of relying on a single contentious town hall, the city partnered with the Local Voices Network to collect small-group conversations and play resident clips during candidate interviews—forcing concrete engagement with diverse local concerns. These are modest, replicable patterns of civic craft.

Even federally funded efforts can become local practices once they reach ground. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is not a cable-news talking point to a city engineer; it is a culvert replacement that restores fish passage in Maine, a bridge planning grant in Philadelphia, or the unglamorous plugging of orphaned oil wells in Texas. Thousands of such site-specific projects have quietly required cross-partisan cooperation among county commissioners, state agencies, unions, and neighborhood groups.

A case for localism does not idolize “the local.” It treats the person as the measure, the common good as the end, and subsidiarity as the rule of governance. It remembers that the parish—not the platform—is the elementary school of charity and civic friendship.

A case for localism does not idolize “the local.” It treats the person as the measure, the common good as the end, and subsidiarity as the rule of governance. It remembers that the parish—not the platform—is the elementary school of charity and civic friendship. We do not conclude this argument because localism is easy. We conclude because it is essential. The abstractions of national rage—amplified by algorithms, aggravated by partisan elites, and made stark by the emptiness of emotivist discourse—cannot be healed from the top down. They must be re-mediated in place, in practice, in the associations that knit strangers into neighbors again.

MacIntyre, whose prophetic diagnosis stands at the heart of our diagnosis, saw how we solemnly utter terms — “justice,” “good,” “rights” — yet many of us no longer know how they resonate in the world. In that void, emotivism thrives, and public life devolves into a contest of desires rather than pursuits of goods. The remedy he suggests - the re-formation of communities in which civic virtue is lived, not declaimed.

Local self-government—budgeting schools, siting fire stations, restoring wetlands—is not a consolation prize for the powerless. It is a training ground for character. It forces us into the slippery, humble work of managing shared life; it demands we negotiate ends with people whose views we may reject but whose presence we cannot erase.

Local self-government—budgeting schools, siting fire stations, restoring wetlands—is not a consolation prize for the powerless. It is a training ground for character. It forces us into the slippery, humble work of managing shared life; it demands we negotiate ends with people whose views we may reject but whose presence we cannot erase. It is in this crucible that trust begins to regenerate. The parish, the neighborhood board, the volunteer fire department—all become micro-polis, the small chambers in which people learn how to deliberate, how to reconcile, how to mourn, and how to hope together.

The parish, the neighborhood board, the volunteer fire department—all become micro-polis, the small chambers in which people learn how to deliberate, how to reconcile, how to mourn, and how to hope together.

Yet we must not delude ourselves. Localism can become a siege mentality. The “local” can become a fortress, shutting out the stranger, ossifying privilege, resisting justice. Localism must always be disciplined by solidarity as well as subsidiarity—by the recognition that the local is nested in larger wholes and that the requests of justice sometimes demand transcendence. As Nestor Davidson warns in The Dilemma of Localism in an Era of Polarization, local discretion must be coupled with normative guardrails that guard against exclusion and ensure that local action respects the broader common welfare - towards a "more equitable localism".

Imagine two neighbors divided only by lawn signs—one the catechist who keeps the parish pantry stocked, the other a union electrician who patches the backstop at the Little League diamond. They have traded nods, little more. Then a storm swells the creek and floods their block. By dawn they are shoulder to shoulder in the mud, passing sandbags hand to hand. Weeks later, they sit at a folding table with maps spread wide, drafting a plan for culverts and drains. They quarrel, they compromise, they learn each other’s cadence. Their ballots in November will cancel each other out. But in the meantime they have become citizens of a common place. MacIntyre would call it the recovery of a practice; the Church, subsidiarity incarnate; Tocqueville, the apprenticeship of democracy.

Localism is not a cure-all, but it is the discipline that teaches us another way. It converts rage into obligation, hostility into responsibility; it rescues “the people” from abstraction and restores them as neighbors bound by soil, story, and shared stakes.

The ugliest battles of our politics will continue to unfold on screens. Localism is not a cure-all, but it is the discipline that teaches us another way. It converts rage into obligation, hostility into responsibility; it rescues “the people” from abstraction and restores them as neighbors bound by soil, story, and shared stakes. Here, in parishes and planning boards, in festivals and fire brigades, politics becomes again what it was meant to be: a craft of common life. And in this craft—humble, repetitive, indispensable—we recover not only civic friendship but the apprenticeship of freedom itself.

And in this craft—humble, repetitive, indispensable—we recover not only civic friendship but the apprenticeship of freedom itself.