Across the country, many local governments are taking the lead on tackling our greatest challenges head-on, enacting laws to protect public health, improve workers’ rights, and reduce inequity.
Local Solutions Support Center (LSSC)
Nevertheless, abrogation of moral authority and responsibility by the national political party leaders has tainted and influenced political leadership down to the local levels.
When traditional party politics as embodied in pronouncements by national and state entities — which Jefferson termed America’s greatest political evil — intrudes into municipalities, political duplicity, decadence, and irresponsibility ensue. Everybody in the corrupted systems is impelled to declare openly to be a Democrat or a Republican, especially; adhere to their party’s dictates; and war rather than cooperate with each other. Citizens are induced to accept what theretofore would have been considered morally and ethically reprehensible.
Moreover, the farther away a governmental power center is from the citizens it serves, the less direct impact it has on citizens’ daily lives, e.g., the US Secretary of Education vis-à-vis, school principals; and the US president vis-à-vis mayors.
Despite a long-held misconception, a small a body of patriotic citizens can upset the machinations of authoritarian rulers if we focus our attention on the Fundamental Building Blocks of a nation at the source – individual human beings in local communities and neighborhoods.
Democracy Ensues from the ground up.
The LSSC found that the majority of voters disapprove of external intrusion into local communities and think that intrusion and preemption by external leaders happen too frequently although they don’t really know local people.
Would you be more likely to perform your civic responsibility to vote if your neighbors were to know after each election whether you voted? Odds are that you would (LSSC).
Shame is a strong civic-duty motivator. People’s sense of civic responsibility gets activated when they know that others will become aware of their unpatriotic behavior – e.g., self-disenfranchisement — and understand the resulting harmful outcomes – to wit: America’s impending conversion to Fascism.
People in small groups are more likely to make and keep promises. Nevertheless, no matter the reason, a community whose citizens refuse to investigate the facts, and refuse to believe that their chosen political party will routinely fabricate a reality contrary to verifiable facts, is a community that has chosen the dictatorship it will get. – From Ian Williams Goddard
A municipal charter is the legal document that defines the organization, functions, essential procedures, and powers of municipal government. But, even under schemas that give legal decision-making power to mayors, most people think the mayors’ role is mostly ceremonial – a debilitating antiquity.
In today’s America, mayors and their county counterparts, irrespective of legal authority, are the most important leaders in the social and spiritual domain. The mayor speaks to lawmakers on behalf of the people’s needs, and speaks to the people with respect to decision-makers’ actions. No group, especially leaders in the three branches of state and national governments, is as important as mayors. Today, the mayor is in the necessary and ideal position to be the people’s greater voice, MLK’s Drum Major.
As never before, we need stalwart public servant leaders to publicize and advance Democratic Principles. The people and the nation can only be saved from the local level upward. Valiant, definitive, purposeful mayors can inspire the people who need their example. Nobody follows an uncertain drummer.
All of us – leaders and led — must find our work for the salvation of democracy and do it. To refuse to participate in the shaping of OUR future is to give it up. Do not be misled into inaction either by false security (they — the fascists — don’t mean YOU) or by despair (there is nothing WE THE PEOPLE can do).
The crucial question, however, driven by lessons from recent history, is if a mayor were courageous enough to come to the fore to be that decisive, certain drummer, would there be enough fellow citizens sufficiently enlightened and courageous to stand publicly with him or her to protect the people from political party abuses and advance the primary purposes of the Constitution — for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people?
What our leaders as a group across all parties have been doing historically has not been working. The poverty – spiritual and physical — in millions of Americans prove it. Trump’s two elections epitomize national moral and ethical miasma. We must not simply keep doing the same old things and hoping and praying for better results.
Mayors, with their people’s support, can galvanize various other local leaders, foster the development of a vision of local control and put in place a plan that increases people’s involvement in progressive actions – to both vote and remain involved after elections. Americans are ready for such leadership.
