Articles for Decentralists

A report from Jeremy Beer — Notes from the Congress for the New Urbanism. The author notes that "the New Urbanists are doing something concrete toward helping to rebuild American civic life" but that "[i]t’s the decentralists’ job to convince them that their goal of re-creating human-scale communities can only be attained within a human-scale regime."

Kenneth McIntyre, "dubious about the practical usefulness of the whole tradition of American exceptionalism," examines its origins — Exceptionalism and Localism. Interestingly, he notes, "Lord Acton, while ignoring Switzerland, argued that the real American exceptionalism consisted in its federal distribution of the powers of government, which was why he was so dismayed about the destruction of federalism accomplished by the victory of the Northern Army in the War between the States."

Charles A. Coulombe examines "a major division within Paleoconnery itself" — The Old Paleos and the New. He suggests that the latters' "nostra for healing the national ills may range from Catholic Monarchy to Libertarianism to the breakup of the country into smaller units, [but] they agree that the present system is a hopelessly corrupt old structure lurching towards its well-deserved ruin."