Diversity of Communities

Liberals are supposed to be the champions of freedom and opportunity to live as one pleases. However, they are not the champions of the freedom of local communities to live as they please corporately. They have, in the 20th century, worked for diversity at the federal level to the extent that local communities are being restricted from ordering their communities as they please. One of the great hopes of diversity is that by allowing difference, we can gain appreciation. But appreciation for what? For the sake of appreciation? Diversity cannot be an end in itself. Yes, there can be many ways of living that are all good. But not all ways of living are good. Some ways of living are better than others. Liberals have not hesitated to argue that the Scandinavian way of doing social welfare is superior to the American, for example. Yet, the US has the perfect system for allowing diversity of this type—diversity of ways of life, diversity of choices about how to organize our communities and distribute our resources—to function within our federal structure. But instead of doing so, both liberals and conservatives, have led our nation on a path of centralizing power and jurisdiction in D.C. It makes sense for the conservatives. They want to keep things the same and what better way to do so than to use the federal government’s central power and authority to do so. However, the liberals should know that allowing diversity within communities is a better way. People want liberty not just to choose how they live, but also to choose between diverse types of communities. Allowing communities to forge ahead, organizing themselves and their way of life in unique ways, solving problems in new ways, and selecting values they deem important could create a wonderful diversity of communities throughout the US which would free people to live in communities of their choosing. It would also allow communities to borrow ideas and make improvements based on the experience of other communities. If the trend of centralizing of power in D.C. continues, there will be more and more uniformity of communities. That will not be a good thing for the US’s experiment with self-government.