Daniel Farbman is Assistant Professor of Law at Boston College Law School. This post is based on his presentation for the 2021 North Carolina Law Review Symposium "Home Rule in the 21st Century"
Right now, Georgia is the poster-child for what ails our localism. On the one hand, the new “election integrity” law in Georgia gives the state legislature the power to take over election administration from any county it chooses to. This provision is clearly aimed at large urban counties where the electorate is less white and less Republican—and it is intended as a tool for the Republican state legislature to police and perhaps meddle with the outcome of elections in those counties. At the same time that the state is removing power from its largest cities, one of the richest (and whitest) neighborhoods in Atlanta is trying to secede from the city. A new city of Buckhead would take 40% of Atlanta’s taxable property and would be much richer and much whiter than Atlanta. The rallying cry in Buckhead is “local control” over taxes and services—which is to say keeping the wealthy residents’ money from being spent on their neighbors in poorer parts of Atlanta.
Although these two stratagems are superficially inconsistent with respect to local power (the election law limits local power while secession empowers new local formations), they share a depressing political commitment to preserving a certain kind of power: that of those who are richer and whiter and who do not want to be governed and taxed by their neighbors who are poorer and less white. In my forthcoming essay as part of the Home Rule in the 21st Century Symposium in the North Carolina Law Review, I call this dismally familiar approach to local power Redemption Localism. Redemption localists are agnostic about whether local power is good or bad. They use localism and local power as a tool to protect against redistribution and to increase and preserve the political power of white voters.
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