Via Crooks and Liars, “South Carolina and the Chrisitian Exodus…“:
“That is because South Carolina has been chosen as the place for hundreds, even thousands of Christians to move to, in hopes of impacting the government. But people who live here have mixed opinions about the Christian Exodus…”
So this move is to South Carolina. What ever happened to the call for libertarians to move to some state? I recall that they identified a state in which they would locate.
Here’s an example of the kind of mobility I was thinking about before, perhaps. People move to be near a community in which they wish to participate. In Michael Albert’s Parecon he proposes local councils and communities which determine their own rules for work and life. My primary objection to Parecon was in this fact: communities could decide to be racist. The claim that self-organized communities would be enlightened in some way, seems to be false. Self-organizing isn’t sufficient, apparently.
The potential for developing xenophobic community is a reason to be skeptical about social organization along bio-regions, or any other form of regionalism. One might think that means I suppose Globalization, but I’d rather there be social instead of economic globalization. The term “Globalization” has too much baggage from a specific political-economic agenda.
For example, the Free Trade movement is one in which global connections are made, but it is not “Globalization” as it would be. It seems to me that what proponents mean by “Globalization” is that corporations are to be larger than the entities which might regulate them. The railroad lawyers managed to allow corporations to organize across state boundaries, which they had not before. Then, when national government was able to enforce behaviour, the corporations moved multi-national … that’s the progression. Now the WTO and various treaties subjugate national governments to an economic cartel.
I’ve gone off topic.
This move toward regionalism is something that is also reflected in Garreau’s Nine Nations of North America from ’81. However the regionalism occurs, the more insular, the more xenophobic, I suspect. At some point, it may be a chicken-or-egg on whether the regionalism or the xenophobia came first.