I suspect it started with the interstate tunnel project. Much like Boston’s Big Dig, that project reunited the city with its gorgeous waterfront. That led to the burgeoning development in and around canal park which, in turn, spread eastward and up the hill toward the university.

But, for a decade, or even two, it never spread west. That division of the city always saddened me.  One thing I’ve loved about the city is the unique combination of industry and the stunning natural beauty of Lake Superior and the rock faces and bluffs that rise out of it. Why did the prosperity stop roughly at Mesaba Avenue?

A handful of years ago, things began to change.  You and Deb may have visited or been told about Clyde Ironworks, which was a foundry that has been converted into a beautiful restaurant and entertainment space.  [JF note: yes, we have been there!] Nearby now is the Heritage Hockey Rink and Sports Center, which is dear to my heart as a lifelong fan of hockey. It’s a veritable shrine to hockey in Duluth.

Now we come to your beloved beer.  Bent Paddle cast its lot in the heart of downtrodden Duluth, about two miles from the traffic it could have picked up from Clyde Ironworks.  (If you haven't done so, please some time stop by Northern Waters Smokehouse, pick up sandwiches, and then head out to Bent Paddle.  Sit down with your sandwiches and beer and just watch the demographic of the visitors who come and go.  We love it.  There is a demotic genuineness that place fosters that is rare and is to be prized).

Since Bent Paddle has established itself, it has created a dynamo of entrepreneurial activity nearby.   Your thesis about breweries generating growth outside of vital city centers is being affirmed as we speak.   

You’ve certainly heard about its wonderful relationship with Vikre distillery down by the waterfront. [JF: Yes] We take great pleasure in that symbiotic relationship.  But, what is more important for the
city is what is happening very nearby the brewery.  In the last couple of weeks, the Duluth News Tribune has highlighted a new restaurant,
another brewery, and a new coffeehouse, all opening within blocks of Bent Paddle.

The investment Bent Paddle has made and the traffic it has inspired are clearly driving this development.  It's wonderful.  I wish I had another lifetime to watch what will happen on the west side of town. [JF note: and I, to visit all of the countless other places about which we’ve heard similar reports.]

Your observations about Loll, Cirrus, and Bent Paddle are right on, but only scratch the surface. Duluth is an amazing place.

***

Skyline on Lake Superior, with some of the elevators and port facilities that were part of Duluth’s original source of wealth:

Walkway outside Fitger’s Hotel and Brewery, one of the early anchors of the rejuvenated city.

***

Previously in the “Paradise [Your City’s Name Here]” series, please see “Paradise Beijing.”

Over the past 18 months, I have abandoned my initial skepticism of cooperation by committee once I got to know those involved with BREG, especially those on and leading the Entrepreneurship Task Force. What I discovered is that people here seem to be following a famous maxim uttered by President Reagan: “You can accomplish much if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

You hear none of this hope in the declinist tone of the leading presidential candidates in both parties.

This isn’t to dismiss that many people are finding it difficult to navigate their way in our new economy, and government should do more to help them. That’s what our political conversations should be about, mindful that Wichita, and America, are being reinvented.

***

Knoxville. National Beer Day was yesterday, but it’s always timely to note the role of craft brewers in improving a region’s economy. Ed Marcum of the News Sentinel reports on the development of a Knoxville Ale Trail to link the city’s startup brewers. Sample:

Adam Palmer, president of the brewers association, said the Ale Trail is something Knoxville brewers have been planning for a while.

"When we formed the association, we had a couple of things in mind as far as our vision," he said. "A big part of it was to educate people and grow awareness of the craft-beer scene in Knoxville."

Local craft brewers knew an ale trail would have to wait until there were a good number of breweries, Palmer said. That happened rapidly. From a few breweries, the craft-beer scene in Knoxville has burgeoned since early 2015, he said.

***

Coast-to-coast. Steve Nicholas of the Institute for Sustainable Communities, which operates around the world and has U.S. offices in Vermont and Washington DC, writes about the way he has seen city, state, and regional groups picking up the slack left by a paralyzed national-government. It’s full of examples (and refers to my article), but here are samples:

It was no surprise to read last week that a coalition of more than 50 local governments, along with the National League of Cities and the US Conference of Mayors, filed a legal brief supporting implementation of the EPA Clean Power Plan. The plan, which for the first time would limit carbon pollution from power plants, is just another axle around which our national politics are wrapped….  The message of a very large, very bipartisan group of local leaders is refreshingly clear and straightforward: the Clean Power Plan will improve the current and future wellbeing of our communities, so can we please just get on with it?!

And (with emphasis in the original):

While our Congress dillies and dallies, but does very little, about life-or-death issues – from climate change to gun violence to immigration reform – local leaders are working together to invent new ways of making their communities better. Why is that? Don’t “bipartisan politics” exist at the local level, too? Of course they do – in droves. But they are bounded by leaders’ close proximity to real problems and real people, who hold them accountable for real results. At the community scale, results reign supreme, and ideological squabbling gives way to getting stuff done, rather than the other way around.

***

Salisbury. For family-ties reasons I’ve always liked this largest city on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where one of my uncles lived and worked. Now Greg Bassett of the Salisbury Independent News brings the welcome info that Salisbury stacks up well on the Atlantic’s Official 11-point Checklist for civic success. (Including through the renaissance of craft brewing, led by Evolution.) Sample, based on our claim that successful cities have well-known lists of “local patriots.”

Salisbury, it could be said, has a healthy roster of “local patriots.” Building that list is remarkably easy, as we all know who the difference-makers are. And, more importantly, unknown people who make a difference — and do so without the expected fanfare — are being discovered all the time.

(In fact, Salisbury Independent has made it a mission to find these people, tell their stories and highlight their contributions.)

***

Seattle: Last month my wife Deb and I spoke about what we’d seen across the country, at the convention of Citizen University, which exists to “promote and teach the art of powerful citizenship.” A YouTube version of our presentation, plus introduction by Citizen U’s Eric Liu, is here. An archive of all the videos from the session is here. This conference was fascinating, and I’ll write more about it soon.

Gavin Newsom, the state’s lieutenant governor [and former mayor of San Francisco], said the country’s divisions were making action by the states more urgent and necessary.

“The nation is alive from the bottom up,” Mr. Newsom said. “For all the disproportionate focus on Washington, D.C., there’s a whole other America out there, and it should give pause to the pessimists.”

***

Let’s make the obvious “to be sure” points. Of course many things in America are terrible. These start with the economic inequalities and polarization of this Second Gilded Age, and the racial injustice that is America’s original sin and ongoing challenge. Anyone who thinks (as most GOP candidates claim) that the U.S. military is weak is simply delusional; but the military too is overextended and has its problems, as I wrote about last year (“The Tragedy of the American Military”). And of course there are drawbacks when individuals, cities, and states assume into irrelevance a paralyzed national government. That’s a point Tim Egan addresses in a NYT column today, and that I try to deal with in the conclusion to  my recent magazine article.

But with “to be sure” out of the way, in these two quotes is the tension in how we think about the country.

Everyone is fully-exposed-and-more to the “everything is terrible” argument. It is much, much harder to grapple politically or through the media with the point Scott Wiener and Gavin Newsom are making: that place by place and issue by issue, many people are finding ways to cope with the terribleness and build something better. It’s difficult to register this at the national level. But it is happening, and deserves notice even in a contentious election year.

There are lots of possible reasons for this divergence. For the moment I’m mainly emphasizing that it is real. Today CNBC had a poll showing another aspect of the split, the results of which are shown above. According to these results, 57% of Americans are “happy” or “satisfied” with their personal financial position, and only 21% are either “dissatisfied” or “angry.” But their view of the country as a whole is much darker.

No larger point for the moment beyond what I made in the piece itself. (As a reminder, one of those points was that Donald Trump, in specific, was whipping up anger and discontent in the country, at least as much as he was “expressing” it.) I’m interested in the recurrence of this pattern, of people being surprised that their own lives are proceeding as well as they are, considering the disaster they assume is happening everywhere else.

And yes, of course, I agree with everyone who is “angry” about the last question, on the “political situation in DC.” About that, grrrrr.

Previously in the Hmmmm series, please see this, this, and this.

Alworth gives an example of the way a brewpub is affecting development in bigger cities like Tampa. Then he adds:

But the effect may even be stronger in smaller communities. Little towns are often underserved with regard to cool places to hang out. When they open up shop, they provide much-needed social hubs. That the rent is cheaper there than in big cities gives these breweries a competitive boost, to boot—and we have seen many small towns (like Petaluma, California; Kalamazoo, Michigan; and Milton, Delaware) spawn outsized breweries. And whether they’re in small towns or cities, breweries serve an important community-building function. They’re not only a nice place to spend an evening, but serve as venues for events like meetings, weddings, and even children’s birthday parties.

Agreed on all points. So you’ve now heard this from two separate beer-interested writers, Jeff Alworth and me. By journalism’s hallowed two-source rule, it must be true.

***

Bonus beer news:

The hottest thing on the ever-hot Seattle beer scene is Holy Mountain beer. At least that is what the Seattle Times tells us. (Thanks to Bruce Williams.)

Some craft brewers are not as small and craft-ish as you think, according to this list of corporate ownership of “crafty” brews, from Men’s Journal. This is a complicated subject — if we were describing it in beer (or wine) tasting terms, we could even say it was “layered” and “complex”! A shift in ownership to a much larger parent company makes a brewery less “local,” by definition. It doesn’t necessarily make it bad.

For instance: I hadn’t realized that Lagunitas, of Petaluma, California, is half owned by Heineken. I still like their beers. On the other hand, I don’t like Blue Moon beers, which is separate from the fact that they’re owned by MillerCoors. But it’s an interesting list, so check it out. (Thanks to Michael Ham.)

The economics of brewing: While waiting for your subscription copy of All About Beer to arrive, you could check out its stories on economic/city growth trends. For instance, “Breweries Flourish in Industrial Parks” and “Beer As An Economic Stimulus.” Seriously, these are interesting.

***

Duluth:

As we’ve described in previous visits and in the latest article, Duluth, Minnesota, has gone from being a grain, timber, and ore metropolis of yesteryear, plus model for Zenith city in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, to being a center of aerospace tech, health care, and outdoors-tourism. Early this month Cirrus aircraft, main player in the regional aerospace business, announced an expansion that will bring 150 additional manufacturing jobs in the city, for a total of 825 inside Duluth.  

For the record, Cirrus is now owned by the Chinese aerospace ministry (for reasons described in China Airborne); produces the best-selling airplane of its type in the world (which is the one we’ve been flying around the country on our project_; and also has operations in Grand Forks, North Dakota and, soon, Knoxville, Tennessee.

***

The American Prairie Reserve:

As mentioned in some earlier dispatches, the American Prairie Reserve This is an ambitious, idealistic, “market-minded environmentalist” approach restoring a Serengeti-sized area of northern Montana grassland to the flora and fauna that were there more than 200 years ago, when Lewis and Clark traversed the area. Late last year Peter Geddes, managing director of the APR, described it and similar efforts by environmental entrepreneurs as “the Yellowstones of the future” in a very interesting long piece for the NYT.

The long-term vision for the reserve includes offering local ranchers higher prices for their beef, to be sold under the premium Wild Sky label, if they raise their cattle in “wildlife-friendly” ways that allow the return of bison, elk, prairie dogs, and ultimately predators like wolves and cougars; collaborating with tribes from the very large adjoining reservations, Fort Belknap to the west and Fort Peck to the east; and, significantly, continuing buy land as it becomes available and returning it to nature-reserve use.

In the past few weeks the APR has announced a series of major gifts to its “Land of Legacy” program, of donations for land acquisition and improving the reserve. My point is not to sell you on the reserve, though I’ve ended up being impressed by the way its creators are trying to balance an array of overlapping interests: economic, environmental, ranching-family traditional, tribal and far-more-traditional, local-versus-global, etc. Mainly I am noting their continued progress toward their announced goal.

***

“Almost everything we have is a disaster,” a leading presidential candidate said today, referring to the nation he hopes to lead. You may be surprised to learn that the claim is not correct.

A follow-up article by Tanner is here, making the case that Salt Lake City stands up well on an official 11-point Checklist For Civic Success.  No offense meant! We have another season of reporting-travel coming up this summer and fall and might be in the vicinity. Meanwhile I salute the spirit with which Tanner closes out her series, especially the wry final line.

Fallows’ fourth point [on the checklist] addresses whether people in an area understand and “know the civic story.” Again, the LDS church has made its claim and created a clear identity. Not only do Utah residents know, for the most part, what role the Mormons have played in establishing and sustaining successful state operations through an interesting and sometimes twisted history, but people around the globe know Utah for its Mormons, for better or worse….

Lastly, points five and eleven address whether the city has a downtown and craft breweries. An obvious and distinct downtown is necessary because it is considered the “bones” of the city, the reflection of everything the area represents and stands for. Its appearance and functionality matter, and Salt Lake City has, in my opinion, one of the nicest downtowns I’ve ever seen. It’s clean, airy, has great proximity to everything (mountains, resorts, recreation, freeways, other major state cities, etc.), and is well-organized and managed. Craft breweries matter as an indicator of entrepreneurship and appeal to young people. Utah, as of now, has more than ten craft breweries, which my twenty-year-old self hears are pretty great.

***

2) “Does Knoxville Have What it Takes?” A very nice piece by Alan Sims, who writes as “Urban Guy” for Inside of Knoxville, on how the capital of eastern Tennessee measures up. I was particularly interested in this part, about what I’d listed as the #9 trait of successful cities we’d seen: that they “make themselves open.”

[The checklist said:] “The anti-immigrant passion that has inflamed this election cycle was not something people expressed in most of the cities we visited. On the contrary, politicians, educators, business people, students and retirees frequently stressed the ways their communities were trying to attract and include new people . . . Every small town in America has thought about how to offset the natural brain drain that has historically sent its brightest young people elsewhere. The same emphasis on inclusion that makes a town attractive to talented outsiders increases its draw to its own natives.”

[Fallows] mentions that the mayor of Greenville, SC pointed out how many languages are heard on the sidewalks in that city, which is something I’ve often commented on in my articles about our city. I think the frequency of just that is increasing in Knoxville.

On this front I think our mayor has been particularly keen in welcoming everyone and framing that into city policy. Our state and county doesn’t always help matters. I’m thinking of incidents like Sheriff JJ Jones threatening to “stack immigrants like cord wood,” in jail. That doesn’t help. Still, in speaking specifically of the city, I think we do well on this variable.

I’ve met the mayor of Knoxville, Madeline Rogero, and agree about what she is trying to do in the city. We’ll try to take a closer look soon. (Thanks to Knoxville resident and longtime friend Neil McBride for the tip.)

***

3) On the difficulty of properly registering areas of progress and retrogress at the civic and national level, consider this short note from reader Jerry Glynn of Illinois:

I was in Chicago for two days and one night recently from Urbana IL, where my wife and I live and where are four kids grew up.

I looked out our hotel window and saw three of the many bridges across the river and remembered that almost all of the old bridges in town had been rebuilt, one by one, in the past 15 years. Beautiful and important work. But no stories in the struggling newspapers remind us of this most important work. No politician is getting regular credit for pushing this work through. Too bad.

Those reports emphasized that if a society wants more jobs, it needs to keep fostering more new companies. That is because of the non-obvious but well-substantiated point that, in toto, virtually all the growth in jobs come from companies in their first few years of existence. Big businesses have big payrolls, but taken as a group, long-established companies are laying off as many people as they’re hiring. Thus putting more people to work means reducing the practical barriers between having an idea and starting a small company.

All this is the background to news in the NYT last month that the young Collison brothers of Ireland, John and Patrick, who together have founded the online payments system Stripe, had introduced a new feature designed to make it easier for entrepreneurs around the world to reach a global market. The feature is called Stripe Atlas, and you can see info and watch a video about it here. (For the record: I have met John and Patrick Collison of Stripe, and their journalist-brother Tommy, in San Francisco but have no connection to the company beyond being interested in its idea.)

The new Stripe Atlas features may not sound like much. Essentially, they offer a low-cost way for small businesses around the world to set up a presence in the U.S. financial and banking system. For a fee of $500, the companies get a U.S. bank account, so they can accept payments in U.S. dollars; a U.S. corporate identity, as a Delaware corporation, of course; and U.S. tax registration and tax/legal advice. As a result of these changes and some others, an entrepreneur in Egypt or Turkey or Ghana or Poland is able to operate as if it had a U.S. branch, which previously only much larger companies would have been able to afford. As Patrick Collison explained in an email:

The nuts and bolts of the business infrastructure was the hardest part
of getting started for them. Now, entrepreneurs across more than 170
countries (with a combined population of 6 billion people!) can get
access to the same business infrastructure enjoyed by technology
companies across the US and Europe.

One obvious question is: Does any of this matter? To see how it might, consider other mundane-seeming changes that profoundly changed the terrain of opportunity. A generation ago, FedEx and Express Mail allowed small companies to do what previously had required a large corporation’s shipping department. A decade ago, easy web-creation and blogging tools allowed anyone to establish an online presence. The worldwide ATM network, along with international credit-card acceptance, has greatly streamlined the previously headache-filled process of dealing with foreign currencies. None of these is particularly “interesting” as a concept, but cumulatively they’ve had a profound effect.

The other potential Trump-era American question, or reaction, is: Oh no! One more tool for the foreigners!! Without making the whole case right now, I think that reflects the Manhattan deal-maker’s zero-sum mentality, as opposed to the way businesses and opportunities are really developing around the world and in the United States. No American jobs are going to be “taken” by the little Egyptian or Turkish startups you see in some of the Atlas videos. While I’m a long-time skeptic of the automatic benefits of globalized trade, everything I’ve seen over the decades tells me that helping dispersed entrepreneurs like these (versus large state industries) will be good for them, good for their countries, good for the world, and good for the United States.

***

Now, applying this to the news of the day: For more than half a century, the U.S. embargo of Cuba has made it illegal for U.S.-based entities to do business of almost any sort there. But in the preparation for President Obama’s visit to Cuba starting today, this past week the Treasury relaxed some of those regulations — specifically including ones that affected the Stripe Atlas features. As Harry McCracken reported this week in Fast Company:

“A few weeks ago, the White House reached out to us,” says John Collison, who cofounded Stripe in 2010 with his brother Patrick. As the White House had been making plans for the new banking policies and next week's trip, "people on the ground in Cuba suggested the president check out this Atlas thing," Collison told me.

After hearing from the Obama administration, Stripe moved quickly to prep a version of the service it could offer in Cuba.

That’s part of what is going on in Havana right now — and other sites in the United States and around the world. I hope to speak with some of Stripe’s Cuba-based team this week, and will follow up.

In the meantime, this is an example of the adaptive, creative, entrepreneurial activity underway in so many more places than usually make it onto the media radar. And since the Collisons are also an aviation family, I must close with one of the pictures Patrick has posted via Twitter, of flying his own little airplane from Miami to Havana yesterday.

An en route picture:

And on the ground in Cuba, with Patrick Collison on the left.

***

To wrap this up: the nastiest part of our political dialogue has been based on a fixed-pie, I-win/you-lose version of economic life that might make sense in New York real estate deal making, but which (I think) deeply misunderstands the most important trends in the “real” economy. Those trends are part of what we’re trying to report.

Now a note that arrived from Igor Ferst, who recently moved from S.F. to Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is of course a relatively large city, #15 by population in the United States. It’s also the home of the Ohio State university and the state’s capitol and government offices. But for media purposes it’s in flyover territory and is featured mainly during political events (like today’s primary) or for sports news. Also, in our reports from there, we emphasized the city’s consciousness of being just the right size: big enough to offer just about anything, small and manageable enough to get things done.

From Igor Ferst:

Your reporting in the March issue on the civic and economic revival you encountered in your travels to small and medium-sized cities across America resonated with me immensely, as my wife and I are young professionals in the software business who recently chose to relocate to Columbus, OH after four years in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The biggest improvement to our quality of life is not a lower median house price (though that doesn’t hurt). Rather, it is a sense of freedom that comes from finding personal and professional fulfillment in a vibrant and welcoming city, away from the Bay Area’s grinding commutes and careerist, status-obsessed culture.

I hope other young professionals read your story and start judging cities not by their wealthiest or most famous residents, but by those people quietly working to bring a shared prosperity to the community they love.

***

Similarly, on Facebook a tech figure named Morgan Fitzgibbons has been chronicling his move from San Francisco back to his original home of Toledo, Ohio. (Both of these items are in honor of the Ohio primary today.) I was particularly interested in his interview with Hoodline, in San Francisco, before he left (emphasis added):

Tell us a little bit about why you're leaving.

The short answer is cost of living. You cannot have creative community in a city that is exorbitantly expensive. It could work if the people with all the money gave to the things that needed to be supported, but unfortunately, that's not the case.

The ceiling in Toledo is much higher for me. It's dirt-cheap to live, and we can really create something special there. For example, there's a 24,000-square-foot warehouse in downtown Toledo in really great shape, and it's for sale for $175K. You put a down payment on that, and the mortgage is $1,000 a month. That's the kind of opportunity you're never going to get here.

Unlike when I moved here, San Francisco's not the only place anymore where it's okay to smoke weed and be gay. There's been a big cultural shift in the rest of the country in the past few years. The thing that drew me to San Francisco is because it's where my people were, but it's no longer the only place.

To be clear about this: America is a big, complex place, and through its history people have always been moving back and forth, metropolis to countryside to suburb and back again. The point in emphasizing the activity in the Columbuses, the Fresnos, the Allentowns, the Toledos is that their activity has gotten less attention than it deserves.

***

Finally for today, a new story in PS magazine — formally Pacific Standard, formerly Miller-McCune, and for the record a publication with many ties to the Atlantic. (Its current editor is Atlantic alumnus Nicholas Jackson; its previous editor was Maria Streshinsky, once our managing editor here and now at Mother Jones; before her was my friend John Mecklin, now of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Also for the record, the story I’m about to mention originated with the New America Foundation, which I helped create. Its author, Chayenne Polimédio, is a current New America researcher.)

This new PS story, called “And Now For Some Good News About America,” makes a case that I obviously sympathize with. Namely, that our all-too-obvious national level dysfunction coexists with, and masks, lower-level civic health. For example:

In fact, despite plummeting levels of confidence in government, Gastil and Lukensmeyer [John Gastil of Penn State and Carol Lukensmyer of Arizona]  see a new trend of people wanting to be part of the solution.

And yes, people might not have the time to stay up-to-date on government affairs at all times; they might not always care. But when they do, and when they believe that there is real skin the in the game, and get to interact with the government in a substantial way, as Russon-Gilman [Hollie Russon-Gilman of New America] explains, things change.

But how can we give people that extra push that will make them care about what goes on in their community? …

For Lukensmeyer, it comes down to remembering that humans are social beings. We respond to the structures and signals in which we exist. Our response to a certain issue largely depends on how that issue is framed, who is in the room with us when we have that conversation, and to what extent we can manage to keep a civil discourse regardless of likeness of opinion.

More details follow, leading up to:

We need to stop fetishizing leadership; we need to get up from the couch and go to our city hall meetings; we need to talk to our neighbors; and we need to start carrying our own weight in governing ourselves. John Adams, in a letter to a friend, recognized that the glorification of leadership was a hindrance to democratic progress: "The country won't improve," he said, "until the people begin to consider themselves as the fountain of power."...

We can, at the very least, say that, if we're tired of hearing that America is broken, we ourselves can start talking about how to fix it.

Probably a better message to reflect on that whatever we hear this evening about the Ohio and Florida results. (Thanks to Titus Levi for the PS tip.)

• A lot of the "Commons" (i.e. transport and communication infrastructure, education/training, basic and applied research, law enforcement) needed to support entrepreneurship at the local level requires federal action, and when I say federal action in this email, I mean funding as well as enforcement of federal policies.
• Local communities, in order to be truly successful, will need to be open, tolerant, diverse, and will need to be able to provide a space where the interests of all have a voice regardless of race, sex, religion, ethnicity, and only federal action can provide a legal basis to ensure this nationwide. [JF: Of course federal policies matter, but there can be a huge and significant place-by-place difference on this front.]
• From these points above, I would say that the local-level hybrid solutions that promote competitiveness and resilience will require federal support and action.  They can proceed without them of course, but their impact can only be maximized if the appropriate amount of federal support is made available.
• In other words, both federal policies that develop the Commons and provide a viable safety net for citizens as well as local hybrid solutions are important, but in the grand equation, the former outweighs the latter.

My main response to these last points is, as I argued at the end of my story: Yes, sure, local efforts bolstered at the national level are more effective than something that is standalone-local. But what is your Plan B? It would be better if we had functioning national politics right now. But we don’t, and it will be a while until that changes. What is the best response until that changes? Might it be something like — hmmm, where have I heard this before? — “think globally, act locally”? More from this reader:

Unfortunately, in our country today, pragmatic, effective, federal action is stymied by the simple fact that one half of our political system has lost its collective mind, and this is where I loop back to your article.

In it, you introduced many wonderful people, many of whom are Republicans working to revitalize their communities.  But in another manifestation of Paul Samuelson's adage "people are micro efficient, but macro inefficient", these same folks keep sending some really unhinged people to represent them in the Federal government, and this disconnect for me, is the biggest danger for the country.  

It seems like a lot of the Republicans working intelligently to solve problems at the local level just shut off their minds and decide purely on some loosely thought out ideology when it comes to what should happen at the Federal level, and they never seem to see the connection between what they do and how the federal government enables it.  I have personally seen this in the companies I've worked at where smart, principled people who are Republicans (e.g. an IT manager) have questioned whether our President is in fact a closet Muslim, or (e.g. a Marketing executive) who have acknowledged the need for universal healthcare just as long as the government doesn't have a hand in it, or (a senior actuary at my current company) have questioned whether the ACA is working even as they've seen company enrollment and financial performance improve from gains made in the main ACA programs, or (my old boss) have completely forgotten the lessons of Iraq and wondered why we don't just send troops into Syria and Iraq and Libya to teach people why they shouldn't mess with us.

Trump is the reductio ad absurdum scenario for the tactics the GOP has adopted over these last eight years, but it only did that because Republican voters (like many of the folks represented in your article) rewarded them for this behavior or at the very least did not punish the party for it...

You would think that more and more, people engaged in  local level experiments to improve the quality of life in their communities would gravitate to a similar party at the federal level, but I don't see that happening.  In fact, every year the GOP becomes even more extreme and crazy, and if they ever get a chance to implement their "platform", the resulting dislocation and pain will overwhelm any hybrid local initiative or solution. These two opposing realities - local level success stories and federal level horror story - cannot exist concurrently indefinitely...sooner or later one dynamic will subsume the other.

That's why as long as the dysfunction at the federal level remains, I'm a lot more skeptical that the community level revitalization you've reported on will scale into a national story .  Hope I'm wrong.

This is of course the first-principles question about the next stage in American political evolution and survival, and the one I tried to address in the final part of my article. More to come — over the weeks, and the years — on this theme.

***

3) Last for today, here is entrepreneur, boat-builder, and charter-boat captain David Ryan, who has appeared over the years in this space,

On the "Everything's getting worse and so what" front.

The first job I ever had as a fully independent freelance commercial photographer happened to be in the television section of a Medford OR appliance store at the height of the post-Rodney King verdict riots in LA. All around me on dozens of screens large and small were images of LA going up in flames.

About a year later I had decided that I needed to move to New York and somewhere in there a senator from a southern state was going on about how it was the end American greatness, and something about the fall of Rome. This was in the very early Nineties, so all the prosperity of and optimism of the Clinton years were will ahead of us.

"End of the America? Fall of Rome?" I recalled my trip to Italy a few years earlier and how nice Rome was and I thought living in a fallen empire isn't as bad as people make it out to be, and when I got to New York I named my company Crumbling Empire Productions.

I did business under that name for about 10 years, until the Spring of 2002 when I was asked to produce a documentary about 9/11, and it seemed in bad taste to have "Crumbling Empire Productions" in the credits. I retired the name.

Back in Oregon I was a modestly active member in the Medford Chamber of Commerce, and one of the things I learned is just as everyone's blood is red, every American's money is green, and when you're doing business with people, whether it's selling them services they need (like photography) or business stuff you need, conducting mutually beneficial commerce with other people goes along way to helping, if not see their people of view, at least see past their point of view.

Are their limits to that? Sure. But I've never ever had anyone refuse to do business with me because we disagreed on what the top income tax rate should be, or what our nations policy vis a vis Serbia or Syria should be. Yes, I've heard (and said!) intemperate things about abortion, guns, gays, etc. But you know what? That's never stopped money from exchanging hands either, and the fact that money was changing hands probably restrained the conversation to the level of strong disagreement rather than vile outburst.

Are we at the end of American preeminence? I don't know. We weren't 25 years ago. I don't think we are now. I don't care. I've 15 people working for me building a boat I expect (hope) will take thousands of people out each summer for many summers to come. And if the empire really is crumbling, if things really do get worse than they are in Rome today, I'll get on my boat and sail some where I like better.