Local Power Quotes

The strength of America is not in Washington.

A majority in all parties do, I think, want to see local government recover its old vigour and independence.

The White House is not where power comes from in this country. The cities and the local communities of this nation are prepared to save Washington - and not vice versa.

You can have very big local government. By big, I mean very engaged government. Do you measure it in terms of the number of laws? Number of employees? You could make arguments for either one. I tend to think the axis of the size of government is the wrong concern. But I do think that situating power more locally is a legitimate approach.

I tend to be a kind of left federalist. There's a value to more power of certain kinds being positioned at a more local level.

There's much more we can be doing in Parliament, we could be giving more power back to people at local government level, through local referendums.

I worry that there are attempts to push faith out of the public space. Clearly it happens at a level of local power.

I think I'm a critic of corporate power, whether locally or globally. And the term 'globalization' I've never found all that helpful.

Globally, as the nation-state becomes increasingly less meaningful - a provider of positive goods and more and more just an army and some domestic enforcement - people are withdrawing to shape and support more localised forms of organisation and power. To the extent that it's part of that civilised and localising world, the same is true of the U.S.

One ought to begin an analysis of power from the ground up, at the level of tiny local events where battles are unwittingly enacted by players who don't know what they are doing.

I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom's annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have.