Making a Name for Ourselves
Consciousness-raising through terminology alignment
Welcome to the second issue of Decent Tuesdays, a new, experimental edition of The Main Street Journal that covers and connects the many aspects of decentralization.
The Main Street Journal gives hope, but most people out there don’t know about community investment funds, crowd investing platforms, worker co-op conversions, and new regional banks. Or, if they do, they may not connect them to a growing and empowering movement that’s not just for policy wonks.
Why? Maybe it’s because these concepts require too much explaining, because there’s no single term that anchors them together in people’s minds, because we who work in these areas haven’t agreed on a headline-friendly name and presented it to the media to make it easy for them to report on. We haven’t said, “Everyone can use this term for all these cool, new, interconnected things that we’re working on...”
We recently published v1.0 of A Localism Manifesto, and I floated the term Soft Anarchy, so those are two possible directions. But I think we’d be most effective if we openly, generally discussed and aligned on what we should call ourselves.
Our name should not be divisive, of course. Across the political spectrum, people would rather see their money stay within their communities than siphoned off to corporate headquarters or Big Finance. But I think terms like eco, green, sustainable, inclusive, communitarian, and maybe impact have become too partisan for broad appeal.
As counterpoints, consider the terms used in the bipartisan American Ownership and Resilience Act text, Sen. Van Hollen's press release about it, or last year’s Empowering Main Street in America Act: resilience, local communities, local economies, Main Street.
What else? Liberaltarian is fun, but also partisan. Anti-globalization, mostly militant left in the 1999 WTO riot days, is now also militant right, but is negative either way. Its positive synonym localization logically counters globalization, but localism sounds nicer, and localist is way better than localizationist.
A new term would avoid any political baggage. I love The Reconstruction, Napoleon Wallace and ImpactAlpha’s resonant term for the movement. I also like decent as a play on decentralization—hence Decent Tuesdays.
Whatever term we (mostly, hopefully) align upon, stakeholder orgs and people could give the media an official go-ahead by pitching in on a press release that announces and explains it. Or maybe such a declaration should be part of an announcement focused on the Localism Manifesto, once that document has made the rounds for revisions. WDYT? Let’s discuss terms and tactics in the MSJ chat.
As inspiration for this kind of thinking, check out how thoughtful and intentional the alternative protein industry has been about its terminology, for example, this (archived) explanation of the reasoning behind the term cultured meat or the shorter current version.
Categorical Imperative
Decent Tuesdays now curates decentralization news in five categories: Food, Energy. Making. Finance, and Governance.
The Making category is a catch-all for small manufacturing or other local production of things that aren’t food or energy-related, and Finance covers local banking, crowdfunding, and the blockchain-based systems that are idealistic and aim to be egalitarian rather than extractive and scammy.
NEWS
FOOD
This Baltimore Food Incubator Is a Local Economic Engine, Next City (July 9)
Culinary Architecture, a thriving destination marketplace, commercial kitchen, and business incubator in Baltimore’s Pigtown.
ENERGY
The Rise of Decentralized Solar, Resilience (June 23)
Robert Freling advocates for carbon taxes and investment incentives to fund clean energy in the Global South and (for better or worse politically) frames them as a form of reparations.
MAKING
Zoning Changes Bring Small Manufacturers Downtown, New York Times (July 13)
Hundreds of U.S. cities have recently legalized small-scale local manufacturing.
FINANCE
How to Combat Displacement Through Asset Ownership, Nonprofit Quarterly (July 16)
Real-estate ownership collectives in Chicago, LA, and Durham, NC use new low-interest, low-collateral funding structures to support local home ownership, businesses, and farming.
GOVERNANCE
We need a fourth branch of government, The Elysian (podcast/video, July 17)
In citizens' assemblies, governments convene randomly-selected citizens to advise them on specific issues. They've guided local decisions in the U.S. (land use in Petaluma, CA and Fort Collins, CO) and national policy (right-to-die in France, abortion in Ireland). They’re becoming more common, and people love them.
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Totally agree: Timely and thoughtful, and the True Representation Movement (TRM) welcomes the impulse toward clarity and alignment. However, we believe that naming alone is not enough. Without a fundamental restructuring of how political power operates—specifically, how representatives are held accountable to the people they serve—new labels risk masking the persistence of the old failures. A movement’s name must reflect not just its values, but its structural demands. For TRM, that demand is simple but transformative: representatives must act strictly as conduits of their constituents’ will. Only then can a name truly mean something.
Referring to the link under Governance (We need a fourth branch of government), do you know about the True Representative Movement? See truerepmovement.com.
I sense the two groups (FIDE and TRM) envision something similar!