
David Morris: 50 Years of Pioneering Work and Impact
An appreciation for ILSR's co-founder, David Morris, on 50 years of accomplishments and impact.
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Here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, we recently received some shocking news as we learned of the sudden passing of our beloved co-founder, David Morris. A giant in the antimonopoly field, an innovative thinker ahead of his time, and a crucial mentor to so many of us here at ILSR, David will be missed. I imagine I wasn’t alone in diving into ILSR’s archives to understand and revisit David’s work and legacy in the wake of his death. Reading David’s work from the last 50 years reminded me just how much he deeply understood about building local power, often well before political discourse arrived at the same conclusions.
David Morris“What if we had a law that said that the end of the smokestack had to be curved, and the end of it would come into the boardroom of the corporation? […] If we married responsibility and authority, we would have heard about clean and zero emission manufacturing a generation ago.”
That’s the inspiration for this week’s episode of Building Local Power. Today, we’re revisiting episode 22 of Building Local Power, a 2017 interview between David Morris and ILSR’s Community Broadband Initiative director, Chris Mitchell. What struck me about this interview was how much of it could be said today and how much David anticipated our current moment.
In the interview you’re about to hear, when asked about the source of local power, David explained that the communal nature of cities has had massive power since medieval times. In doing so, David lauds the value of so-called “Sanctuary Cities,” asserting that the term really means mutual protection against a faraway federal government that doesn’t necessarily act in the city’s interest. Such thoughts are almost painfully relevant in the wake of June 14th’s “No Kings” rallies, as those in power cynically exploit tensions about the alleged dangers of cities. There are those who say cities should not be sanctuaries. One of the many pieces of wisdom we have from David Morris’s long career runs counter to that: cities have dramatic potential for their residents to protect each other, and to act in each other’s best interest. That’s how local power is built. I hope you enjoy revisiting this 2017 interview as much as I did.
Danny Caine
Here at ILSR, we recently received some shocking news. we learned of the sudden passing of our beloved co-founder, David Morris. A giant in the antimonopoly field, an innovative thinker ahead of his time, and a crucial mentor to so many of us, David will be missed. I imagine I wasn’t alone in diving into ILSR’s archives to understand and revisit David’s work and legacy in the wake of his death. Reading David’s work from the last 50 years reminded me just how much he deeply understood about building local power, often well before political discourse arrived at the same conclusions.
That’s the inspiration for this week’s episode of Building Local Power. Today, we’re revisiting episode 22 of BLP, a 2017 interview between David Morris and ILSR Community Broadband Initiative Director Chris Mitchell. What struck me about this interview was how much of it could be said today, how much David anticipated our current moment. In the interview you’re about to hear, when asked about the source of local power, David explained that the communal nature of cities has had massive power since medieval times. In doing so, David lauds the value of so-called sanctuary cities, asserting that the term really means mutual protection against a faraway federal government that doesn’t necessarily act in the city’s interest. Such thoughts are almost painfully relevant in the wake of June 14th’s No Kings protests, as ever-present tensions about the alleged dangers of cities are even more inflamed by those in power. There are those who say cities should not be sanctuaries. One of the many pieces of wisdom we have from David Morris’s long career runs counter to that. Cities have dramatic potential for their residents to protect each other and to act in each other’s best interest. That’s how local power is built. I hope you enjoy this 2017 interview as much as I did.
Chris Mitchell
Local self-reliance. What does it mean? Where does it come from? Where are we going? I’m Chris Mitchell with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. direct our broadband work. And David Morris, one of the co-founders of the organization, is back with us for, I believe, a third episode of Building Local Power.
David Morris
Thanks, Chris, for having me on for a third episode.
Chris Mitchell
Well, many more are on the way, I have no doubt. So let’s explore this and maybe we’ll start at the beginning. A time in which there was polarizing president discussion of horrible corruption at the federal level, president under 1974, not the modern era. So you get together with a couple of friends and decide you’re going to create the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
What did you have in mind terms of what was the idea of what local self-reliance meant then?
David Morris
Well, the Local Self- Reliance in 1974 and in 2017 means a focus on cities and a focus on cities for a number of different reasons. One is that historically cities are the basis of innovation. That goes back hundreds and even a thousand years. second is that in the United States, the population shifts are such that we went from being a rural nation before 1920 to being an urban nation to being an almost entirely urban nation. 80 % of the people in the United States live in cities.
Chris Mitchell
When you say cities, I think some people might think metro areas of more than a million people. But having worked with you, my sense is you actually just mean defined units. You’re not talking about a specific scale. It’s more the idea of people that live in close proximity to each other.
David Morris
It’s people who live in close proximity to each other and also that have a certain amount of authority to make decisions on their own behalf collectively. Yes, and it could be a city of 10,000 people. In fact, if you take a look at what used to be the Bureau of Statistics, when we used to have a Bureau of Statistics at the federal level, you take a look, you will find that there’s a greater population in the United States in smaller cities than there are in larger cities.
Chris Mitchell
So the third factor, what was that?
David Morris
The third factor was that cities have become increasingly competent. They have created an internal capacity. That wasn’t true in the 19th century. That wasn’t true in the early 20th century. It was early 20th century when cities began to run municipal electric utilities, run their streetcar companies. and sewer. Water and sewer. They also began to develop the municipal planning profession. They began to create data so they could compare each other on the basis of efficiencies.
And that has continued and so cities are now very capable. The fourth reason that we focus on cities is that that’s where the rubber meets the road. No matter what happens at the federal level, you feel it at the local level. And they have to clean up the mess. They have to enact, what you have is Congress makes a law and then the executive branch defines the regulations related to the law and then the states have to and then the localities have to interpret that and then put them down on the ground and so you know when it comes to an energy crisis for example the federal government can worry about the oil but it’s the mayor that has to worry about utility bills going up and people not being able to pay their utility bills and the final reason for it and a very important recent reason is that technology is now decentralizing in its impact.
In the 19th century and much of the 20th century, technology was centralizing. When we shifted from renewable resources to fossil fuels to concentrated energy sources, we shifted from small to big. When we shifted from batch manufacturing to mass production, we shifted from small to big. When we shifted from wood to steel, we shifted from small to big. And so we created institutions and we created laws and we even created behaviors.
That assumed that bigger was better and bigger was more efficient. But at the end of the 20th century and certainly in the 21st century, technology is moving us in the other direction. And that means that cities not on the outside looking in to these huge structures, whether they be power plants or whether they be steel mills, but they’re actually there where the economy, that is the real economy, the productive economy, is increasingly based.
Chris Mitchell
One of the technologies that I would just highlight is the communications technology, which in many ways led to that centralizing, I think, in that you had like a telegraph, which was sort of one-to-one over great distances. And then eventually you had broadcast, which was one-to-many over great distances. But it’s only more recently when we have the possibility for many-to-many over the internet as people are connected that I think also leads to a different way of sharing information that leads to decentralization.
David Morris
It does lead to decentralization, although one can have a whole other discussion here about whether the internet has led to decentralization or centralization in many ways, because it does allow for a corporate control which we’ve never had before, a very intimate corporate control.
Chris Mitchell
There’s billions of websites, but Facebook has billions of users and there’s no sense of how you’d ever take them.
David Morris
That’s exactly it. Billions and billions and billions of us communicate with each other every day and there’s about half a dozen corporations that own that process.
Chris Mitchell
Most of it, yes. So what I’m interested in really making sure we hit on is the trend, because it strikes me, having worked for ILSR for the last 10 years, that I’m really here in the glory days in the sense that you started this focus on cities in a time when cities were, if anything, becoming less popular. People were fleeing cities for many years. Budgets were difficult. I live in a time now, and I’m working in a time in which everyone wants to live in cities. Not everyone, but they’re incredibly sexy.
People are flocking to them. think budgets are looking better than they have in decades. So what can you tell us about the sort of the change over this time sense of the city as an exciting place?
David Morris
Well, that’s a very good summary, you know, actually. In 1974, people were still fleeing the Detroits and the Clevelands and the old industrial cities, the Pittsburghs and the like. And everybody was talking about the growth of the suburbs shrinking, especially of the central cities at that time. And so the Institute was promoting an idea that had relatively little currency.
The environmentalists hated cities. They hated cities because thought that they were resource consuming, that they in fact exploited the land in a poor way.
Chris Mitchell
There was a sense at one time that the solution to pollution is dilution. And so cities, you just, concentrated all the pollution. If you just could spread it out, it wouldn’t be as much of a problem.
David Morris
That’s exactly right. I sometimes tell a story when someone asks, so what would a good rule be that’s sort of a local self-reliance principle in the environmental movement? And I talk about the 1970 Clean Air Act. And the 1970 Clean Air Act essentially said that in order to deal with the particulate pollution that was coming out of the smokestacks in cities where people lived, you would raise the height of the smokestacks.
And what that then created was a regional problem ⁓ of acid rain ⁓ and the like. And I thought, well, what about if instead of that, we had a law that said that the end of the smokestack had to be curved ⁓ and the end of it would come into the boardroom of the corporation. And I bet you that if we did that, that is, if we married responsibility and authority, that we would have heard about clean and zero emission manufacturing a generation ago.
Chris Mitchell
We did recently did a digitizing project in which we were looking back at old columns that you had written, David. And in the eighties, you wrote about 3D printing and how 3D printing could fundamentally change the economy.
And it’s happening now, certainly, and we’re seeing this incredible new technology that really lends itself to local manufacturing on a small scale. What are some of these other technologies?
David Morris
Well, there’s many technologies like that. When I was writing about it in the late 1980s, it was called desktop manufacturing. But certainly 3D printing is exactly what it is. But when we look at different aspects of the economy, for example, in energy, it’s obvious to people in terms of energy that it used to be that you had very specific parts of the globe that had resources that you could use to generate energy. And you dug them out, you transported them long distances, and you burned them ⁓ in either large power plants or through ⁓ distribution networks at your gas stations in your cars. ⁓ And you created institutions and you created a national infrastructure as a result of it. But the sunlight falls on your roof and the wind sort of blows through your backyard. And so when we’re talking about moving to renewable resources, we’re also talking about resources that can be claimed, that can be harnessed.
At the very, very local level, mean even at your rooftop level. that’s been true forever, but the new technologies allow us actually to do that in an economical way and to generate electricity. Previously in thousands of years you generated heat and you generated mechanical power, but right now you can generate electricity, which is of course the premier form of energy. So that’s something that’s very, very new. It’s very new. In fact, in 1974, when the Institute started, literally three months before that, 20 miles away from our headquarters, the first factory was set up that produced solar cells for terrestrial applications. They had been used for space satellites before that. And in a year’s output, it generated enough solar cells to power one house.
That was 1974. And in 1999 was the first time where amount of solar capacity that was installed connected to a grid exceeded the amount of solar capacity that was installed in remote cabins So that’s less than 20 years ago.
Chris Mitchell
Let me ask you why that matters in the sense that certainly there’s less pollution from not digging fossil fuels up, transporting them long distances and whatnot. But I mean, what we care about is the electricity. Why does the economy care where it comes from?
David Morris
Well, the economy doesn’t care where it comes from, absolutely. But politically, it has a dynamic that’s extremely different. And know, nobody, no matter whether you’re a conservative or a radical, you hate your utility company. And you hate your utility company because it’s a monopoly and it’s remote and it’s not responsive and for a whole bunch of reasons. And so when you’re starting to talk about ⁓ energy that can be harnessed at the local level and the rooftop level and the neighborhood level and the metropolitan level, people are are are extremely enthusiastic about it that cuts across ideologies and and it’s that political i think as well as environmental dynamic that’s the most important of all
Chris Mitchell
Well, I just wanted to actually reinforce your point, but David, as you know, I love disagreeing with you. 75 % of Americans, I think, undoubtedly hate their electric company because it’s mostly investor owned companies that are not meeting their needs. But I was just in Newport, Tennessee, which has a municipal electric company, which is locally owned. And though they are a monopoly, I was talking with them about how they were viewed in the community. One of the things they told me was that their installers were often offered beer.
And people would be like, you want to drink? They just had such a good reputation. So this local does matter. Certainly, I just wanted to throw that out there because I would hesitate for anyone who thinks that all the utility companies are hated. We see that the municipal ones tend to be really loved.
David Morris
No, that’s absolutely true. They do. Well, they tend to be respected and sometimes they tend to be admired and rarely loved. And sometimes there’s attention. But the same is true about government. mean, most everybody hates remote government, which means the federal government. Many people, if not most people, don’t like their state governments, which are remote and controlled by people that they don’t even know. But most people do like their local government. They may scream about and yell about and so forth. The snow wasn’t plowed when it should have been plowed and so forth. But there’s a real clear connection to your local government. so scale does matter both in terms of the economy and politics.
Chris Mitchell
But sticking with electricity, how important is it that when you’re generating locally, it just means that more of that money is staying in the community versus going, know, some portion of your bill is going to the extracting, to the company that’s extracting the coal, some portion of your bill is going to the railroad monopoly that’s moving it, some portion of your money then is then going to a generation facility that could be in a different state. How important is it that that money stays in the community in terms of why we’re concerned about it?
David Morris
Well, it’s very important. It’s important, it’s part of the sort of recycling of local resources. mean, part of the maximum of local self-reliance is that you extract the maximum amount of value you can from your local resource base, and that includes your human resource base, it includes your natural resource base, it includes your capital, and in terms of capital, want to recycle your money as much as you can. I don’t want to overemphasize that point, however, although it’s a useful point to talk to people about. But when you buy from a locally owned business, you actually have influence on that locally owned business. That business probably knows you. You certainly do know them. If you want to complain, you can complain to them directly. The owner of that business may very well…live locally. If they live locally, they pay property taxes to the schools that their kids go to. So there’s a lot of reasons why you want to keep your money local. And one of them is economic, but again, one of them is political in the sense that you have more say, more participation, more influence over small business than you do remote business and locally owned structures rather than remotely owned structures.
Chris Mitchell
Since you mentioned both economic and political I think it’s worth noting something that I’ve certainly learned over the years which is that it doesn’t seem to be possible to have local and distributed political power if you do not have local and distributed economic power.
David Morris
That’s exactly right. I mean, we talk about authority, responsibility, and capacity, the kind of arc of local self-reliance. You can’t really have the exercise of authority if you don’t have a productive capacity. Now, Thomas Jefferson, by the way, who hated cities, he hated cities. He thought that when people went to cities, they became propertyless, they became mobs, and they became part of political machines and boss machines. And the reason that he supported the yeoman peasant was that the yeoman peasant, in fact, could be self-sufficient. He didn’t preach self-sufficiency, but could be self-sufficient. He or she had the skills and also had land and had the productive capacity. And because they have productive capacity, they would be informed in their decision-making, collective decision-making process. That is, they would be able to participate in politics knowing how the world worked. And so needing that capacity is extremely important.
Chris Mitchell
And you mentioned self-sufficiency. It’s just worth noting. Are we expecting cities to be self-sufficient?
David Morris
No, we’re expecting cities to be self-reliant. Yes, indeed. One biologist talked self-reliance being the capacity for self-sufficiency but not self-sufficiency itself. I like and I think it’s useful for us to use the metaphor of nation that I think that we view cities as nations. Not autarkic. Autarky is a terrible thing. Only North Korea believes in autarky. And look what that got them, right?
Chris Mitchell
comes back to the name, I think.
David Morris
That is, we don’t believe in self-sufficiency for cities, but if they treat themselves as nations, they become self-conscious. They become self-aware. They track the flow of resources through their borders. They make decisions that try to maximize the value to the people within those borders of those resource flows. And so that’s what we’re talking about in terms of local self-reliance.
Chris Mitchell
Now want to sort of take this conversation and go to a different spot, which is, I think one of the greatest problems that we face as a nation right now is how we think of areas outside of our communities. And I would point to an article that I’ll be recommending ⁓ people read at the end of the show, ⁓ which was by James Fallows in which he traveled around the country and talked to people often from areas that have been seen as being really hard hit in recent economic times, cities that are not doing as well, like Allentown where I was born. And one of the things he found was that people generally had a sense that things were going well in their community, but that nationwide we were falling apart and that locally they liked the immigrants that were coming in to their community because they were contributing and they were helpful. But nationwide we had this problem with immigrants and it didn’t matter where he went in the country. felt that people locally felt their immigrants were helpful and
To some extent, I mean, I think we’re a nation of 330 million people with an incredibly flawed news media. In some sense, I kind of feel like our philosophy is one of the rare ones I can see that actually can figure out how we can all get along in some ways.
David Morris
Yes, absolutely. Knowledge respect, I think, and admiration. And it’s absolutely true. mean, you find the same thing is true in schools. If you ask people whether the school system is good or bad, they say it’s terrible, it’s awful, it’s educating. You ask them whether their school is working, they say, yeah, my school’s working just fine, thank you very much. And so the same thing is true with local politicians versus national politicians. That is, if you know them,
You may be angry at them for one reason or another, but you don’t think of them immediately as corrupt or ineffective.
Chris Mitchell
To some extent, I actually feel like, you have a much broader view of this than I do, I wonder if things are so specialized now. I mean, we’re so far past the point at which an intelligent person can know most things in most fields, that we simply cannot have policymaking at such a high level. We need to push it down where there’s more local expertise. Because I think when we look at the state level and the federal level, we’re expecting far too much expertise from people who often don’t have staff at the state level. And at the federal level, don’t even, we can get into what all the problems are in a different show. But fundamentally, it seems to me that the economy has gotten much more complicated. The solutions to our problems in many ways are more complicated. And there’s a sort of a lack of expertise and that if we bring it more to the local level, we will address that. Is that something, is that a dynamic that’s?
David Morris
Yes, is a dynamic. mean, you can also look at it as the costs and the benefits of a particular policy when you’re talking about large-scale institutions fall on different actors, if you will. And so of corporations make a decision, let’s say closing a plant, for example. that doesn’t affect them negatively. It actually affects them positively. The more that we can, in fact, decentralize, distribute, push down to the community level, both the costs and the benefits, we can have a better decision-making process. That’s why I had talked about the curved smokestack coming in through the board window. That was one where you in fact began to marry authority and responsibility. Those who made the decisions were those who were going to feel the impact of those decisions, and you end up with very good decisions. In that case, the decision would have been to reduce pollution in the first place rather than to spread it around
Chris Mitchell
Right, and obviously you can only do that when the boardroom is in proximity to the factory.
David Morris
That’s right, exactly, exactly, exactly. Well, that’s another point. It could be another continent, I suppose. You were talking about James Fallow’s piece about immigrants and migrants. And I think that would lead, one, to the proposition that decisions related to deportation should be pushed down to the local level.
Now in saying that, I get it that people out there are going, ooh, wait a minute, communities are xenophobic. They can be racist. They have a history of in fact pushing out people who don’t look like them. And I concede that point. But also because you know these people in your community, or people down the block know these people in your community, you will probably find a community saying, you know, there are 10 % of them who are criminals. We can put them in jail or we can send them out of the country.
But 90 % of them are law-abiding citizens, just like you and me, are striving and insecure. And what we should do is nurture them, not to make them afraid. Now, that’s a decision, I think, that would be done at the local level, and in fact is being done at the local level. I mean, you look at Los Angeles, you look at a number of different cities that, in fact, have provided money for legal support of their immigrants. And when one talks about sanctuary communities, one should realize that this is not a theoretical term, know, sanctuary communities. This is a term that says we are going to protect our neighbors against the despotism, really, you know, of a remote government in Washington, D.C. We are at a point now, as you indicated, a new generation is growing up that does focus on cities. And at the same time, you have a federal government that essentially is trying to preempt and destroy the authority of cities and move us back 40 or 50 years in terms of the progress that we have made. And so the fight right now is at the city level, both in defending what is good and promoting even better. And so in terms of local self-reliance, we do need to not only explain the term and promote the term, but get into the nitty gritty of what does it mean in terms of specific policymaking, what does it mean in terms of specific strategies, what can a city do?
Chris Mitchell
You mentioned that cities are increasingly more competent and whatnot and with the Trump administration pulling out of the Paris Accord Relating to climate change. We’re seeing increasingly talk of cities having their own foreign policy now So where does this fit in and I have to say that I am somewhat nervous about it as someone who does believe That the nation needs a cohesive foreign policy that’s unified But I’m curious what your thoughts are in terms of from the city point of view.
David Morris
Yeah, from a city point of view, when you talk about foreign policy and the climate change issue, it has foreign implications what a city does. It’s a local policy. mean, a city, in terms of energy, in the past, cities could only get involved in the energy situation by promoting energy efficiency and energy conservation. But now they can talk about local energy production. And as they do that, they, in fact, say, we are going to comply with this treaty or with this negotiation. And I think that that’s very useful. But the term foreign policy, and I looked up some of the recent literature in terms of people promoting it, and there are many people promoting city foreign policy, what they mean is that cities should try to be global in attracting capital. And I think that this is understandable, and we certainly should pursue that, but we should also be careful about what that means. If in fact a city foreign policy is that you make yourself as attractive as possible to the creative class, to the investment class, to the people in the rest of the world who want to buy citizenship in the United States so they come into your community and invest in your community, then I think that’s a dangerous road. And once again, it’s a road that looks outward rather than inward. Now that doesn’t mean we should be parochial.
Clearly, we live in a globe. And one of the wonderful things about the internet is that, in fact, we can communicate horizontally with the rest of the world. We don’t have to communicate through intermediaries. We don’t have to go up to a mass media and then down for the people who are listening to that. So I think that we do need to look outward. But I am concerned if foreign policy means that we should as individual cities ⁓ make ourselves as attractive to foreign investment as the nation has tried to make itself attractive to foreign investment.
Chris Mitchell
Right, think one of the concerns that just springs into my mind, of course, is that then you’re potentially displacing local investment and you don’t want to privilege foreign investment over your local investment.
David Morris
Well, that’s true, but I think more importantly than that, you are giving control. mean, when somebody invests in your community, they try, if they can, to gain control over that investment and the productive capacity that they have invested in. So I think that that’s more problematic than just the fact that there will be, I don’t think that foreign investment will displace local investment. I think it might distort local investment, it also brings absentee ownership and that in itself is a ⁓ significant problem.
Chris Mitchell
Let’s talk about recommendations. What do you have in mind for something that a person who’s listened to this show might want to read to learn a little bit more or just something that will blow their mind?
David Morris
Well, I have two things. One is a book called Mutual Aid by a man named Peter Kropotkin.
And Peter Kropotkin was an anarchist in the best sense of the term, which meant that he believed that people could take the future into their own hands localize the means of production. Mutual Aid is a fascinating book in and of itself. But what I would suggest people do is to read the chapter on medieval cities. Now,
Peter Kropotkin, without going through a long discussion, a naturalist and a botanist and a scientist of the first order. And he lived at a time where Charles Darwin had come out with his theory of evolution. And Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was translated into survival of the fittest, tooth and claw. And what he found in his research about nature was that nature worked by cooperation. It didn’t work through competition.
And he then took that as his thesis and looked at human society as well and animal society and posited that in fact it was cooperation that was the fittest, if you will. And there’s a chapter in Mutual Aid about medieval cities. And people who think of the period of time 900 to 1,000 BC, ⁓
We think of it as the dark ages. It was not a dark age. It was an age where city-states arose.
Chris Mitchell
They didn’t bother to record history.
David Morris
Well, people could read it. It’s an easy chapter read. It’s probably 25 pages. But it talks about the astonishing progress, the astonishing innovation that was done when small, we’re talking about cities of maybe 5,000 people, 10,000 people, when they came together mutually created codes and forms of behavior and local economies and technologies and the like. So I suggest that, number one.
Chris Mitchell
Let me build on that with a book that references that book and that work and Kropotkin’s work in general. And that’s a more recent work that uses more recent studies to make similar points called The Penguin and the Leviathan by Jochei Benkler, who’s a brilliant professor at Harvard who often talks about decentralization. I just recently read this book and about a number of different studies and I actually think makes a very nuanced case for how we overemphasize the role of selfishness. Like we are motivated by selfishness, but we are motivated by lots of things and we need to appreciate that.
David Morris
That’s very good. The second book is one that most people might know of especially people who are listening to this Podcast and that is the book the economy of cities by Jane Jacobs And it came out in the early 1970s mid to late 1970s and and her thesis is that most innovation came from cities that cities are the reason that we have modern civilization and there’s a whole bunch of reasons why that might be the case, but she goes through it very well in terms of providing examples and the like. And I think that both the cities of five and 10,000 people and 900 and 1,000 AD, and also in terms of the modern city and its ability to generate wealth internal to itself, those would be the two books that I would suggest.
Chris Mitchell
Great. And I had suggested this James Fallows article. I believe it was a cover story on the Atlantic sometime last year. How America is putting itself back together. And then just because I’m just going to go crazy with recommendations. I did recently read a book by Katherine Kramer who’s a professor at the University of Wisconsin called The Politics of Resentment. She did a ton of interviews across Wisconsin looking at how people get their identity and how that informs their political views and where they get, actually not so much where they get their information. I thought that was a major weakness of the book. But just how they think about a lot of these different things and how they reacted over the past five years as we went through these elections, basically ever since Obama took office and then also in Wisconsin with Walker. And it was a pretty interesting read. So thank you everyone for listening. Thank you David for coming back on. We look forward to having you again soon I hope.
David Morris
Thanks. I’m looking forward to it as well. Thanks for the conversation.
Danny Caine
For further context on immigrants in cities, I encourage you to read the James Fallows essay that David and Chris mentioned. There’s a link to that in the show notes. You can also find links to the books that David and Chris Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin is available both as a print book and as a free ebook. Links to both, as well as the other books mentioned, are in the show notes as well.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly is a link to an ILSR page called 50 years, 50 works, a decade spanning archive of work throughout ILSR’s history. It’s a treasure trove of vintage ILSR research, much of it written by David Morris, all of it relevant to this day. We’ll continue our remembrance of the life and work of David Morris in the coming weeks, but for now that’s a great place to start. Here at Building Local Power, we’d love to invite you, our listeners, into the conversation.
If you have thoughts about this or other episodes, ideas for future guests, or if you just want to get in touch, send me a note at buildinglocalpoweratilsr.org. And as always, if you like what you hear, please like, subscribe, review, and share with your friends. This episode of Building Local Power was produced by me, Danny Caine with the help of Reggie Rucker. The original 2017 episode was produced by Lisa Gonzalez. For the episode, revisiting the interview, I did the editing with help from Téa Noelle, who also composed the music. Thank you so much for listening and see you in two weeks.
An appreciation for ILSR's co-founder, David Morris, on 50 years of accomplishments and impact.
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