Welcome to Pulaski
At The Pulaski Institution, we often use the word “heartlands” to evoke the places with which we are concerned. In describing them, we allude a range of features that likely span many different categories of place in people’s minds. We talk about farmlands, from the Mississippi Delta and Great Plains to rural Australia. We also talk about post-industrial landscapes, such as the Rust Belt, and the North of England. Our formulation includes small towns and cities; places in the geographical middle (see: Kansas), and those that are very much not (Upstate New York). So this is a guide to how we at Pulaski think about heartland places and what we mean when we say we want to try to bring the local and global together.
What I’m putting forward here is a guiding principle of Pulaski: the heartland can be anywhere. What matters is that it’s a place where the place matters. The heartland is where the thick linkages of globalization—the agglomerations of activities and cultural institutions that build up in cities like New York, London, and Milan—thin out. And it is where the politics of place have often become isolationist, populist, and, in many cases, tinged with nativism and illiberalism. Perhaps rural Maine doesn’t immediately appear in your mind? It should. Perhaps your image of these places doesn’t include the English Midlands, the often-overlooked communities of Northern Ireland, Australia’s regional hubs, Canada’s prairie and Atlantic provinces, and cities like Marseille in France or Dresden in Germany. It should.
It is our belief at Pulaski that a vision of the world that is pro-globalization—that is to say, pro- immigration, trade, pluralism—can accommodate a sense of place. And it’s our belief that better understanding these places is actually critical to defending the liberal democratic values that underpin a free and fair society.
But doing so means injecting that sense of place into our work. It’s partly why we’ve organized our work around the idea of place-based democracy. We want to measure the quality of democracy at the local and regional level because we think that has a lot to tell us about the overall health of a country. And we think it has a lot to tell us about the day-to-day life of millions of citizens. Because, after all, everyone lives somewhere. A failure to diagnose democratic backsliding at the subnational level means a failure to diagnose the erosion in the quality of civic life and liberties for many people otherwise described as living in a free country.
We also believe in doing the work from these places precisely because we want to help contribute to reversing some of the magnetic polarity of modern globalization. We want to help these places keep talent and, when possible, to be the ones that draw it from elsewhere. Our decision to launch in Little Rock, Arkansas is central to that mission. We want our physical presence itself to work in concert with our research and action agenda.
The key is that sense of place. Working at the connection of heartland areas and global politics and economics means having some sense of where that is. This is a brief guide to where that is. And it’s a small mental map of how our programmatic interests will be driven. We hope you’ll consider supporting, either financially or by engaging with our programs.
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Alan Elrod
Co-founder, president, and CEO