The party of local control sold Jefferson County’s water to cool a server farm, told the cattlemen to take it up with the statehouse, and called it a first-world problem. So reports David Marcus in his new Fox News Opinion column, West Virginian fairgoers are worried, but not about prices, traveling to the Jefferson County Fair and finding bipartisan worry — Democrats and Republicans alike — about data centers rising over the Eastern Panhandle’s fields, wells going dry, and the local authority that is supposed to be the headline promise of the modern right. Marcus calls this “a crisis of opportunity, not lack thereof.” The country is doing okay, he says. The issue is how to responsibly ride the rising tide. Then he walks back to his funnel cake.
The fairgoers are worth listening to. Roy the farmer told Marcus that “all we’ve got is the land.” Sarah, the retired teacher, said “I guess we need ‘em, but nobody wants ‘em.” Tamara Thompson and her neighbors logged noise complaints against the new operation. A Tea Party leader took those complaints personally. Democratic candidates said the state has stripped local authority. There is bipartisan worry in Jefferson County, and naming it is the column’s honest work. The right word for what is being lost is exactly the one Marcus reaches for: local control. The country was promised the cloud, and now the cloud is here, and nobody — including the party that ran on local control — bothered to write the contract.
But listen to what Marcus does with the observation. He puts “growth” in scare quotes, as if it were an imposition. He treats the data center the way a Manhattan columnist might treat a zoning meeting — an interesting local dispute that proves the country’s nerve-endings are healthy. He frames the locals’ reluctance as the Platonic form of a first-world problem. He ends by telling you that “we are doing okay” and that the issue is “how to responsibly ride the rising tide.” That is the line the column crosses, and it is the betrayal.
For the same twenty years these voters have been told that the Republican Party is the party of local control, that party has spent those years clearing the path for the buildout it now pretends to worry about. Permitting reform at the federal level — Republican priority, Republican legislation. The AI arms race with China, framed as a national-security matter, with the data-center buildout as the patriotic answer. Energy policy that treats the grid as a private project to be permitted and financed by whichever company moves fastest — a twenty-year power-purchase agreement signed by a hyperscaler that locks a rural co-op into serving a single industrial load and prices member ratepayers out of their own queue — in the same deregulatory spirit that ran the rural utilities and the family farms into the ground. The state-level politicians Marcus interviewed at the fair are worried about exactly the loss of local control that the federal-level politicians his voters sent to Washington are accelerating.
The right has lost every fight it has ever fought against consolidated ownership. It has lost the family-farm fight under farm bills it drafted. It has lost the local-bank fight. It has lost the local-newspaper fight under FCC rulings it cheered. It has lost the rural-hospital fight under deregulation it ran on. It has lost the local-pharmacy fight to the pharmacy benefit managers. It has lost every one of those fights, and it has lost them because it never built the institutions that would have let it win. “Local control” was always a campaign button, not a governing commitment. The data-center fight is the next in the line, and the right will hold hearings, write letters, express concern, and ultimately accept the buildout — because the China-race argument will not wait for the Jefferson County Planning Commission.
What is rising over Roy the cattleman’s fences is not a tide. It is a private utility-scale industrial operation, owned by a corporation that does not live in Jefferson County, does not draw water from Jefferson County, does not send its children to Jefferson County schools, and does not answer to Jefferson County voters — except insofar as it can be made to, by a fight Roy will lose on his own. The water that cools those servers does not come back to his well. The sound his neighbors complained of to Tamara Thompson does not stop at the property line. The hundred new houses that “go up every day” do pay his county property taxes, but the schools and the roads and the water lines they require do not appear by spontaneous generation — they appear because somebody local, a county commission, a water district, a volunteer fire department, a school board, is being asked to absorb them.
I know the operation. I used to trade agricultural futures on a Chicago desk, and the corn I traded was the corn Roy’s neighbors grew. The screen had columns of numbers and nothing else. The men who write the data-center power-purchase agreements think about Jefferson County the same way I once thought about Grundy County, Illinois — as a coordinate on a heat map. I came back to a small Wisconsin county because the abstraction was killing me. What I noticed first, walking back into a real place after years on that desk, was that “local control” was mostly over. The co-op was one of the last institutions still locally owned. The hospital was being assembled by a private-equity group whose principals did not live in the county. The local paper had been consolidated into a regional chain two hours away. The Main Street storefronts were seasonal, when they were anything. The politicians who wore the “local control” button at the diner counter were the same people cheering the deregulation and tax policy that made every one of those losses possible. The right’s brand of “local control” had become a feeling about cultural issues and a surrender on every economic one.
That is the man whose well goes dry this August. He is not thinking about whether he lives in the first world. He is thinking that the land his grandfather cleared, the herd his father built, the quiet his wife liked on summer evenings — none of that was in the equation. The corporation’s spreadsheet did not include a row for “things Roy cannot get back.” That is not a Platonic problem. That is the operation of a private government with no accountability to the people it lands on, dressed up as progress.
This is what your movement now means by conservatism.
Local control is not a slogan. It is a doctrine — and the doctrine is older than the modern party. It says that decisions ought to be made at the lowest level that can competently make them. Not the statehouse in Charleston, and certainly not the data-center operator in Northern Virginia. The county. The township. The water district. The member-owned electric cooperative. The place where the people whose land and water are at stake can actually stand in a room with the people who want to take it, and the room has a vote, and the vote counts.
The answer is not a state moratorium, though the locals are entitled to one if they can get it. The answer is not a federal permitting regime, though the federal permitting regime is a disgrace. The answer is what conservatives used to believe in before they forgot: locally owned institutions with the standing to negotiate. A member-owned electric cooperative that has to answer to the people it serves — not to a hedge fund — is in a different posture than a rural utility being told to wheel power to a hyperscaler at a sweetheart rate. A community land trust that owns the development rights to the parcel is in a different posture than a cattleman going to the county commission alone. A water district run by the people who drink from it, not by the state engineer, is in a different posture than Roy applying for a well permit.
These are not fantasies. The Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, headquartered two miles up the highway from where I write this, is one of them — the largest rural electric co-op in Wisconsin, owned by its thirty-one thousand members across twelve counties. It exists because the for-profit utilities would not string a line out to farms like mine. The same logic applies to a county whose water, power, and quiet are about to be consumed by someone else’s server farm. A co-op board that signs the next twenty-year agreement has to look its own members in the eye. A water district whose members own the wells can refuse to sell them to a stranger. A land trust that holds the development rights can outlast any single election. The distributed answer centralizes nothing. It answers to the people in the room.
The right can hold another hearing, or it can build the answer. Marcus reported the worry. The voters he talked to will know which one was chosen by whether the substation stays local, and whether the co-op board, the member-owned water association, the planning commission with teeth, is still in the room when the next twenty-year agreement gets signed. That is how they will judge what “local control” actually means.
If it means anything, it had better mean that. If it does not, then it was never a doctrine at all. It was a campaign slogan, and the data center is the receipt.