Decentralization and localization of government -- The route to advancing individual freedom?

Increasing the power and authority of more local levels of government is a very poor proxy for advancing individual freedom. Decentralization and localization are tools that can be used in a system of checks and balances to protect liberty, and they are important tools that can do immense good when applied properly, but just blindly handing more power to levels of government that cover a smaller geographic area is not how it works.

It's not an increase in freedom to abolish the federal government if that means states start erecting border checkpoints and trade barriers. It's not a libertarian victory to create a thousand miniature local tyrannies in the form of oppressive theocracies and totalitarian ethnostates.

Be very wary of the sleight of hand that tries to replace a focus on individual rights and freedoms with a focus exclusively on political "decentralization" or "localization." That can very quickly slide into apologetics for all sorts of authoritarian nastiness, so long as it's framed as opposing a higher level of government doing anything to stop it.

Individual rights are what matter, whether they're being threatened by your local zoning board or the president of the United States. If state and local governments defend individual rights against federal encroachment, that's good. And if a federal judge defends individual rights against state and local encroachment, that's also good.

Local tyranny can be and often has been outright murderous. There's a long history of that in the United States.
Flagrant violations of rights should be opposed at whatever level of government they originate. And often at the local level that's going to mean appealing to a higher authority.

It's not just in the context of Jim Crow type scenarios, either. For example, like many states Wisconsin has a statewide preemption law that prevents city and county governments from passing their own gun bans. Or for another, it's the federal 1st Amendment that makes inoperative the provisions in several states which would ban atheists from holding office.

If you always side with the more local level of government in any dispute, you're going to be on the wrong side of individual rights as often as not.