Some local governments can be good--mainly those that are part of open & functional communities, where there's a genuine dynamic of relational accountability between government & citizens. But a big problem of large-scale governments (or large, integrated societies more generally) is that it's usually the scum that rises to the top. Granted, this scum is a lot scummier in closed, dysfunctional societies than in healthier ones.
(I have some more thoughts on this question. I don't have time to write them at the moment, but maybe I'll come back to it...although I can't guarantee it'll be something I haven't carried on about in some way before).

What is your relationship to, or thoughts regarding, your local governments?
How do you feel about them?
In what ways are you in favor or opposed to them?
 
And I suppose more generally– what political stances do you have?

 
In some ways I feel encouraged by my local community & its government. I know some of the people involved with it and have seen that many of them respond well to pressure for positive change. Yet like most placed in the world, my community is affected by a series of overlapping crises that are global in scale.
As capitalism has expanded its grasp over most corners of the world during the past several decades, individual wealth has become ever more consolidated into the hands of a few billionaires & elites. Ordinary people have gradually seen their standards of living decline as their governments have followed these elites’ bidding, selling their public assets to corporations, bit by bit, for bargain basement prices. The resulting unrest has created the opportunity for authoritarian, anti-democratic movements to seize power in countries throughout the world. Rather than directing popular anger toward wresting the global economic system from the hands of the elites who have largely made this mess, authoritarian leaders (many of whom are billionaires & elites themselves) have redirected it toward scapegoats such as immigrants and other minorities.
This is partly what I meant in my earlier post about the scum rising to the top. Up till now, the prevailing pattern has been that leaders of stable, more-or-less democratic countries tended to be charismatic, ambitious careerists—often a bit scummy & lacking in personal integrity. People like Ronald Reagan or Justin Trudeau. Nowadays, an opening has been created for full-blown sociopaths/strongmen/narcissists to gain & consolidate power in more & more countries. Hence, the world’s becoming infested with wannabe dictators like Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Muhammad bin Salman, Benyamin Netinyahu, Rodrigo Duterte, Viktor Orban.
Along these same lines, the past few centuries of ever-expanding capitalism have created a dire, worldwide ecological crisis. Many governments & corporations have been quite cavalier about this, especially those with financial interests in things like fossil fuels. And I also just feel that there's not a critical mass of people who are responding to it with the urgency it demands—apparently, many have yet to internalize its implications at a gut level. I suspect this is partly because humans have become increasingly disconnected from all the interwoven ecosystems of which their lives are a part & on which their lives depend. Lulled into complacency by an ever-expanding network of infrastructure, technology, and media. As French sociologist Jacques Ellul put it in his book, The Technological System,  "A [modern] person deals with the natural elements only through a set of technologies which is so complete that he is actually dealing with those technologies themselves. The natural environment itself disappears." The global history of colonial imperialism during the past 500 years or so has undoubtedly also played a role. (By this I’m referring to the pattern where large, powerful countries have conquered large swaths of Earth’s land for the purpose of appropriating & extracting cheap resources. In doing so, they have invariably subjugated the Indigenous inhabitants of those lands).
I admit this next assertion is slightly conspiratorial, but I suspect part of the reason some billionaires are so interested in space exploration is because they, too, can see Earth is teetering on the brink of collapse. They want a fallback option for themselves, just in case runaway climate change makes our Mother’s womb an uninhabitable place. However, I highly doubt they have in mind a scenario like the film Interstellar, where the leaders & scientists planning for a doomed Earth’s evacuation feel a sense of ethical urgency find a way to take all humans along. Instead, billionaires already cling to their own fantasy of themselves of “chosen people”—i.e., they behave as if their ability to accumulate money & power is somehow proof that they are superior to other humans. In this way, Atlas Shrugged seems like quite a realistic depiction of how rich capitalists actually tend to think. Yet with an issue like ecological collapse, the irony is that it’s the rich capitalists who are actually driving it. Even while they are investing billions in fossil fuels, clearcutting the Amazon for soy plantations, and propping up dictators who crush public dissent, many of these billionaires are spending millions on their own survivalist compounds in the hope they can save themselves if the system begins to collapse.
 
Political views & their roots?
At the level of description above, I don’t know that anything about what I’ve written above is particularly unique, or of interest from a CT perspective. (Maybe it would have been more interesting if I’d gone a bit further down the rabbit-hole with some of my more wacky ideas?) A more pertinent topic, which I’ve been interested in for quite a while, relates to what lies at the roots of my worldview:
To what extent are the ideas, beliefs & values I hold inherent to who I am, and to what extent have I merely “constructed” them?
This is something I'm broadly interested in with regard to my own life, not only as it relates to the topic of government or politics. As in other areas of of my life, my views about the government have evolved quite a bit over the years. In the past, I sometimes assumed that whatever views I held as a little kid were somehow more truly representative of who I inherently am. Yet I’ve come to see problems with this assumption. While my heart may have been simpler when I was a little kid, I was also more impressionable and more easily accepting of what others told me. I was quite religious up till my early adulthood, and because of my religion I tried to feed myself a lot of ideas & beliefs that never truly felt like “me.” As I’ve gotten older, I feel like I’ve gradually settled into beliefs & values that resonate comfortably; ones that I don’t feel like I have to struggle against.
I could parse out the basic elements of the worldview I outlined above as freedom (i.e. anti-authoritarianism), devolution of power, and climate/environmental justice. I guess another one could be fairness/equality. Of course, all of these are interconnected and overlapping, but I’m dividing them up like this to get at something about my overall worldview.
I was originally gonna talk about all four of these values, but I went on for so long about the first one that I’ll just leave my discussion with that…
 
Freedom and devolution of power
Somewhere, I read that the “proper” way to figure out your Enneagram type is to figure out what your basic fear is. I’ve never been completely certain of my Enneagram type, and I decided to try this approach. Unfortunately, I couldn't discern that any one of the nine basic fears cleanly fit me better than all the others. Over time, I began to wonder, what if my basic fear is something different than the nine options listed here? Lately, I’ve began to feel that perhaps my basic fear derives from claustrophobia. In a literal sense I’m a bit claustrophobic, and I love open spaces. More broadly, I hate feeling hemmed-in, constrained, or to have someone else telling me what to do, who I should be or how to live. Even if there are a limited number of things I'll actually do in my life, I want the freedom to feel like I could do whatever I like.
I also want this for others, and I think this is where my perverse fascination with authoritarianism comes from. One of the things that most upsets me about people like Trump is that he sees anyone who opposes him as an affront to his need for control. If things were to escalate enough, I have little doubt he’d imprison anyone he perceived as a threat if that was what it to maintain power. Authoritarianism and paranoia feed off eachother.
So as far as the roots of my valuing liberty and devolution of power. On the one hand, it feels like more of an ideological value to me than a pragmatic one. (I’ll try to explain below). Yet on the other hand, it feels like an innate concern that I can trace to my early childhood—even before I understood it as a delineated concept—and as something to which I’ve often responded in a very visceral way. In fact, what I’m calling “liberty” here doesn’t precisely capture all the nuance of this value. It’s more like something that’s not completely articulated, but emerges contextually as I encounter it in life situations. It’s closely connected with the value of fairness & equality, which I see as an Fe thing.
At some level, I dislike the whole idea of government. The very idea that someone else can have authority over my life has always grated against my sense of fairness. I never gave my consent for anyone to rule me. Most acutely, Indigenous groups never even remotely gave their consent to countries like the United States to march in, seize their lands, or tell them what to do and how to live. Large governments have been historically successful because of violence and subjugation. I don't see how a nation-state like the United States, which is built 100% on land that was stolen from Native Americans, has any moral authority in and of itself. I'm not saying the US is altogether bad, I'm simply saying it was built on a rotten foundation, just like many other countries. This is why I don’t love the rhetoric favored by a lot of US liberals (“government is our friend”). I would like local communities (however they organize themselves) to be given as much sovereignty as they can gulp down (to paraphrase Boris Yeltsin, haha) ... At least as long as that doesn’t mean the sovereignty to oppress others (but then, perhaps that's the cost of true freedom).
At the end of the day, I have to acknowledge that freedom for freedom’s sake is an ideological value, emanating from feelings of claustrophobia and wanting to feel unconstrained. Unfortunately, there are many instances in which real-world consequences and the tragic conditions of life—rather than ideological ideas—shape my on-the-ground political views. I love the idea of the United States dissolving into a heterogenous network of autonomous communities & ecoregions, but I’m pragmatic enough to recognize that it would be a global disaster for the country to disappear without some cohesive social order to take its place. The Roman Empire was cruel & oppressive, but there was also tremendous suffering when Europe was forced to readjust to tribal society during the centuries following its collapse. Russia became so much freer during the 1980s & 1990s, but in an unsustainable way: the lack of structure during the Yeltsin era led to rampant economic instability, ultimately boomeranging the country into Putin’s authoritarian embrace. I love the idea of stable anarchy, but if I’m being perfectly honest, it’s predicated on a rosy view of human nature that doesn’t reflect present reality. As for unstable anarchy, I’m pretty sure it usually leads to authoritarianism whenever the strongest faction consolidates power. Somewhere, humanity’s collective Judgment oscillation will find a place to plant its flag.
Another thing is that pursuing freedom as an ideological construct (e.g. classical libertarianism) isn’t necessarily the same thing as actually giving people more freedom. When private large, private corporations control all the basic services on which people depend, these corporations have the power to put a lot of constraints on people’s lives. (I recall Noam Chomsky calling corporations “private tyrannies.”) For instance, large media outlets don’t love giving out platforms for fair criticism of their misdeeds. That’s a lot of why billionaires like Jeff Bezos buy newspapers like the Washington Post. Just as importantly, large corporations don’t actually favor free markets in any principled way: whenever cronyism and massive subsidies benefit them, corporations favor those. Then there’s the fact that freedom that freedom doesn’t mean the same thing for every citizen. Study after study has shown that the US criminal justice system is much harsher on black people than it is on white people, meting out far longer prison sentences for the exact same crimes. So at the end of the day, freedom is lovely as an ideological value, but it’s complex & messy when mapped onto real-world situations.
And yet, the simple value of liberty goes a long way toward explaining the broad contours of our current crisis. Extremely concentrated power & wealth beget conditions of corruption & public unrest, leading to authoritarianism. There seems to be an economy of freedom that parallels the more literal economy of wealth. Because the world has finite space & resources, it seems natural that only a finite amount of freedom in it. Currently, its distribution seems highly unequal: the same people who control the wealth & power control the freedom. Billionaires are rarely ever punished for their crimes. Trump has bragged about being able to get away with killing a man in broad daylight. Often, billionaires don’t even have to show their passports when landing their private jets in foreign countries. Refugees, on the other hand, are greeted by walls, armed guard & detention centers.
In CT terms, I agree with Auburn’s NiTe thread that disliking authority is probably related to being a polarized Pi-lead. For me, then it's probably largely an Si-Ne thing. Yet I also think both Ti & Fe play a strong role in it. Ti because it feels like a basic axiom (even though, as I said above, it’s not that well articulated). Fe because it’s emotionally rooted, is something I also want for others, and because I can't really separate it from the values of fairness & equality.
 
Conductor Alphas & democracy
Along these lines, I wanted to mention that in the Alpha metabolism section, it characterized conductor Alphas as being democratic in orientation. This isn’t a bad description, and this was a rare instance where the Alpha description felt more flattering than those of the Betas, Gammas or Deltas (sectarian, meritocratic, technocratic). Nonetheless, this characterization feels a little bit J-biased to me. The whole point about Si-Ne’s pluralism plus Fe’s collectivism is that Alphas tend to want to govern by using a mishmash of ideas that are sourced from collective. This could be democratic, but democracy seems like a J-lead idea: allowing citizens to participate in a single, cohesive political structure. When Si-Ne is the primary oscillation, I would hypothesize that Si-Ne pluralism would tend toward something a bit more anarchic or autarkic: let each group hash out whatever approach works best for them. This reflects how I tend to approach disagreements in real life (i.e. let’s find a way to let each of us approach this our own way), and I suspect it reflects a general difference between SiFe and FeSi. However, I don't know of any neat one-word way to encapsulate this idea. Maybe provincialist could be an alternative, more P-oriented term.