No I mean this specific statement: "Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state."

During the period in the US where power was most abused by bureaucrats and executives, they were also extremely local to the people they were wielding that power against.

I'm not trying to figure out some personal-freedom-vs-collective-justice conundrum, I'm asking a very concrete question about whether the quoted statement is even true. In one highly notable case affecting tens or hundreds of thousands of americans and lasting for nearly a century, that wasn't the case. That calls the assertion into question, I think.