The Big Sort (30 page)

We drove down a road between Breese's ranch and the town of Prineville, the county seat. Doug pointed to the spot where the Democrats lost Crook County. Over there, Breeze said, the owner of the county's last sawmill went out of business. "He finally gave up because he couldn't get any wood," Breese explained, pushing back his
ANIMAL PHARMACEUTICALS
gimme cap. In the mid-1970s, no matter where you went in Oregon, people had good feelings about environmentalists. But after a decade or so of fighting about old-growth forests, spotted owls, and endangered species, rural Oregonians concluded that environmentalists were the enemy—the people who wanted to do away with jobs in counties such as Crook. Some people—in fact, quite a lot of people—argued that Oregon's milling operations were hurt more by markets than by the Endangered Species Act—a bill, Oregon Democrats like to point out, that was signed by Richard Nixon. But there were once six sawmills in Prineville, and now there are none. The perception here is that those environmentalists were people from the city. They wanted to tell rural people how to live—where they could build, what they could cut, and how many guns they could own. And those people doing all the telling were Democrats.

This isn't just the way rural Republicans view Democrats. At the Sandwich Factory in Prineville, Crook Democratic Party chair Steve Bucknum smoothes out a sheet of paper and draws a diagram of a wagon wheel that he says explains the Democrats' troubles in rural America. There are issues that cause problems for rural Democrats, Bucknum says, such as gun control and the Endangered Species Act. These are the spokes in the wheel. Spokes can be replaced, he said. The real difficulty the party has is the hub. "At the center of the wheel is elitism," Bucknum said. "The reason rural people become resentful is that they feel like in every one of these issues, they are being told what to do by someone who claims to know better. And that elitism is seen as Democratic, no matter where it comes from."

Back in Portland, it's easy to see how rural Oregonians might come to think poorly of the city and the Democrats who live there. At the too-cool Jupiter Motel—one of the manifestations of hipness in the new century is the transformation of 1950s and 1960s flophouses into hard-to-book accommodations with concrete floors, low beds, and minimalist decorations—a wonderfully nice woman with two-tone hair and tattoos that began on her fingers and disappeared up her shirtsleeve directed me to the Doug Fir Room. Young people ate off tables made of thick planks of Douglas fir and bought drinks at a sculpted Doug fir bar. They soaked in the romance of Oregon as a timber state while listening to whatever indie surfer rock band was making the rounds. Around Prineville, nobody cuts Doug fir for a living anymore, and there's nothing romantic about ranch work. Doug Breese and his son have spent the past three years pulling rocks from one field. The stones filled a dump truck and rested in piles, and the field still wasn't planted. That's ranching. The Breeses cut juniper and medusahead to keep the pastures clear, and when the stuff grows back, they cut it again. Breese sees endangered species laws protecting trees and birds, but there's no law promising that his ranch will be around for his kids.

Democrat Steve Bucknum is the only registered property appraiser in Crook County, so he meets most of the new people moving in. Bucknum told me that the old-timers in the County, such as Doug Breese, are different from those who have come here in the past decade. In the early 1990s, good old boys ran the courthouse. The county judge was a rodeo veteran who told ranch stories. Longtime Crook County residents, Bucknum said, were pragmatic about life and politics. After all, there's no such thing as ideological ranching. Between 1995 and 2004, however, the number of Crook County voters registered as Democrats or Republicans jumped by 28 percent. Eight out of ten of those new voters registered as Republicans. In the 1976 presidential election, Crook County cast 55 percent of its votes for Democrat Jimmy Carter, compared to 53 percent of the votes in Portland's Multnomah County. In 2004, however, whereas 73 percent of Multnomah County voted for Kerry, 69 percent of Crook County supported Bush.

These newcomer Republicans are people who wanted out of the city—more by-the-book conservatives rather than brogan Republicans. "The people who grew up here sort of have a laid-back way of talking, and they like things the way they are—they aren't fearful about the world," Bucknum said. "The people who have recently come here, from the Willamette Valley in particular—from Salem, Portland, and Eugene—[who] self-selected to leave those areas, talk about their fears. It's just very concrete. The people who are new to the area are, by and large, motivated by fear. Wrapped up with that are Christian fundamentalism, property rights, and economic theory, and it's more pervasive than political party. It's a worldview."

Chet Peterson runs an insurance office on Prineville's Main Street and helped organize the Bush campaign here in 2004. He's in good shape and sits up straight. He told me the story of Les Schwab, an ambitious kid from the Crook County logging camps who bought a tire-recapping business with borrowed money and became the largest independent tire distributor in the country. Peterson moved here in 1996 and does business with a lot of the newcomers. I asked him where these people are coming from. "They are coming from big cities," he answered. "Big cities are dangerous." They are also debilitating. People who live in cities, Peterson said, "become dependent on what government offers, all the way from mass transit to food stamps." Cities coddle. They make people weak and get them hooked on government. Rural places are filled with pioneers and capitalists, do-it-yourselfers like Les Schwab.

Ted Robinson moved to Crook County from the city and became Republican Party chair. In the Democratic Party, Robinson told me, "anything goes. It's the sixties. But people want to live in a community where they have values, where they aren't going to force gay marriage down your throat. Where you live within your means and people expect you to live up to what you can do."

Linguist George Lakoff described American society as divided between "two different forms of family-based morality": the "strict father" and the "nurturant parent."
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The strict father sets rules and exerts authority. Children obey, and by obeying they build character, gain respect for authority, and grow self-reliant. This is Chet Peterson's and Ted Robinson's vision of Crook County and the Scott County Republicans' conception of their almost-rural community. The other moral system, the "nurturant parent," sees love and empathy as paramount in raising a child. Children are to be supported and protected; obedience stems from love and respect, not from fear. The goal of children is to be happy and fulfilled. Welcome to Portland and Austin (Travis Heights). Lakoff argued that these two moral systems essentially distinguished political conservatives (strict fathers) from liberals (nurturant parents).

After the 2004 election, there was a great deal of discussion about whether "moral values"—gay rights, abortion, religious beliefs—drove voters' decisions. Two political scientists, Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, took another approach. They decided to apply Lakoff's theory and determine whether, at root, the United States was divided by a difference in worldview, one revealed in two styles of child rearing.
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Hetherington and Weiler looked at data on children's issues gathered by the National Election Studies (NES). In 1992, 2000, and 2004, the large survey conducted through the University of Michigan presented voters with pairs of attributes and asked which of the two were more important for a child to have. Was it better for a child to demonstrate independence or respect for elders? Obedience or self-reliance? Curiosity or good manners? To be considerate or well behaved? Hetherington and Weiler realized that the answers to these four questions fell on either side of Lakoff's strict father/nurturant parent division. Moreover, unlike gay marriage, abortion, gun control, and other issues used to identify values, these questions had some distance from the news of the day. They didn't carry any ideological baggage. The NES's questions asked about traits that were all admirable. Presumably, parents would want their children to be both considerate and well behaved, so these questions elicited more discerning—and revealing—answers. Hetherington and Weiler surmised that the questions exposed underlying views of authority—whether people favored the strict father or the nurturant parent.

Hetherington and Weiler constructed a scale based on the answers to these four questions. Those who picked respect, obedience, good manners, and being well behaved were the most authoritarian, and the researchers counted them as strict fathers. Those who favored independence, self-reliance, curiosity, and being considerate were nurturant parents. Then Hetherington and Weiler tested to see if opinions about child rearing were correlated with political beliefs. They were, and to a striking degree. Republicans favored respect, obedience, good manners, and being well behaved. They were strict fathers. Democrats were nurturant parents.

This splitting of moral perspectives, and its connection to political affiliations, seemed to be something new. Hetherington and Weiler pointed out that before the 1960s, there was little real difference in how Americans raised their children. During the cold war, the political scientists wrote, authoritarian types could be found aplenty in both parties. In the 1960s, there were plenty of strict father Democrats. Over the last generation, however, these two moral syndromes emerged in families and then sorted into Republican and Democrat. In 1992, there was little difference between the parties on the child-rearing scale. By 2000, the differences were distinct, and by 2004 the gap had grown wide and deep. Answers to questions about child rearing, in fact, provided a better gauge of party affiliation than did income.
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The parenting scale was also more closely aligned with "moral issues" than political orientation. Knowing whether a person was a nurturant parent or a strict father provided a better guide to his or her thinking about gay rights than knowing whether he or she was a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat.

Hetherington and Weiler found that the two parties differed on a cluster of issues revolving around "muscularity." How tough should the nation be in battling terrorists? (When a foreign leader violates international law, Hetherington and Weiler asked, what is our response? Do we send him to "time-out" or do we spank?) Should laws be passed to protect the traditional family, to prosecute flag burners, and to tap the phones of suspected terrorists? The answers to these questions divided strict fathers from nurturant parents. The child-rearing scale also helped explain the steady migration of the white working class away from the Democratic Party. It showed that Evangelicals were largely strict fathers. And in 2004, voters who had attended graduate school had a strict father score on the four-question survey that was only half that of voters who hadn't graduated from high school. "Little wonder our politics today are polarized," Hetherington and Weiler concluded. "The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds. We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues."
¹⁵

In 1974, the division in the Kanawha County school textbook fight (see
chapter 5
) was between those who believed that salvation was the most important value and those who sought beauty. In the mid-1990s, George Lakoff defined strict fathers and nurturant parents. On the first Tuesday in November, these divisions are given another set of labels: Republicans and Democrats.

Political scientist Daniel Elazar traced the political development of the United States by the early flows of migrants moving east to west. As people migrated, they brought their politics with them, setting down their beliefs with their trunks and suitcases. In the early days of the frontier, like-minded people traveled together, and when they settled, they created political cultures that spread across regions of the country. A few years before his death in 1999, however, Elazar noticed the emergence of "lifestyle" communities. He suspected that these communities heralded a "new sectionalism." The aging political scientist optimistically believed that the emergence of like-minded communities would "encourage recrudescence of the kind of territorial democracy that potentially allows different lifestyles to flourish in different places without clashing."
¹⁶
Elazar was referring to life in nineteenth-century America, when communities were narrowly defined and isolated. At that time, the rich in one city intermarried, according to historian Robert Wiebe, never knowing, or caring to know, their contemporaries in other urban areas. "Within the city limits yet detached from its core, neighborhoods provided fairly cloistered way stations between urban and rural living," Wiebe wrote. Farm communities were "usually homogeneous, usually Protestant ... In all, it was a nation of loosely connected islands, similar in kind, whose restless natives often moved only to settle down again as part of another island."
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The physical barriers of frontier life may have helped create these nineteenth-century islands, but the segmentation of community life in the last quarter of the twentieth-century was manmade, a reaction, perhaps, to the fast-paced, wild, and woolly changes taking place in the nation and the world. "When people find themselves unable to control the world, they simply shrink the world to the size of their community," observed sociologist Manuel Castells.
¹⁸
Sociologist Craig Calhoun described the growth of "enclaves of people who have made similar life-style choices. These life-style enclaves—especially suburban and exurban ones—are characterized by an extraordinary homophilia (primarily in non-sexual senses)."
¹⁹

There is a market demand now for "lifestyle" communities. Before developers built the Ladera Ranch subdivision in Orange County, California, they surveyed likely residents about their beliefs and values. The surveys asked how strongly people agreed with statements such as "We need to treat the planet as a living system" and "I have been born again in Jesus Christ." People fell into distinct groups—and that's the way the development was built. There is "Covenant Hills" for the faithful (big family rooms and traditional suburban architecture) and "Terramor" for what the developers call the "cultural creatives" (bamboo floors and instead of a family room, a "culture room").
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(Cultural creatives? Yes, Paul Ray, one of the authors of the 2000 book
The Cultural Creatives,
was a consultant for Ladera Ranch.) There is a Christian school for the believers in Covenant Hills and a Montessori school for the "cultural creatives" in Terramor. More than 16,000 people live in the subdivision now, and what's vaguely creepy (well, maybe not so vaguely) is that people drive in the same entrance and then split off into neighborhoods designed for different lifestyles and values—the twenty-first-century version of nineteenth-century "island communities."