The eastern region of the state is under the yoke of a state government based far to the west — and far removed politically and culturally.
On just about every issue, from abortion to guns to taxes to civil rights, state legislators completely ignore what those on the eastern border want, what they believe, how they live.
At times, it seems the state's political leaders are maliciously wielding their legislative majority to outright punish the entire region for its support of the opposing political party and a different ideological culture.
Eastern Oregon, we get you.
St. Louis is about as different as possible from that rural, conservative region, but for one commonality: the looming shadow of a state government that at times seems to be on a different political planet.
Should frustrated St. Louis residents think about just ditching Missouri altogether and joining deep-blue Illinois, right across the river?
It's an interesting thought-project, nothing more.
Except, perhaps, in Oregon.
As The Washington Post reported in an extensive piece recently, the conservatives who populate most of eastern Oregon are pursuing what appears to be a serious attempt to secede from their state and join red-state Idaho, just to their east across the Snake River.
Dubbed the Greater Idaho Movement, it's being primarily driven by rural eastern Oregonians, who tend to be far more politically conservative than residents in the western cities of Portland, Eugene and Bend. Those population centers, which are all staunchly liberal (Portland famously so), effectively control Salem, the state capital.
The result is a raft of liberal state laws that are about as popular in rural Oregon as they would be in rural Missouri. Oregon strongly protects abortion rights in the post-Roe v. Wade era, is a national leader on environmental protection and has some of the nation's strictest gun control.
Oh, to be able to just trade state governments.
State policies next door in Idaho, meanwhile, offer a conservative reverse image on those and other issues. It is, in its way, a microcosm of the deep political divisions that plague America as a whole today.
Which is what makes eastern Oregonians' proposed solution both fascinating and troubling: Twelve counties (and counting) have voted to support local ballot initiatives ordering leaders to study the possibility of moving the Oregon-Idaho border about 270 miles west, to encompass what is now eastern Oregon.
Proponents even have a slogan for it that St. Louisans might recognize: "Better together."
"What we're looking for is local control, not foreign control," one Oregon state senator told the newspaper. "And by foreign I mean Portland, Salem and the rest of those in the west who have decided they know better than we do how to run our lives."
Hmm. From our St. Louis perspective, we have to ask: Would that be similar to a state government that, for example, systematically dismantles virtually every firearms restriction it once had, even as its major cities beg for tools to stop the deluge of guns in their streets?
Or a state government that refuses to let the cities set their minimum wages higher than an unlivable base, finally prompting a statewide referendum to overrule the Legislature?
Or a state government that censors libraries and sues city school districts for following the best expert medical advice during a pandemic — all while failing to carry out the basic functions of government like education, health care and infrastructure improvement?
Just asking.
In this deeply polarized era, with red and blue America feeling very much like two different countries, there are lots of places around the nation like eastern Oregon — places under the thumb of (if you will) the other side. And yes, St. Louis is one of them.
It's all part of a national ideological divide that is being driven in large part by political self-sorting. Known among sociologists and political scientists as "The Big Sort," it describes this era's unusual trend of Americans literally relocating to cities or states that are more in line with their personal political beliefs than the places they lived before.
Most of the demographic evidence of that phenomenon is anecdotal and hard to quantify — though things like an 8,000-member Facebook group called "Conservatives moving to Texas" indicate it's real.
There's no denying that America's political centers are deeper red and deeper blue, with far less "purple," than in previous generations. Legislatures in all but two states today are completely controlled by one party or the other, with supermajorities in more than half of those (including Missouri Republicans and Illinois Democrats).
That sorting, along with gerrymandering by both parties, has made truly competitive U.S. House districts a rarity. In 2022, five of every six House races were decided by 10 percentage points or more, with an average margin for victory of 28%, according to the nonpartisan organization FairVote. And that's not even counting the 32 seats that were completely uncontested.
No wonder Congressional debate today resembles day care food fights, while neighboring states like Oregon and Idaho (and Missouri and Illinois) pursue policies that seem to come from completely separate cultures.
If ideas like The Greater Idaho movement become the template, those divisions would only get deeper.
Is that a bad thing?
That may depend not necessarily on which side of the political spectrum you ask, but on how far toward the edges you go.
Oregon may have what liberals consider more enlightened policies than its neighbor on myriad cultural issues, but conservatives would counter that it also suffers some of the same economic issues that afflict other high-tax, high-regulation blue states — most notably, alarming population loss. The same could be said about blue-state Illinois (not to mention blue-city St. Louis).
On the other hand, we might note, the Land of Lincoln has demonstrably better infrastructure than Missouri, a better education system, better health care, a far lower gun-mortality rate. It's far more accepting of LGBTQ and other citizens who don't toe the traditional societal line. And it doesn't treat half its population like Handmaid's Tale refugees.
We consider those to be priority issues, so we're not apt to wander too far down the path of both-siderism.
That said, couldn't the argument be made that both these extremes are more problematic than the relative restraint that state governments show when neither party has a complete lock on the political system?
We are all Americans, after all. The fact that we can't seem to agree these days on what, exactly, that means isn't an ideal circumstance for any nation. But moving state borders around probably isn't the answer.
REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
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