`Oregon has lost its connective tissue'
HOW ONE STATE ILLUSTRATES AMERICA'S GROWING POLITICAL DIVIDE
To describe Wasco as a onehorse town might be exaggerating its equine magnitude a little. With a population of 400, it consists of a half-dozen or so streets, a few businesses and a trailer park in the midst of the windswept, semi-arid landscape of Oregon’s Sherman County.
It may be small, but in politics, at least, the town and its sparsely populated county is united. Sherman voted 73 per cent for Donald Trump in the last U.S. presidential election, and Don Hilderbrand is certain it will do the same this time around.
The retired farmer, decorative-rock miner and son of a prominent Oregon politician conceded recently that the president has his flaws, but said even those add to his general effectiveness.
“I think in some ways he’s pretty damn disgusting,” said Hilderbrand, leaning back in an easy chair arranged on a Wasco sidewalk, as three friends kibitzed nearby. “(But) when the rest of the world looks at him, they look at him in a disgusting way, too. They can’t F*** with him … The rest of the world respects America like it hasn’t in a long time.”
“I loved Obama’s personality. I voted for him one time. (But) I thought he sold us down the tube by the time it was over. So personality isn’t everything.”
Trump is one of the most polarizing presidents in U. S. history. Even a Republican senator, Ben Sasse, recently accused him of an array of deficiencies, from flirting with white supremacists to making nice with dictators. Few would echo such words here.
But then there is Portland, 180 kilometres to the west and the state’s largest city.
The county that encompasses the city — Multnomah — voted 73 per cent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and leans hard toward the Democrats’ left wing. It is the mirror image of Wasco.
Oregon is a reliably blue state, with Clinton beating Trump by 11 points in 2016 thanks to a population concentrated in its generally liberal cities. But it is also a starkly divided jurisdiction.
The electoral map from the last presidential election shows a sea of red counties that fills most of the state, surrounding the blue islands of Portland and second-city Eugene. And the rift between Republicans and Democrats in Oregon seems to be yawning wider.
In other words, the state has become a four-million-strong microcosm of U.S. politics as a whole, and may help explain the countrywide fissure.
“I think that Oregon has lost its connective tissue,” says Joel Barker, a spokesman for Portland Democrats. “There was a tradition of environmentally minded, Grange-style Republicans in Oregon that really tied together how we worked across those divides … There's no longer a lot of those politicians who can be relatable to both sides.”
Signs of America's political schisms have been on full display in this U.S. election campaign. The president openly mocks and insults his opponents, farright militants are charged with plotting to kidnap a Democratic governor and Biden calls Trump the country's worst commander-in-chief ever.
Opinion research suggests it's not just a question of rhetoric. The common ideological ground that once bonded many Americans has shrunk in recent years as the gulf between left and right widens sharply.
The Pew Research Centre found the average difference in Democratic and Republican views on 10 topics ranging from reducing poverty to foreign policy had more than doubled from 15 to 36 per cent between 1994 and 2017.
The percentage of Republicans who say the government should do more to help the needy, for instance, fell from 45 per cent in 2007 to about 25 per cent; Democratic backing for such government intervention rose from 54 to 71 per cent, says Pew.
And adherents of the two parties are literally less tolerant of each other.
A striking 45 per cent of Democrats and 35 per cent of Republicans said last year they'd be unhappy if their child married someone from the opposite party, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. In 1960, the figure stood at only four per cent for both.
Supporters of both parties say Oregon has experienced the same kind of split, though they disagree, of course, on the reasons.
The partisan divide plays out at the most local level, sometimes overriding traditional issues like sewers and stop lights, says Chris Nichols, a history professor and director of the Center for Humanities at Oregon State University.
“City councillors in Corvalis, Ore., they have to talk about Trump if they're running as Republicans, and if they're running as Democrats, they're running against him, they're running against what's been happening at the highest national level,” he said. “That was not as true in U.S. political history, even as recently as the George W. Bush years, which were incredibly polarizing.”
Portland has long developed a reputation as a liberal mecca, becoming one of the first cities to ban plastic shopping bags, for instance, and promoting other environmental policies.
By the time Oregon held its presidential primaries this August, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic race's progressive standard-bearers, had ended their campaigns weeks earlier and Joe
Biden had become the party's de-facto nominee. Yet Sanders and Warren still polled a combined 40 per cent of the vote in Multnomah.
Democratic activists there are “very proud of their Bernie associations,” says Barker. He points to a legendary Sanders rally in 2016 when a bird landed on the senator's podium, as if to endorse the ecologically minded candidate. The Portland crowd roared.
“People talk about it as relatively religious moment,” Barker says with a laugh.
The city's liberal, hipster ways have even earned pop-culture recognition, lampooned in the TV comedy series Portlandia. Its support for the Black Lives Matter movement is unparalleled, with almost daily rallies held since May.
But just as they divide the state geographically, the Cascade mountains do so ideologically, too. To the west are the liberal urban centres, to the east more conservative small towns and rural areas.
The state's huge, second congressional district in the east has similar voting patterns and culture to the U.S. deep south, says Nichols.
But things weren't always so, he says.
Two generations ago, Oregon's cities were not so uniformly Democratic, while those rural areas, and the Republican party, have grown more right- wing, said the historian.
Oregon Republicans even chose Jo Rae Perkins as their candidate for a vacant Senate seat. Perkins openly backs Qanon, the bizarre, baseless and Trump-championing conspiracy theory that imagines a cabal of mostly Democratic elites raping and cannibalizing children.
And as the minority in both houses of the state legislature, the party has used some contentious tactics of late. Encouraged by the group Timber Unity — a controversial coalition of loggers and truckers — Republican members have repeatedly stayed away from key votes on environmental bills, depriving the houses of quorum and stymieing the legislative process.
Republicans based in the state's rural east tend to see agriculture, logging and long-haul trucking as the key elements of the state's economy, though none are the “the industries of the future,” said Nichols.
As wealthier western Oregon has dominated state politics, people in the east have felt increasingly disenfranchised, which in turn has nudged them more to the right, suggests Barker, who grew up in an east- Oregon small town.
Back in Wasco, Hilderbrand argues that Democratic politicians are themselves pushing people toward Trump, and cites the generally peaceful anti-racism protests that have sometimes turned violent.
“Our Democratic rulers in Portland have allowed Oregon to become a disgrace in the nation, in the world,” said the son of Bev Clarno, Oregon's outgoing Republican secretary of state. “Now people think of Oregon, they think of it burning within, of anarchy.”
His friend and fellow Trump supporter Jay Carlson agrees that political polarization has gotten “worse and worse with every election.” But he also blames the other party, claiming Democrats are much more likely to deface election signs and generally exhibit “hatred” toward their rivals.
As for the president, “there's no BS,” says Carlson. “What he says, he does. If he draws a line in the sand, he sticks to it.”
Down the road in Moro, the county seat, but an even smaller town, the manager of Tall Winds Motel claims it's the media that has created divisions by constantly vilifying Trump for partisan reasons.
“I'm surprised he hasn't been blamed for the Civil War,” says Mike, who declined to give his last name.
He says he's not excited by either choice in the election but if someone put a pistol to his head, he'd definitely not vote Democrat.
Indeed, Mike invokes issues that are key elements of the president's brand, like immigration and guns. He complained that Oregon's Democratic legislators had passed a law allowing undocumented immigrants to get driver's licences, and warned that Biden would attack Americans' constitutional right to bear arms.
The Oregonians on both sides of the divide who talked to the National Post this month seemed affable and decent citizens.
But Nichols frets about what may be to come on the streets of Portland, where so-called antifa ( anti- fascist) and far- right militants have already sparred. He echoes a national concern, heightened by Trump's refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses on Nov. 3.
“The great worry is, around the election, an aggressive clash of the two groups, with the individuals being armed and the police taking a backseat,” said the professor. “That could be really disastrous.”
POLARIZATION HAS GOTTEN `WORSE AND WORSE WITH EVERY ELECTION.'