The Big Sort

by Bill Bishop

  Robert Thibodeaux grew up in Grapevine, Texas, a small town between Dallas and Fort Worth. He was shocked by a rape and a rash of pregnancies at his high school. He blamed Dallas, which he felt was reaching out to touch his hometown. "There was this creeping big-city-ness," Thibodeaux said. When he moved north for work, he decided to distance himself from all things citified.

  Those active in the Scott County Republican Party have an anti-urban idealization of rural America. Barbara Lerschen was Scott County Republican Party chair in the 1980s. She moved from the Twin Cities because, she said, you can "breathe the freedom [in this exurban county]. South of here, there are still fields. You can get out, and you're not crowded. In St. Paul, you have people telling you what to do." Ben Adams runs a car stereo shop in Minneapolis but lives in Scott County. He moved there with his wife, a schoolteacher, because "we loved the fact that once you drove south of the [Minnesota] River, you had ten minutes of driving where you had fields on both sides of the road. It was the separation from the Twin Cities ... that we liked. We're not urban people."

  One Republican I met at a GOP get-together in Savage grimaced when he talked about "places you go [in the Twin Cities] where there are a lot of gray, pasty-faced people. I like it here." I brought up the trendy city neighborhood of Uptown in Minneapolis, a place brimming with young people. Nobody was much impressed. "I have real good liberal friends, and that's where they want to be, right there in Uptown," one Scott County Republican said. Wes Mader, a Bush campaign organizer, told me, "A lot of us are fed up with the urban lifestyle. I would not want to see my grandchildren raised in downtown Minneapolis in an environment that is different from the one out here. I want to split my own wood and be less dependent on government." Randy Penrod, a 285-pound rugby player and Scott County's Republican Party chair, said that Republicans and Democrats have a basic difference: "I have a theory that the farther away you are from another human being, the more likely you are to be a Republican."

  New York Times columnist David Brooks described the exurbs in his impressionistic 2004 book On Paradise Drive. After these fast-growing counties appeared to have reelected Bush that year, there was a mini-burst of research into what the exurbs were all about. The research was never particularly rewarding because nobody could agree on how an exurb differed from a suburb or a rural community. But anyone who has visited the outskirts of a U.S. city recently has seen these communities clinging to the hull of the city, just outside the older suburbs. Bob Cushing and I discovered that in counties where populations were growing fast and where a high percentage of people commuted across county lines to work (two-thirds of Scott County's workers leave the county for their jobs), the 2004 presidential vote was heavily Republican. But it was difficult to single out places that were purely exurban. The best study found that a whopping 6 percent of the people living in large metro areas could be found in an exurb—hardly enough of a vote to be changing the dynamics of presidential elections.10

  To understand who voted for Bush—and to see how the country was sorting—a more useful calculation is the one proposed by Randy Penrod: population density. Republicans were moving into places where people lived farther apart; Democrats were clustering in places where people lived closer together. According to political scientist Michael Harrington, the average population density for counties voting for Bush was 108 people per square mile in 2000 and no people per square mile in 2004. Counties voting for Al Gore in 2000 averaged 739 people per square mile. Those voting for John Kerry in 2004 averaged 836 people per square mile. "As population density steadily decreases from the urban core to the rural periphery, Mr. Bush's share of the vote increases from 24 percent to more than 60 percent," Harrington wrote.11 Robert Lang and Thomas Sanchez saw a straight-line relationship between population density and the 2004 vote. "At each greater increment of urban intensity, Democrat John Kerry received a higher proportion of the vote," the two Virginia Tech demographers wrote. "There is a metropolitan political gradient in the big US metro areas: the center tilts to Democrats and the fringe to Republicans."12 The phenomenon occurred in staunchly blue and red states alike. In Bush's former hometown of Dallas, Kerry came within a percentage point of winning Dallas County, which voted in a Hispanic lesbian as sheriff in the same election. Bush won all of Dallas's suburban counties by at least 40 percentage points. Republicans didn't spend much time looking for votes in downtown Portland, however. The Bush campaign sent workers to precincts in the "farthest reaches of Multnomah County," one Bush organizer told me. They targeted the neighborhoods with the newest mortgages—and the largest expanses of lawn.

  Thirty years ago, before the Big Sort, the spatial arrangement of voters was more balanced. In 1976, the average Democratic county in the presidential election had a slightly smaller population than the average Republican county. Over the next two generations, however, people made choices about how and where they wanted to live. Democrats gravitated toward cities. Republicans moved where there was a bit more grass to be mowed. It wasn't the suburban turf that transformed people into Republicans; nor did the city streets turn people Democratic. Instead, the cheek-by-jowl existence of the city attracted a different kind of person than the wide expanses of the exurbs. The change in geography was really a sorting by lifestyle and, ultimately, by political party.

  Ideology Comes to Rural America

  Doug Breese ranches land his grandfather began piecing together in 1905. Homesteaders who had come to central Oregon realized that they weren't making any money and likely never would, so Breese's granddad was able to pick up land in Crook County at fifty cents an acre. Ranching is a make-do occupation, and ranchers are some of the world's best recyclers. The pipe running water from a spring to the Breese homestead was recovered from San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. The ranch is now a model of flexible production operating in a world market. Breese points from his pickup window to the pasture where he's experimenting with grass-fed beef. He grew peppermint until the Russians and Brazilians undercut his price by a third. He produced garlic seed one year, sold it for twelve cents a pound, and made money. The Chinese then put garlic seed on the market for two cents a pound. "It's okay," he said, in the best manner of a former president of the Oregon Farm Bureau. "They're learning to produce just like we learned to produce."

  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 th
ey 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."

  The Strict Father/Nurturant Parent Divide

  Linguist George Lakoff described American society as divided between "two different forms of family-based morality": the "strict father" and the "nurturant parent."13 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.14 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.* 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 libe
ral 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.

  Living on Islands

  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."17