Finding Common Ground is Hard but Worth the Effort

Thoughts on how we recover the social cohesion that used to make the US population so formidable a friend or foe.

While reading a December 3rd, 2021 New York Times article on vaccine hesitancy, I was moved to check on the range of responses among Oregon counties. It’s pretty wide: from 72% of “all residents age 12+ fully vaccinated” in Benton County to 38% in Lake County. Cases of the virus largely mirror vaccination rates: your odds of contracting the virus are one in 14 in Benton County, one in seven in Lake (one in five in Umatilla and Malheur).

The same pattern appears across the state (and nation): more vaccinations and fewer cases (and deaths) in the urban, more progressive counties; fewer vaccinations, more cases and deaths in the rural and more conservative counties.

Oregonians and Americans are divided not only in political views and family values but even in our willingness to observe the data of science and public health, and to draw objective conclusions. 

Okay, that’s not news. But reflecting on it, I found myself wondering whether ascribing the phenomena to differences of education, income, class and geography tells enough of the story. And recalling — this might appear a little off the subject — the designs of Captain Jack Aubrey for assembling disconnected tars and pressed landsmen into a ship’s crew that functioned as a unit at sea and stood shoulder to shoulder on land. Jack always hoped for a powerful storm or a brisk action with the enemy to weld a crew together.

(Apologies to those unfortunate readers who have not consumed Patrick O’Brian’s “Aubrey/Maturin” novels of early 19th Century British naval actions in conflict with Napoleon’s forces at sea. Lots to learn there, and enjoy.)

The United States had two such enveloping experiences back-to-back in the 20th Century: the Depression and WWII. In the one or two generations that followed those experiences, we had a firm grasp on the value of social cohesion. There was a notable exception of course; Whites weren’t much interested in cohering with Blacks. 

But the vast majority of the population, when facing a mid-1950’s decision whether to get polio shots, lined up around to block to do so. Voting was a right for all and a privilege for most, not a burdensome chore. People joined all manner of social organizations, from the PTA to the Elks/Moose/Lions Clubs. Businessmen (another departure from communal cohesion—males dominated public and private activities) organized local Rotary clubs. While nobody much liked the draft, it wasn’t widely resisted until we were knee-deep in paddy mud in the mid-60’s.  

The slippage started — arguably — with Civil Rights conflicts in the South and shipping boys (including me) to Viet Nam. By 1980 Reagan could say, with impunity, that government wasn’t the solution, it was the problem (imagine, in the 1930’s, anyone other than a Wall Street mogul saying that about FDR).

We can concede that Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for this slippage. But the policies of Ds have generally called for extending the benefits of education, public health and other public goods to all (most “all” anyway) while the actions of the R’s in recent years have consistently atomized society, insisting that individual initiative and associated outcomes should always be preferred to public goods. Republicans have demanded that the market be the arbiter of who wins and who loses in this country. At the same time, they have insisted that the “Makers” who presumably make the economy hum should be nourished with tax cuts and subsidies.

R policies and ideologies (and periodic D efforts to triangulate rather than defend liberalism) have left many to fend for themselves . . . and R’s have sold this as a public good. But we know that not all people can fully fend for themselves in all circumstances. Being born in the wrong zip code is destiny for many. Being born into a single-parent household that struggles financially is destiny. Catastrophic illness resulting in catastrophic health care costs can be a ruinous financial destiny and a short road to bankruptcy.

Too often R ideology leaves our destiny up to each of us to shoulder individually. Absent efforts to reshape those destinies, too many Oregonians and Americans will simply have to accept bad hands in the poker game of life.

Not all Republican’s subscribe to the more extreme expressions of policies that leave individuals to fend for themselves even when dealt a seven, two off-suit (the worst hand in poker). But the intra-party resistance is weak, and its ranks are relentlessly thinned by the Party apparatchik.

How do we recover the social cohesion that used to make the US population so formidable a friend or foe? How do we decrease the odds of folks merely playing out the statistically awful hands they’ve been dealt?

I might have thought collectively weathering the COVID storm could close some of these seams, but vaccine attitudes seem too dominated by embedded perspective and prior circumstance to so respond. Too many of us are less interested in having our neighbor’s back than in defending our personal right to choose.  

Short of hoping for a more coherent war or another especially vicious variant to realign us, are there untested options that might bring us together? 

So far, a national voters rights bill isn’t one of them. But local and state experiments with new voting practices (ranked choice; “approval” voting; “quadratic” voting) could reveal processes that devalue divisiveness. Another potential experiment: pursuing the National Popular Vote. If eliminating the Electoral College remains a non-starter, can we defang it by more states adopting the “National Popular Vote” (Oregon joined this movement in 2019)? 

Possibly the single most influential departure from business-as-usual would be a revival of the strategy that created the Republican Party in the 1850’s out of disaffected Whigs. An active, collaborative group of secession-minded conservative R’s (and perhaps some centrist D’s also) could be competing for national center-right voters.  

State-level Republicans, including Oregon R’s, have this option open locally. Most Rs will recoil at the thought of torpedoing their party’s electoral chances by joining an upstart political effort. They should recall that within a short ten years from 1850, a newly-competitive Republican Party plucked Abraham Lincoln out of relative prairie obscurity and thrust him into the White House. 

Oregon, with its legacy history of moderate Republicans (including my Democratic family’s good friend Mark Hatfield), could be fertile soil for planting and nurturing such initiatives.

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In and out of politics, policy, government (local/state/federal) the energy business, and energy/climate advocacy. Have served in policy and advocacy positions at all levels. Focused since 1990 on environmental externalities, energy and climate.