Yes, the West is getting purple... blue even The Big Strategy

Ryan Sager makes a great observation, not every rural stretch of the US is the same, and not every stretch of Red America is home to Ralph Reed and the Southern Baptist convention.

Though, he fails to finish the deal and fill in where exactly Democrats are able to appeal to Western libertarians.

As MassInc pointed out a few years ago, the more the Republican Party leans over towards Southernism, the more they put the West into the Democratic column:

More recently, Sagebrush has had to compete with Southern Comfort for the soul of the Republican Party. One difference between the two regions is that Sagebrush seems more ambivalent toward religious conservatism. Goldwater himself expressed disdain for Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority during his last Senate term, and another senator from Arizona, John McCain, pretty much burned his bridges to fundamentalist groups during his 2000 presidential run. Vice President Dick Cheney, who once represented Wyoming in the US House, is a forceful voice for conservatism on fiscal and foreign-policy issues but seems less enthusiastic about advocating fundamentalist views on gay rights and other cultural issues. Yet the region is still represented by many Republicans in the moralist wing of the party, including Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a leader of the anti-abortion movement, and Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, the driving force behind a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages.

Yes, the West is not the South. And, this should scare the living crap out of Republicans:

As the Republican Party tilts on its South-West axis, increasingly favoring southern values (religion, morality, tradition) over western ones (freedom, independence, privacy), the Democrats have been presented with a tremendous opportunity. If the Republican Party doesn't want to lose its hold over all of the West, as it lost hold of once-reliable California more than a decade ago, its leaders are going to have to rethink their embrace of big-government, big-religion conservatism.

Why? The interior West is not the South -- not by demography and not by ideology.

...

In other words, while the interior West is just as fiscally conservative as the South, it is clearly more socially libertarian. (Other hints on this front include medical marijuana laws out West, resolutions against the Patriot Act passed by legislatures out West and a rebellion against the No Child Left Behind Act by Colorado and Utah.) And as the Republican Party embraces the big government it once fought against, and increasingly stakes its political fortunes on cultural hot-buttons such as gay marriage and flag burning, libertarian-minded voters are up for grabs.

The question that Sager doesn't answer is how Democratic appeal to the Sagebrushers that seem to typify what Republicans think of the West. The answer isn't a wholesale abandonment of Democratic values of active government, but rather a rethinking of how we do that. We say, "Yes, the federal government will not have the answers, but we here do. We need to work together here to make this work."

We do that by strongly picking up the civic republican mantle. If you haven't read Daniel Kemmis's This Sovereign Land, pick it up.

For Democrats in the West, good government can't mean the federal government. Good government has to be smart, local and engaged. By rebranding the party in the West as the party of engagement, or civic republicanism or being a smart and local problem solver, we directly address the reasons why so many people in the West end up hating government.

Government is the West for the past century has been distant, and for all the wrong reason such as environmental protection and economic development, had a Democratic face. The distant bureaucracy in Washington was Democrat, the local hell raiser who told you to screw the government was Republican.

Western Democrats though are coming home to the West, and crafting smart local solutions to problems the federal government had been stubbing its toes on.

Emmett O'Connell | July 13, 2006 | Comment on This Post (2 so far) Permalink: Yes, the West is getting purple... blue even The Big Strategy

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