A Blue Person in a Red State or Vice Versa

If you live in a red state, say West Virginia for example, do you ever wish you lived in a blue state, that is a state with a bigger social safety net? Even if this comes at the cost of more regulation and higher taxes? If you’re a Republican, you’ll  probably say no. If you’re a Democrat, maybe yes. Higher taxes are pretty much not loved by anyone.

So what do you do if you’re the square peg in a round hole? If your state government doesn’t support your positions on social issues? You can protest, you can pray, you can suck it up, you can vote for people that believe like you do, or you can move.  More than likely if you stay put, you’ll feel resentment or just become complacent and unengaged. 

Politics was always intended to be the means of meeting in the middle – the art of the compromise, it was called.  And for some periods in American history, it worked that way. In fact, the Founding Fathers planned for the middle road. There was as much dissent about issues then as there is now, though the issues themselves were different. 

To find that middle way to bridge disagreements, they built into the Constitution the separation of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the government. There were checks and balances. Nobody got all of the pie, but nobody was left with an empty plate. There was always the assumption that there would be a diversity of opinion, but that we could keep the diversity from being divisive. Their good intentions failed most notably in the inability of the country to find a middle way on the slavery issue, the most divisive issue of the 19th century, which led to the tragedy of the Civil War. Almost nobody wants that kind of drama again.

The Founders laid out a good plan overall and there were times in our history when it actually worked well. There were two situations, though, in which it didn’t work well. One was when the government got so complacent or corrupt that it delegated its responsibilities to non-governmental players–generally organized religions, powerful institutions, and influential people (usually rich ones). The other was when the voters saw fit to elect governments representing only one point of view, thereby shielding themselves from information opposed to their dominating ideology.

Actually there’s a third situation that’s somewhat particular to the United States. That’s the fact that we are  50 states, plus other voting bodies, like the District of Columbia and our various territories. We are a Republic of those states and territories and they span numerous time zones, geologic and geographic regions, and human demographics all of which predispose each state  to different economic and social realities. These differences between voting blocks, through the centuries, have inclined each state or block of states to different histories and those varying histories have locked in different political profiles.

Take, for example, the position of the American south with its mild, wet climate operating over mostly flat or gently rolling hills providing fertile soils. A natural for high demand crops like sugarcane and cotton, assuming you have the workforce to plant and harvest them. The answer historically to a workforce scarcity was the slavery of Black Africans. It took 250 or so years to abolish the inhumanity of the practice, but it left its residue in discriminatory practices and outright racism that persisted for another hundred years. And it is still with us, to some lesser but nevertheless real extent.

Taking one more step in the chain of causation starting with the South’s beneficial climate, we have today’s American southerners preferring low taxes and just the minimal social services to get by. What help people need should come directly from their neighbors, especially church going neighbors, rather than from the government. It’s the ideology of “we look after our own.” 

To prove that it’s ideology, rather than political party that drives people’s choices for representation, the South changed its allegiance from Democrats to Republicans when the Democrats in the 1960’s voted to extend equal social and educational services to all people. This new policy of equality applied especially to those who had traditionally not been given much of the pie. 

The South became over some thirty years a solidly Republican voting block. "The government can’t tell us what to do and we’ll enforce that conviction by opposing the taxes and regulations that give it that license." Gradually the ideology that drove the South spread also to the prairie Midwest and much of the mountain West. Lo and behold, we are now a highly polarized country politically. One set of voices, respectively Republican or Democratic, in most of our states does the governing and one state’s priorities directly oppose another’s. We’re getting to the point that there’s talk on both sides of splitting the country. Hopefully, if that does happen, it won’t be violent. 

But situated as we are at present in the first quarter of the 21st century, the predominant conversation on both sides is still how to heal the divisions. The reality, though, is that locked-in state governments won’t do it. They resist doing it in fact. They want to perpetuate the powers and ideologies they currently embrace, even if it’s necessary to disenfranchise a whole large slice of the population. 

If there’s to be any change of direction in this deteriorating situation, it will have to come from the people that vote. They will have to be convinced that it will be better for them and for their descendants to reestablish political balance between the two main ideologies butting heads.

So, if you’re a blue person in a red state, you might need to make nice with your red state politicians and gently persuade them to consider the people who didn’t vote for them, but who they still must represent. You might also need to be more engaged in growing your voting block by convincing others of the benefits of having a variety of voices in the legislature. Naturally, if you’re a red person in a blue state, the same methods apply. But in both cases, your success in staying sane is to stay involved.