Greater Idaho is a pipe dream, a symptom of a deeper problem: the urban-rural divide | Opinion

The Idaho House last week voted to advance a resolution in support of so-called Greater Idaho, which would redraw the border between Oregon and Idaho to somewhere in the vicinity of Bend, chopping off most of the red portions of the Beaver State and tacking them onto the Gem State.

Doing so, proponents say, would free the vast rural areas of eastern Oregon from the oppressive rule of Portland and other urban population centers, and join it to rural, culturally similar Idaho.

The easy thing to say about Greater Idaho is that it’s ridiculous — and that’s true. The interstate compact required would need to get through Congress, as well as both the Oregon and Idaho legislatures.

Getting Congress to do much of anything has been virtually impossible for about a quarter-century or so, absent full one-party control. And Oregon would have to agree to cede more than half of its landmass, an unthinkable proposition.

So it’s a joke. But there is a serious problem contained within this persistent idea.

Greater Idaho is an embodiment of the pipe dream that we can all retire to our corners, where everyone agrees with us and nobody proposes anything we don’t like. It is a kind of political childishness. It’s the idea that you don’t need to build bridges across political divisions; you just need a new map.

It’s dangerous not as a policy, but as a political effect. And it’s spreading.

Rising calls for secession

The interesting question isn’t: Will Greater Idaho happen? It won’t.

The interesting question is: Why has such an effort arisen now?

Because it isn’t just here where there are proposals to redraw state or national borders to build ideologically homogeneous units. There’s a movement advocating for the secession of Texas. There’s an effort for rural parts of Illinois to secede from the urban areas around Chicago. There’s a movement to break up California. Last year, New Hampshire held hearings on seceding from the United States to become its own country.

Each of these proposals is as unserious as Greater Idaho. But there are common threads among them. They’re led by conservatives. They draw their support from rural areas. They promote the notion that they are preserving traditional values and a rural way of life against encroaching urban cosmopolitanism.

This follows a yearslong pattern, advancing since the early 1990s, of geographic polarization.

Urban/rural polarization

In 2020, researchers from the University of Maryland and the Washington University in St. Louis did a detailed study of how where you live — and specifically how many people you live near — influences your political positions.

As the researchers noted, it was obvious for a long time that there was an urban/rural political division in America, but the general assumption was that this had to do with the differing racial, economic and cultural composition of rural and urban voters. But they found that even after controlling for race, income and a host of other factors, whether you live in a city or the country still has an independent effect on your political views.

And the converse is true, too: Your political views do a lot to determine where you live. The median Democrat lives 12 miles from a city center, the median independent 17 miles and the median Republican 20 miles, according to their findings. The median Republican lives in an area with fewer than 600 people per square mile, while the median Democrat lives in an area with about 1,200 people per square mile.

A 2021 paper by researchers from the London School of Economics and the Arctic University of Norway found that this urban/rural political divide is present in countries throughout the world, though it is much stronger in wealthier countries like the United States than in poorer ones.

In a guest essay last month in the New York Times reviewing a host of recent research, Thomas Edsall warned the cementation of polarized ideological divisions into patterns of living raised serious risks.

“Urban-rural ‘apartheid’ further reinforces ideological and affective polarization,” he wrote. “The geographic separation of Republicans and Democrats makes partisan crosscutting experiences at work, in friendships, in community gatherings, at school or in local government — all key to reducing polarization — increasingly unlikely to occur.

“Geographic barriers between Republicans and Democrats — of those holding traditional values and those choosing to reject or reinterpret those values — reinforce what scholars now call the calcification of difference. As conflict and hostility become embedded in the structure of where people live, the likelihood increases of seeing adversaries as less than fully human.”

We’ve seen plenty of that in Idaho.

From polarization to enmity

One supporter of Greater Idaho said during a committee hearing that he felt liberals in Oregon were taking delight in attacking conservatives and their way of life. He felt there were efforts to make guns impossible to own and to make it impossible to raise livestock.

Liberals in Idaho understand that feeling.

The Idaho Freedom Foundation used to take basically libertarian positions on most issues. It advocated smaller government, for example, but its big fight of 2016 was to make CBD oil, a derivative of hemp, legal. It was a fight against the culturally conservative Republican establishment on behalf of criminalized families.

Now its main enemy seems to be not big government but “wokeness” — not policy but culture. The enemy no longer seems to be state power, but the political minority’s way of life.

Ammon Bundy, known for leading protests outside officials’ homes and leading the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — and the Freedom Foundation’s pick for governor — made his biggest splash during campaign season by selling exactly this message. If elected governor, he promised, he’d pay liberals to move out of the state.

The increasing fixation of the Republican supermajority in the Idaho Legislature on the state’s tiny transgender community fits this mold, as well. The raft of yearly policies — trans kids can’t play sports or get gender-affirming medical care, trans people can’t get new birth certificates, books that mention gay people are pornography — comes with the constant rhetorical insistence that there are only two biological sexes, and that they are immutable (a strictly irrelevant point). The aim of the attack seems to be not mainly legal (most of the bills get halted in federal court) but cultural: delegitimizing the very existence of transgender people.

So you could understand why some parts of Idaho might want to be part a majority-Democratic Greater Montana (a proposal jokingly floated by Rep. Colin Nash, D-Boise). But the truth is, these problems can’t be solved by moving borders.

Moving borders solves nothing

The fundamental reason polarization can’t be solved with a new map is that today’s political divisions aren’t like those ahead of the Civil War. You can’t divide people neatly with a line. It isn’t North versus South or East versus West.

The modern American political division is overwhelmingly between urban and rural areas. But there is no conceivable way to collect the rural areas into one set of political divisions and the urban areas into another.

And even if you could, that wouldn’t get rid of the problem.

According to 2018 research by Pew, the average urban county in America had something like a 30-point Democratic lean, while the average rural county had around a 20-point Republican lean. That’s a massive gap. It means no election there will be competitive in a winner-take-all system.

But it still means about one in three urban residents lean Republican, and about two in five rural residents lean Democratic. Polarization extends only so far. More than a quarter of Kootenai and Bonneville counties voted for Joe Biden. One in five people in Custer and Lemhi counties voted for Biden.

No matter where you draw the state’s boundaries, there will remain major divisions within it — which puts you right back where you started. There’s always a very large group of people in the political minority. This isn’t a problem you can solve with a new map.

What the Greater Idaho movement represents is a mix of incredible naïveté and bottomless pessimism. It is the notion that we can all come together to agree that our political differences have become completely irreconcilable.

That is a doomed project, but more than that, it’s a childish urge that needs to be driven out of our political imagination.

Here are the unavoidable facts: We have to live with one another. There’s no way around it. Our coexistence may be peaceful or bitter — that is up to us — but we will coexist. Anyone who tells you something different is lying, either to themselves or to you.

Where do you stand in the Greater Idaho debate?

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman based in eastern Idaho.