Liberal Talk Radio

Yet another resolution has been introduced into the Washington state legislature attempting to cleave the state in two along the “Cascade Curtain” which separates the rainy, trade-dependent, Democratic-leaning coastal region from the dry, agriculture-dependent, GOP-leaning inland empire. Eastern Washington’s mad, and I can see why. They keep losing statewide elections because they’re just slightly outnumbered by the Democrats on the coast. Sen. Maria Cantwell carried 4 of 39 counties in the state, and yet won the election against Republican Slade Gordon.

I know this proposal has next to zero chance of getting enacted, but let’s tease it out, because it’s a fun intellectual exercise. And what is a blog for, if not fun, intellectual exercise?

The red/blue divide in America, it has often been noted, is really a rural/urban divide. The states that go red do so because the rural counties outnumber the urban ones, and the states that go blue have population ratios in reverse. Hence the fight for the exurbs.

It seems to me, thinking about it now, that there are some serious benefits for both sides, as well as some major setbacks. And many of these depend on the implementation and how it fares over time.

For Eastern Washington, they would benefit from being more homogenous and Republcan, which they appear to value more than diversity. Says the resoluton’s sponsor, “It’s common sense. People who think alike should be united.” This, of course, would seem to fly in the face of 200 years of American traditions of tolerance and diversity, but that’s a debate for another time. If they want to be separated, then we should respect that. They would also get off the hook for expensive transit projects that, due to population and geography, tend to happen in Western Washington. Nationally, Republicans in general would benefit from the addition of two Republican senators and another Republican governor.

Here on the coast, we’d benefit in a couple of ways. First, we subsidize the East to a large degree. The cost of serving the poor, rural communities in the East is disproportionately high, so we’d get off the hook for that. We’d also be able to focus that money on solving the transit issues that plague this side of the state without having to worry about how Eastern Wa. feels about it.

There are, of course, many different ways to slice this issue. It gets at the heart of what function the States serve in America. They’re sort of a weird historical anomaly, given undue power due to the fact that 13 of them pre-date the country itself. I’ve often thought that the real way to deal with the issue is to abolish states altogether, and replace them with city-states, along the lines of the current metropolises (thereby merging Western Connecticut and Northern New Jersey with New York City, for example, and re-aligning New England around Boston).

I do believe in some degree of local control, so I don’t think that zero regional government is a good idea. It does seem however, that as with the fight for fair districts, there’s a good deal of philosophy to discuss before we get to the nuts and bolts of policy.