Democracy works well when people have similar general goals and just disagree about how to accomplish them. It doesn’t work well when people have opposing goals. Thus I have a lot of sympathy for these people even though I disagree with their politics. Why should they have to follow the rules set by culturally dissimilar coastal cities far away rather than the rules set by much more similar and much closer Idaho?
If I could remake the US government from scratch, I think I might create something like the self-governing cities of medieval Europe. The Democratic/Republican divide is largely an urban/rural one, and this way both the urban and the rural areas would have the local governments and the representatives that the majority wanted. Real-world state lines do a poor job of demarcating regions where most of the people have similar values. A better system is possible, but in practice there’s too much inertia to make such large changes.
What happens to queer people who happen to be born in rural areas, in your model?
The same thing that already happens to most of them now, I suppose: their basic rights are protected by the Constitution but if they want to live in a community that welcomes them then they might need to move. In the specific situation this article is about, the queer people in eastern Oregon would have to deal with the same issues that the queer people in Idaho already deal with.
In general, I sympathize with the desire to rescue people from the customs of their community, but I don’t think that doing so by imposing our customs on their community is a good idea except in the most extreme cases. It violates the golden rule: I wouldn’t want outsiders imposing their customs on me, even if someone in my community was being mistreated according to the customs of those outsiders. It also doesn’t seem to work very well in practice. It has failed in extreme cases like the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and I fear that it is currently failing in the USA.
They die, of course.
So do the poor and anyone who has the misfortune of not being born a rich landowner.
There are already solid-red states with no blue urban areas. I suppose it’s technically true that people die in these states (all humans are mortal) but the implication that everyone there except rich landowners is likely to die prematurely is ridiculous.
Idaho?
Prediction: Literally everything they are complaining about, will be an instance where they’re unhappy about the will of the majority of Oregonians
Brb
Edit: Yeah pretty much
Crook county voted for Donald Trump, a Republican governor, against decriminalising drugs and against restrictions on gun ownership. The state went the other way every time.
Fuckin’ democracy
They want to get rid of agriculture
you need to drive an electric car
Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that my government would say, ‘You can’t go to church.’”
IDK, man. I do kind of get it; I think the underlying complaint is probably more just that no one likes feeling like everyone in their community looks at it one way, and there’s a force from outside preventing them from doing it that way when they mostly want to (like drug legalization, or having to wear masks or closing churches during Covid). That part honestly does make some sense to me.
I’d be curious how much is some real agriculture or legislative issue where they actually were being overridden, and how much is culture-war bullshit that doesn’t impact their daily lives in any way except when they see it on the propaganda-news that’s trying to get them all riled up. But I had more sympathy reading about it than I thought I would.
LET THEM JOIN IDAHO!!!
CASCADIA NOW!!!
The United States has he right to travel. There is nothing stopping them from moving to Idaho.
Yeah, but, y’see, actual Idaho kinda sucks. They want the benefits of being in a blue state while complaining about it.
Honestly, yah.
See how much they want it when they have to start paying tariffs to ship their potatoes into the US.
The folks in Jackson and Josephine county, who want to join Idaho, are so anti-tax, they had to reduce police and fire services because they wouldn’t vote for local funding bonds.
These folks are going to be DRAMATICALLY surprised to learn, as Idahoans, they now have a 6% sales tax.
I wouldn’t say Jackson or Josephine county “want” to join Idaho. There has not really been political talk or any votes for such a thing. The counties that want to join Idaho are east of Jackson county and have much smaller population. Anecdotally, everyone I know in both counties are proud Oregonians and would never vote for such a thing, even if they do hate Portland. The anti-tax sentiment is a separate issue all together.
We don’t have a democracy, we are a constitutional republic
This is the new battle cry of American fascism.
The opening of the American Declaration of Independence literally states that the country is going to establish a government that derives “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The opening of the American Declaration of Independence literally states that the country is going to establish a government that derives “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
To play devil’s advocate, you could argue that’s why the Eastern Oregonian fascists should be allowed to join Idaho- because they don’t consent to be governed by the state legislature.
(Of course, the real problem is that these assholes are increasingly rejecting the concept of government altogether.)
I don’t understand this argument. The Declaration of Independence is not part of the constitution so it’s not part of a valid legal argument. as I understand it the Constitution does not give individual citizens the right to elect the State that governs them ( beyond by moving obviously).
You’re right, which is why the argument made is a moral one, not a legal one. If you want a more clear-cut example, think about the American South during the US Civil War. They no longer consented to being governed by Washington, so an argument could be made that the North was morally wrong to force the South to remain in the Union. However, as established in Texas v. White in 1869 there was no (and still isn’t) a legal mechanism for a state to leave the Union, therefore the South couldn’t legally secede.
The same legal precedent applies in this case as well. There isn’t any way (currently, anyhow) for states to redraw their boundaries, so even if allowing the eastern Oregon fascists to join Idaho is the morally-correct action (which is not a position I endorse, just presenting the reasoning) they don’t have a legal method of doing so.
I asked him what he meant by that distinction.
“We have a constitution that lays down the laws for us. As a republic, the individual is protected. So the minority can be protected. It’s not just majority rules.”
Agreed, so we let homosexual couples get married, pregnant women make their own health care decisions, treat transgendered people with respect, and take measures to prevent at-risk individuals from getting a deadly virus.
