How the West Was Lost
By Daniel Kemmis
Next year will mark the bicentennial both of Thomas Jefferson's victory in the 1800 presidential election and the birth of the Democratic Party, which Jefferson created to win control of the new government. The approach of those anniversaries should prompt Democrats to ask not only how their party can win the next election, but how it can position itself to shape history during its third century.
For much of its existence, the Democratic Party was referred to by friend and foe alike simply as "The Democracy." It got that name because it vigorously and stubbornly espoused the cause of democracy in the face of substantial segments of American society that had grave doubts about it. Jefferson was a democrat long before he founded the Democratic Party. He was acutely aware that the enterprise of democracy -- of people collectively governing their lives and shaping their world was both a satisfying and a risky undertaking. Democracy has survived because the democratic shaping of a world together is such an invigorating and ennobling enterprise. People become larger, better, more creative, and more dignified when they assume responsibility for governing themselves.
But democracy does not perpetuate itself automatically. Only constant vigilance and constant nurturing of the conditions that sustain democracy can guarantee its perpetuation. In the end, Jefferson became convinced that one of those conditions was a political party whose central purpose was to guard and advance the cause of democracy itself.
If Jefferson could return to Washington, he almost certainly would be appalled by today's remote, unresponsive, bought-and-sold decisionmaking system and its corrosive effects on the polity. The radical volatility of the electorate may prove to be the dominant political feature of our time. The fortunes of the Democrats and Republicans have dramatically reversed and re-reversed themselves this decade. The Democrats up in 1992, dismally down in 1994, up again in 1996 and 1998 have no good reason to think such wild swings have ended. What we are witnessing is not a political realignment but a deepening crisis of democracy itself. Voters are fed up with both parties. Members of the party whose name rings proudly of democracy should be especially troubled by this trend.
Jefferson would remind us that the reason to have a Democratic Party is not to deliver the goods to carefully calculated coalitions, but to help citizens govern themselves and reap the satisfactions of self-government.
If Democrats could only remember what it meant for their party to be known as "The Democracy," they might discover their gravest shortcomings. They also might discover that rededicating the party to the cause of self-government would be very good politics that it might be the best platform upon which to construct a sustainable majority for the next century.
The best way to understand both the party's greatest problem and its best opportunity is to examine its status in the region where the problem simply cannot be denied and where the opportunity is waiting to be seized the interior West.
The Solid Republican West
Much has been made of the Republican Party's domination of the South. But Republicans exercise even more solid control over the interior West. Three-quarters of the congressional districts in that region are held by Republicans, and there are now no Democratic governors in the 1,200-mile-wide swath between Missouri and Iowa and the Pacific Coast states.
I am from Montana, and I happened to be on the East Coast during the 1998 elections. There, I heard a leading Democratic tactician analyze the election results and draw lessons for 2000 from them. One of the recommendations had to do with consolidating Democratic gains in what was threatening to become the solidly Republican South. Emboldened by this mention of regional politics, I asked if Democrats were at all concerned about the Republicans' tightening grip on the West.
The hard-boiled reply was: "There isn't anybody there. There are fewer electoral votes in the interior West than in Pennsylvania. We have to concentrate our attention where the votes are."
Feeling a little like chopped liver, I contented myself with observing that since feeling like you count for something is so fundamental to democratic citizenship, a democratic party should be wary of an approach that tells a whole class of people they don't count.
The alienation of the West can teach Democrats a great deal about the current crisis of democracy and about how it can be reversed.
Each region of the country has certain features that shape both the lives of its inhabitants and its political cli- mate. For the West, the foremost feature is the power and presence of its landscape. No other region even comes close to the West's expansiveness in proportion to its population. Land is ubiquitous in every dimension of Western life. Map America's public lands, and you have essentially mapped the West which brings us to the heart of the Democratic Party's weakness in the region.
In terms of public policy and politics, what distinguishes the Rocky Mountain West most sharply from the rest of the country is the role of public lands. Of all the land owned by the national government, more than 90 percent is located in 12 Western states. The U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management alone "own" more than a third of the West. This overwhelming federal presence accounts for Republican hegemony of the region more than any other factor. This is because Westerners see Democrats as the party most supportive of the national government's domination of the West through land and resource regulation. Republicans, meanwhile, seem eager to give Westerners some meaningful control of their own beloved landscape. Democrats have long and successfully supported federal protection of "national interests" in the region, above all against Westerners themselves. They vigorously defend (while Republicans often attack) both the national status of public lands and the national approach to environmental protection. To Westerners, Democrats seem never to tire of telling them, "We absolutely do not trust you to care for the place you have chosen to inhabit."
What makes the current crisis of the Democratic Party in the West so difficult to resolve is the fact that the party arrived at this undemocratic position by following eminently sound democratic principles.
The Nationalization of Democracy
For many Americans, the public lands are among the noblest achievements of our national democracy. They stand for the farsighted wisdom and stewardship of which we as a nation are capable at our collective best. If we go back to the beginning of this century when this national initiative began, we find the roots of both the present-day philosophy of the Democratic Party and of the party's current disastrous weakness in the West.
At the turn of the last century, the expansion of corporate power raised hard questions about what role government should play in people's lives. Many politicians and policymakers favored a stronger role for the national government. Others recognized that such an approach would mark a departure from one of Jefferson's most deep-seated commitments: that of decentralized government.
The Democratic Party did eventually abandon this Jeffersonian principle in favor of a vastly expanded role for government in public life. At the time, this could be defended as a soundly Jeffersonian move, for Jefferson understood that responsiveness and flexibility are key to perpetuating democracy over time. If you are not seriously testing and occasionally recasting the forms of government you have inherited, Jefferson would argue that you have lost your democratic edge.
Ever since Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, the nationalization of our public life has steadily accumulated force, from Woodrow Wilson's Federal Reserve system to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, through the 1960s war on poverty and that decade's reintroduction of national policy into the field of race relations. Those years also saw the environmental movement using national power for its laudable ends through such enactments as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Wilderness Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.
The good done by national environmental legislation has undoubtedly been historic in its proportions. But it has also produced an unintended regional side effect. Because of the concentration of public lands in the West, the national environmental framework has fallen far more heavily on this region than on any other. It has left a majority of Westerners feeling tyrannized and colonized. Jefferson, who built his political career out of precisely such feelings, might well say that the party he founded is now in such pathetic shape in the West because it has not responded to Westerners' most genuinely democratic aspirations.
But then these are people who essentially don't exist in the tactical calculations of the national Democratic Party. "There's nobody there," at least not by comparison to the rich harvests of non-Western environmentalists residing in states without national forests or grasslands but with many electoral votes. So far, the Democrats have found the tradeoff of non-Western environmental votes for Western Republican hegemony perfectly acceptable. Given Vice President Gore's high standing with and responsiveness to national environmentalists, we have to expect this same strategy will extend into the 2000 campaign.
I pray it will not take the catastrophe of losing the White House in 2000 to persuade Democrats to rethink this approach. Then they would almost certainly find themselves reviewing an Electoral College map with essentially no Democratic votes from the interior West and a Senate bereft of Western Democrats. Before that happens, Democrats should begin questioning the wisdom of writing off an entire region. We should re-examine the national democratic presumptions that lost us that region and the more enduring democratic principles that could regain it.
The Emerging Western Democracy
Jefferson, whose earliest anti-colonial political base had been in western Virginia, was always looking even farther west, always trying to discern what lay out there and what might become of it. As we approach the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition, we might take the occasion to see with open Jeffersonian eyes what is happening in the West that always fascinated him. More than 30 years ago, Wallace Stegner wrote in The Sound of Mountain Water: Angry as one may be at what heedless men have done and still do to a noble habitat, one cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
For several decades after Stegner wrote those lines, it would have been almost impossible to find any but the most scattered bits of evidence of Westerners learning lessons of cooperation. But then, against all odds, home-grown democracy began to appear in the West and soon began to gather force in a way that would eventually make Stegner appear prophetic indeed.
This is the story of what New Democrats call "civic environmentalism" the steadily growing number of local agreements among Western environmentalists, ranchers, loggers, miners, and recreationists about how land should be managed in their particular river drainage or their ecosystem (see "A River Runs Through It," TND, May/June 1999). The list of such local collaborative efforts is growing too fast now to be catalogued, but names like the Henry's Fork Watershed Council, the Quincy Library Group, the Willapa Alliance, the Malpai Borderlands Group, and the Applegate Partnership are beginning to add up to a matter of genuinely historical proportions. Westerners on both sides of the political fence are coming to believe they can do better by their communities, their economies, and their ecosystems by working together outside the established, centralized governing framework that had only taught them how to be enemies.
The kind of work people have to do in these collaborative settings is different from anything else they ever encounter in public life. It requires them to think harder, better, more creatively, to reach beyond themselves, to transcend what they already know and comfortably believe. It requires them to listen closely and actively to people they have never liked or trusted, to find a mutually beneficial solution. And the amazing thing is that it works. There are failures, of course, but people are finding that very often they can create something effective and lasting, not only on the ground but within and among themselves. This democratically invigorating atmosphere stands in stark contrast to the enervating atmosphere of the national decisionmaking morass. Solving tough problems together forces people to reach beyond their narrow selves and enables them to discover together a wisdom they do not have as individuals. That is the absolute essence of being a democratic people.
For the Democratic Party to reverse its dismal fortunes in the West, it must begin questioning, in a radically Jeffersonian way, its unblinking support for a heavily centralized approach to public lands. It should recognize and celebrate the fact that given the chance to develop their native democratic capacities, Westerners will do far better by their landscape than the outmoded national system can possibly do. And a Democratic Party that meets democratic people on their own terms will fare far better with those people than a party that can only tell them how misguided they are.
A "democratic" Resurgence
The small-d "democratic" resurgence so evident across the West is by no means confined to that region. In tens of thousands of communities around the country, people are learning to solve problems in exactly this way. This is the nascent democracy that the Democratic Party should cultivate and nurture. These are the people whose democratic impulses should become the core of a sustainable Democratic majority.
But first, the party must stop focusing so exclusively on what people want as individuals and begin looking instead at what people in hundreds of thousands of settings are trying to do together, for the sake of their communities, their children, and their ecosystems: create parks and trails together; fight drugs on their block; work together to restore a stream to ecological health. These people, who now number in the millions, are democrats. Some are also registered Democrats, but most are not and some never will be. But if the party were to begin seeking these people out, then a new, vibrant majority worthy of the grand old name of "The Democracy" might soon emerge.
Choosing Between Timber and Tourists
On Oct. 13, President Clinton ordered an environmental review process that could result in more than 40 million acres of national forests and grasslands, mainly in the West, being declared permanent wilderness. Environmentalists cheered and conservative lawmakers jeered this latest installment in the debate over the nation's 192 million acres of public forest, which is spread across 46 states and territories. Presently, about 35 million acres of national forest are designated as wilderness.
For timber producers on public lands, the announcement marked a major escalation of the Clinton administration's quest to shift the mission of the U.S. Forest Service from supplying timber to conservation. For the past 18 months, the administration has banned road-building in public forests, forestalling further timber cutting. Less than 10 percent of U.S. timber production comes from public forests. Some 393 million acres of private forests -- twice the size of the Forest Service holdings -- account for more than 90 percent of domestic production.
Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck argues that public forests are more valuable to the nation today as preserves and places of recreation than as potential board-feet of lumber. National forests are visited roughly 800 million times a year by campers, hikers, outdoorsmen, and others, more than the national parks or any other land-management agency or jurisdiction. According to the Forest Service, "logging traffic now accounts for only one-half of 1 percent of all forest road use. By contrast, recreational road use has soared to 13 times its 1950 level." Rather than build roads, Dombeck would prefer to use more of his agency's budget to maintain roads and preserve ecologically valuable forests.
Westerners are rankled less by the Clinton administration's quest for wilderness preservation than by the means by which the federal government traditionally has pursued that goal. The administration has sometimes issued environmental and land-preservation dictums without seeking the support of a broad range of state and local interests. It remains to be seen whether the environmental review process Clinton ordered in October fits the old pattern or begins to expand our wilderness lands in a more constructive and collaborative fashion.
-- Debra S. Knopman
Daniel Kemmis served as minority leader and speaker of the Montana House of Representatives and as mayor of Missoula, Mont. He is the director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at The University of Montana. This essay is a product of Kemmis' Institute of Polities Fellowship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in the fall of 1998.