In our increasingly tribal culture, it matters what we choose to commit to vs. what we don’t. Our choices are shaping our culture and the places we live.
Recently, I had the honor of facilitating a retreat for a newly-formed group of county commissioners that were exploring how the group should define itself. Asked to share a “Colorado experience,” most in the group dialled up a defining story of why or how they came to Colorado. The group had only one “native,” yet self-identifying as “from Colorado” mattered.
Paths were varied for each commissioner between that major life decision to come to Colorado, and this retreat. As elected commissioners, their commitment as leaders in their respective chosen communities across the state was notable. These were leaders accustomed to digging in and getting things done. They had been recognized by their peers through elections. They were committed to improving their communities, and through this group improving policy at a state level. Oddly, there were those who might see the very existence of the group as showing a lack of commitment.
Their stories had a familiar structure. Part one was an empowering, affirmative experience: crossing a pass, descending a peak, meeting someone they admired—an experience that moved each enough to say, I need more of that because it will positively change the trajectory of my life. Part two was a negative experience powerful enough to move them to leave a place that didn’t match their desire for an opportunity–New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Kansas City were named specifically.
Knowing what leaders this room of individuals had become, I felt a little sad for these spurned places that failed to retain their talent or draw it back. I heard Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown” where his dad drove him around to show him “his hometown” with new resonance. Later in life Bruce still identified with his hometown in spite of all the years of change, the social unrest, the economic pain. I’ve had lyrics from that song repeating through my head as this administration tries to resuscitate industries that have passed—they are closing down the textile mill across the railroad track. Foreman said these jobs are going, boy, and they ain’t coming back. One point of the song was about identifying with a place and committing to it.
If staying in your hometown were the measure of this group, there was none of that. To a person, they had left those places, and I was struck by how emphatically each had chosen to leave. Why had they not chosen to stay and improve those places? Why had they not just become “serial” movers? What moved them to stay and work to improve their chosen communities?
These were not idle questions since the group had origins of dissatisfaction, feeling ineffective within another County Commissioner group. After years of battling from inside, these commissioners finally made an affirmative decision to try another path. Many at the retreat remained members of both groups, battling to change from the inside and from the outside. It was very clear which angle was more satisfying. Being in a new group with internal alignment completely changed the conversation, just like moving to a place that has opportunity and jobs does. The decision was paying off. They were affecting policy at a state level.
I too immigrated to Colorado from a place where my public service could also have been of use. I was exploring—which is a form of consumerism, I suppose and backed my way into being committed to place through public service. Leaving college, I knew I had a lot to learn about myself and how things worked. I had spent a number of years challenging my thinking in a classroom and wanted to do the same out “in the world.” I came to Western Colorado with no plan other than to live, work and learn from the small rural places that attracted me on the Western Slope—in turn, Hotchkiss, Lake City then for the past 22 years, the Town of Eagle. I left behind successive cocoons of progressivism, in Portland, Oregon then at college to get here. I banked on finding common ground with locals in those communities and I did, even though I knew from my rural Oregon family experience that I would likely not share their national politics. Often, I didn’t. It is a long, bookish story, but I made a choice to find a place to settle in, knowing I would understand that place and myself better for it from many angles over time. Finding common ground seemed more like a challenge than an impediment. I found that we had important things to do together.
America continues to be shaped by a somewhat new type of out-migration: people seeking to undo the messiness of our melting pot. People committing to finding like-mindedness over place. This is leading to a dramatic demographic, economic and political “sorting.” Our willingness to move has been an integrating force historically, a strength, though it now seems to be leading us away from equality and the opportunity to build a shared identity, which is weakning us. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop describes how the sort has effects on towns, neighbourhood, schools. To no small degree today’s reactionary, exclusionary politics have shaped and been shaped by voting blocks gerrymandered around those clusters. The sort is not uniting us, and it is marginalizing minority opinions which our democracy was structured to embrace in order to make it more resilient.
These mostly rural resort Commissioners felt marginalized by their staunchly conservative peers at a state level who had begun to do what Congressional partisans do—categorically exclude opposition rather than engage it and find middle-ground towards solutions. Good governance does not just benefit the “winning side.” But don’t tell that other group that. In a way, those at the retreat were sorted out.
I have seen it work differently. The existence of common ground amid differences was confirmed through my experience in local government. I problem solved for years side-by-side with people whom I did not know their party affiliation. No one was creating “wedge issues” to keep us from the sensible middle, either. We agreed or disagreed by turns, never allowing a label to keep us from a robust conversation focused on the business at hand.
It seems that willingness to seek common ground and work through differences is waning in rural Colorado as it is across the country. We are turning inside ourselves rather than turning outward outside of ourselves. Also waning is a willingness to seek solutions that have benefits outside of one’s perceived tribe.
Leaders also only want to work within the comfort of their group, and often tribes don’t contemplate or question the forces that define the group. They take positions that reinforce the boundaries. Our schools, neighbourhoods and towns are being sorted by like-mindedness that is the byproduct of a lack of commitment to engage with different groups, different voices, across the aisle. At a national level, American leaders, and the country seem unable or unwilling to question themselves or to cross rather arbitrary lines of affiliation to create coalitions and meet the most important policy challenges of our time. It is often forgotten how fluid issues that bound the political parties have been. The result has short-circuited the democratic process and led to a stalemate on each of the most important issues facing us today.
The administration has weaponized this trend by fanning a hyper-nationalism that is also anti-free-trade, and anti-immigrant. A dangerously isolationist narrative about ourselves that is being built. Like a fractal, that pattern repeats itself on a large scale as it does on a small scale through our individual social media spheres. It is an illusion to see this spiral as a return to some golden age.
That the commissioners in the group when asked to tell a story that was important to them chose a story of their immigration to Colorado was not lost on me this same week that the Administration began separating families at the U.S. border. Coming to a new place is a powerful experience, and just the cognitive stimulation alone can propel people far beyond what they thought possible before. Nothing is more tribal than actual borders, and nothing is more mythologically satisfying than passing a threshold. Most are driven to do so to do damage to thier new paces, right? Not. By the data, jobs being taken by immigrants, and immigrants bringing violence and crime with them is dangerous tribal hyperbole. America is a nation of immigrants which is largely what made us better citizens, having to absorb waves of immigrants who repeatedly had to find common ground–again and again. We benefited from importing labor and talent. We made many imported customs our own. America is made up of those who sought it out, and those people often have been the most committed to our values and improving our culture, our institutions and our places. People actually tend to be more committed to things they have chosen than to what has been given. Of course, the leaders at this retreat had transitioned between states to seek opportunity without the same level of suffering or hardship, and they were not met with opposition to entry in the places to which they migrated.
So what makes us stay and “fix” places and relationships rather than hit the road? I don’t know, but I can sure tell the places where people have committed to improvement. It is true of families. I have been married for 22 years. I have served equally long in various roles in my chosen community. I’ll save talking about marriage for another day. As Mayor, I often said, “our community is not a commodity.” By that, I meant, “if every citizen thinks like a consumer who doesn’t engage in changing it, and just leaves the schools the neighbourhood or town when they get fed up, then who is investing in the effort to make tough decisions to make it a better place? Over time, no one.”
By the way, that same commitment has not extended to employers. That part of the social contract had already shifted when I entered the workforce. I know few who stay with an employer for a lifetime. And we have figured out how to solve this with regard to individual retirement accounts replacing pensions, but we have not done so with health insurance, stubbornly insisting on employer-based health care when a more fluid national health insurance would better fit with our fluid economy. My commitment also does not extend to any political group. I believe the political realm should be a marketplace of ideas that don’t come from one faction. That fluidity is a hallmark of our democracy and our economy, although few seem to see it that way anymore.
At the facilitation, I felt like I was a part of democracy in action. There was a shift to something new that day, not quite in full alignment with the usual politics, and some of the most important questions were discussed. These were tough decisions—stay and fight to improve a place, an organization or a party, or form a new one? It was fun, for a day, to work with a group that had made an uncomfortable leap, was committed to it, and was active in problem-solving tough policy issues, even if it just may have further sorted Colorado.
Most of us have forgotten the basic choice to engage with each other is in front of us each day. That takes a real commitment, and a willingness to challenge ourselves and the dogma that is pushed on us every day. Those who don’t want us to get things done must like us sorting ourselves. It makes us weak.
