The Big Sort (42 page)

As Greider told the story, Governor Combs was sending an aide to Washington, D.C., to secure money for the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky. The emissary asked if the governor had any last-minute instructions, and Combs allowed that he did. The governor said, cryptically, "Show them just enough to win the turkey." The man confessed that he had no idea what Combs was talking about, so the governor explained. Combs said that on a yearly trade day in one mountain town, there would be a contest of sorts. The young men would trail off behind a Main Street building and open their trousers; the gentleman with the largest display of manhood would win a live turkey. One trade day, the contest proceeded as tradition dictated. The competition was undecided until the judges reached a young man who slowly revealed his entry. The man had made only a partial disclosure when the judges acclaimed him clearly to be the most prodigious of that year's lot. The man tucked the feathered and flapping prize under his arm and walked back onto Main Street. The contest was no secret, of course, and when the man's wife saw her husband with the telltale turkey, she shrieked. How could he have done such a thing? "Don't worry, hon," the young man answered. "I just showed them enough to win the turkey." So, Combs told the aide, don't tell those people in Washington everything.

We all laughed, which surprised Greider, who said he'd been telling the story for years at Georgetown dinner tables to listeners who were either mystified or offended, but never amused. We all appreciated Kentucky politics—or at least the culture that once defined Kentucky politics. And we all knew this was quintessential Combs, a man who revealed himself, like the man with the turkey, only as necessary, a little bit at a time.

When I was a young reporter, I covered the explosions at the Scotia mine in 1976 that killed those twenty-six men, and I wrote about Combs as he defended the negligent coal company. The former governor did everything in his considerable power to win, and during that time, I considered him a traitor to his legacy. With politicians like Combs, however, you needed to stick around for a time to get the full story. Combs took the coal company's money, and a short time later, he resurfaced as the pro bono attorney representing public schools so poor that some of them couldn't afford to stock their restrooms with toilet paper. Combs sued the state on behalf of the schools. He demanded that the children in the poor, mostly rural communities be treated the same as their richer city neighbors. He was more successful representing kids than the coal company, but in both cases he was the insider, the fixer. Some say Combs not only represented the schoolchildren but also wrote the court's opinion. Nobody doubted the story.

A week before Combs died—in 1991, he accidentally drove his car into a stream that had flooded the road leading to his mountain home—he called me out of the blue and began describing a case to be made before the U.S. Supreme Court. Combs thought that he could make a winning argument that would overturn the Court's ruling that states couldn't limit spending on political campaigns. There was too much money in politics, Combs creaked, and the law didn't fit the times. That was Combs, a man who bounced between amazing grace and the temptations of the purse, the middleman between the factions and economic interests that squabbled over the carcass of Kentucky.

Our politics used to be filled with these Januses of special interests and public purpose—old pols, guys who were funny, flawed, and conflicted. America's best political novels have been about these two-tone politicians. Huey Long became Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's
All the King's Men.
Lyndon Johnson was the model for Arthur "Goddamn" Fenstemaker in Billy Lee Brammer's
The Gay Place.
Both books (and the multiple biographies of Long and LBJ) wrestled with the ambiguity inherent in their protagonists' occupation, but the fictional Fenstemaker said it best when he explained how things worked to a young, liberal politician—an idealist reluctant to raise the money from the "wrong people" for a statewide campaign: "Your job is to get elected and stay elected. That's the first consideration. When that's assured, you get good enough, mean enough, you learn enough to fend off the bill collectors. They come around wanting the moon and you give 'em green cheese and make 'em think that was what they were lookin' for all the time.
That's
what you do. That's what a professional
has
to do."
²¹

The political world revolved around Fenstemaker. Others—Brammer and his liberal (post-materialist) friends—lost their balance and were consumed by alcohol or despair. Fenstemaker was able to fend off the bill collectors for a time, and he served as the connection between the state's ideological factions. He was able to do some good. At the end of
The Gay Place,
the governor's aide, Jay McGown, finds Fenstemaker dead, in bed, having spent the night with a woman (or maybe two) who was not his wife. McGown remembers what Fenstemaker told him during an earlier campaign. "This is what you have to watch out for, Jay," the governor warned. "Remember it. You sit here in these carpets up to your ankles with a fire crackling in a corner and these black men serve you red wine and rare roast beef—and there's crepes suzettes comin' later—and tell me, now. Can you get all wrought up about the poor folks?"
²²
McGown knew that with Fenstemaker dead, an important part of what made self-government possible was gone.

In the mid-1950s, an English anthropologist made a breakthrough in his discipline's understanding of politics. Max Gluckman realized that people were always in dispute. Societies were successful and long-standing so long as they could devise mechanisms that kept simple conflicts from becoming cataclysmic. Gluckman described the Nuer, a herding society of the Upper Nile. When the Nuer would fall into a dispute, the tribe would turn to a class of arbitrators known as the "men of the earth." The men of the earth had no formal powers, but they had cultural authority. When a person was killed in a village argument, a man of the earth would adjudicate compensation. When two groups of Nuer began fighting, a man of the earth could bring the factions to peace by rushing between the combatants and hoeing the soil. In modern democratic politics, Gluckman noted, we elect our men of the earth, politicians who are called upon to represent opposing factions and pressure groups.
²³

At one time, the politician's profession was to have divided loyalties. The conflicting desires and interests of a community were reconciled through the pol, the ward heeler. Politicians such as Combs and Lyndon Johnson were specialists in the art of showing just enough to win the turkey. With discretion and sometimes duplicity, they represented the diverse and conflicting factions within a county or a state, and through them disputes were mediated. Everyone would get angry with them, and everyone would also benefit from their work. Without them, the system, flawed as it is, has no way to reach the compromises that are fundamental to representative government.

Gluckman learned in Africa that people needed "cross-cutting" relationships to survive. Successful societies evolved so that friends and enemies would often change places: opponents at one time would be friends later. This dynamic mixing of interests gave a tribe stability and protected it from internal warfare. Gluckman, an anthropologist specializing in Africa, was a contemporary of the missionary Donald McGavran, but as a social theorist, Gluckman was, in a sense, McGavran's opposite. McGavran said, over and over, "Men do not join churches where services are conducted in a language they do not understand, or where members have a noticeably higher degree of education, wear better clothes, and are obviously of a different sort."
²⁴
Whereas McGavran was interested in the attractive power of conformity, Gluckman studied the nature of conflict and its resolution. From his research into human discord, Gluckman came to see that normal conflict didn't escalate when people were connected to others in multiple ways, when the ties among the members of a tribe were conflicted. Societies that controlled disputes "are so organized into a series of groups and relationships, that people who are friends on one basis are enemies on another," Gluckman wrote.
^*
25

Among the Nuer, Gluckman discovered, it not only ran against custom to marry within the family—a prohibition common in many cultures—but the tribe's rules "forbid, under penalty of disease, accident, and death, a man to marry any woman of his clan, or any woman to whom relationship can be traced in any line up to six generations." The rules forced marriages to be spread widely, with the result that all portions of the larger nation of Nuer were connected. The various clans had to remain friendly, if for no other reason than to avoid the risk of suffering a depressing decline in the number of available marriage partners. Marriage itself widened the web of friendship, or at least association. It was hard for there to be much internecine warfare, because no matter the configuration of warring parties, a Nuer would have to battle his (or his wife's) present or future in-laws. The saying, therefore, among some African peoples was "They are our enemies; we marry them."
²⁶

When political scientist Robert Dahl sought to explain the underlying stability of the American political system, he credited a "pattern of cleavages." America was divided by race, by faith, by geography, and by class, Dahl wrote. As long as those cleavages were mixed up in the country's politics—as long as groups weren't always friends or always foes—the heated conflicts that periodically arose would not boil over. However, Dahl wrote, "if all the cleavages occur along the same lines, if the same people hold opposing positions in one dispute after another, then the severity of conflicts is likely to increase. The man on the other side is not just an opponent; he soon becomes an enemy."
²⁷

The Big Sort, ironically, has given contemporary Americans a life simpler in important ways than the existence of Nuer herdsmen. Communities, churches, and volunteer groups are less likely now to be sources of those sometimes abrasive and troublesome cross-cutting relationships. Americans have used wealth and technology to invent and secure places of minimal conflict. They spend more time with people like themselves. Politicians are sharply partisan, mirroring the homogeneity of the electorate. The "men of the earth" are near extinction, and, most definitely, Americans are less likely to marry their enemies.
^*

Americans have been polarized before, of course, and these divisions have been cured by the eventual (some political scientists say inevitable) rise of cross-cutting issues. Although the two parties emerged from the 2006 midterm elections as polarized as at any time since the end of World War II, this kind of rigid partisanship can't last. Or at least it hasn't lasted in the past. Maybe the struggle to provide everyone with medical care will become one of those cross-cutting issues, urgent enough to put Republicans and Democrats in mixed company again. Already, an unlikely coalition including Wal-Mart, Intel, Kelly Services, and the Service Employees International Union is calling for a new American health care system by 2012.
²⁸
Similar combinations of old enemies and new friends can be seen forming in debates surrounding immigration.

But the Big Sort has not been simply a difference of political opinion. The communities of interest—and the growing economic disparities among regions—won't disappear with a change in Congress or a new president. Moreover, it's wishful thinking to predict that a Generation Y LBJ will emerge to become a twenty-first-century "man of the earth," some kind of web-based "deus ex MySpace" politician who could forge a national consensus out of our disparate communities.
^†
Presidential candidates and op-ed writers often lament the lack of leaders, as if entire generations of Americans were born without the skills of a Johnson, a Franklin D. Roosevelt, or a Dwight D. Eisenhower. There are, of course, just as many leaders as there have always been. What the country is missing is old-fashioned followers. The generations that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century lost trust in every vestige of hierarchical authority, from the edicts of Catholic bishops to the degrees of Free Masons to the stature of federal representatives. There haven't been any new LBJs because the whole notion of leadership has changed—and the whole shape of democracy is changing.

As people gather in like-minded places, their homogeneity will be reflected in the decisive actions of local governments. New Hampshire allowed civil unions in 2007, and New York governor Eliot Spitzer soon after introduced a bill that would legalize gay marriage. Meanwhile, the Texas legislature passed a bill in 2007 to protect religious "speech" in schools. Thanks to the Big Sort, the country will soon be awash in democratic experiments.

Meanwhile, those with the means will take more direct action.
^*
The rich have always bought candidates, but now they will create their own political climates. In April 2007, two of the country's richest men, Bill Gates and Eli Broad, announced that they would spend $60 million to force candidates to address education in the 2008 presidential election. Two months later, U2 frontman Bono announced a $30 million public lobbying campaign to force presidential candidates to address Third World poverty, an effort that included actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, quarterback Tom Brady, and a celebrity bus tour through the early-primary states.
²⁹
Tour de France winner and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong organized two forums in Iowa in mid-2007 so that Americans could hear what the presidential candidates intended to do about cancer, and the candidates answered the cyclist's call.
³⁰

The continued distrust of government, however, has reduced the size and scope of public life. Democracy has become so balky that the normal processes of representative government are being replaced by systems of issue brokering that are only quasi-representative. In Austin, public policy is often negotiated among interest groups, with government only ratifying decisions made behind the scenes.
³¹
Or decisions once regularly made by government are offloaded entirely to utility districts, homeowners associations, and water or road authorities. Representation of the whole is avoided, replaced by negotiations among tribes. Silicon Valley economist Doug Henton describes the coalition of businesses, government officials, and interest groups that manages his region as a "network governance" model.
³²
In Austin and Silicon Valley, a democratically elected assembly is simply a single node on a crowded organizational chart.