A state of two minds (Part 1 of 2)

Virginia is blessed by its diverse geography, population, and economy. Virginia is cursed by its diverse geography, population, and economy.

This diversity is, in no small part, what makes our commonwealth a special place to live. But it’s also what tends to hold us back in some respects, influencing the way locally elected officials protect their own turf from neighboring jurisdictions and often preventing state legislators from looking beyond their own constituencies to a region’s – or the state’s – greater good.

This is not to say that such inward looking is wholly bad. It’s not. That individual officials focus on their own constituencies’ indigenous needs is good. Such focus breeds introspection, locally formed alliances, creativity, and community spirit, all necessary ingredients to problem-solving and effective self-governance.

It’s also not to say that inward looking is entirely avoidable. It’s not. Parochial thinking is a natural byproduct of an electoral system where districts are constitutionally defined by “communities of interest.” Those with common interests band together against those whose interests are not only different, but sometimes a direct threat. Such is simply a political fact of life.

It is to suggest, however, that elected officials representing – fighting for – their own in a broader system of collected counties, towns, cities, and districts makes moving that whole system forward quite a difficult thing to do. In a legislature made up of 140 delegates and senators, getting 71 of them to agree to put aside hometown pride or home team politics for the good of so many more beyond their districts is much easier said than done.

In private, you can often get at least 71 individual delegates and senators to admit that this or that far-reaching or statewide initiative is “the right thing to do,” despite back-home politics. But getting them to put their public voice and voting finger behind their private admissions is another matter.

So what’s behind this parochialism? What’s really at its roots? Why does it often prevent the movers and shakers who do so well for folks back home from moving and shaking for the commonwealth as a whole?

Virginia’s topography, extending from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Eastern Shore and from Clark to Lee, is all encompassing. Rocks to red clay to sand. And when you get right down to it, it’s the topography that determines land uses, thus people’s living and work habits, thus their attitudes, thus their voting trends, thus a predictable kind of legislative representation.

German Protestants and Mennonites largely settled in the fertile northern Shenandoah Valley after the Revolutionary War, beginning the farming industry that thrives today and is defined by a conservative approach to life and politics. The rugged mountains and coalfields of southwestern Virginia produced the big-shouldered, hard-working, independent-minded voters and legislators who come from there. And the flats of Southside offered up the red clay that’s prime for the sometimes defiant tobacco-growers whose dawn-to-dusk hard work has made Virginia’s biggest cash crop so well known around the world.

Tidewater, shaped by more than four centuries of crab- and oyster-driven industries as well as military installations, and in the last century or so by heavy-duty shipbuilding, is defined by a salt-of-the-earth people who know their rivers and bays and what they mean to Virginia’s culture, economy, and defenses. Those who represent them do so diligently with the same understandings.

Northern Virginia is a region whose current economic makeup was pre-determined in the late 18th century when Congress – as a result of the successful lobbying by Jefferson and Madison – chose the banks of the Potomac (over western Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River valley or Philadelphia or New York City) to be the nation’s capital. The capital’s environs have grown almost as the nation itself. The more expansive and influential our government has become, the more people it’s taken to operate – and defend – it. It’s inevitable that a private-sector military industrial complex would grow up around the beltway’s counties and cities, and even more inevitable that the ingenuity within it would spawn – especially since WWII – the much broader technology economy that has meant so much to the entire state. This specially defined local economy demands much from those elected to represent it.

So it’s something of a given that our state’s diverse geography has influenced the way our people have migrated, the way our local economies have taken shape, and the way our political trends have developed. What’s been less a given, though, is that the “one Virginia” cohesiveness that’d be needed to hold together the sum of these parts would be easily achieved. It hasn’t been.

Such cohesiveness has arguably escaped the Virginia legislature because the sum of our state’s parts has been upended by the parts themselves. A parochialism that’s often so right for so many micro reasons eclipses a broader view from being taken of what the Old Dominion has grown from and what it can progress to be.

The result has been a commonwealth in historic name only. Ours is a state whose regions at times seem to define themselves politically more by their defense against one another than by the strengths each can offer toward a nobler common purpose.

But does it have to be that way? While the Blue Ridge Mountains differ from the Tidewater sands, isn’t it the same James River that each enjoys? And isn’t it the same I-81 that runs from Winchester’s apple orchards to Bristol’s NASCAR track?