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OPINION
East Oregonian
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Founded October 16, 1875
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Publisher
DANIEL WATTENBURGER
Managing Editor
TIM TRAINOR
Opinion Page Editor
MARISSA WILLIAMS
Regional Advertising Director
MARCY ROSENBERG
Circulation Manager
JANNA HEIMGARTNER
Business Office Manager
MIKE JENSEN
Production Manager
OUR VIEW
ODFW needs
consistent
state funding
OTHER VIEWS
Changes in social behavior and
two license fee increases — one in
public financing will increasingly
2018 and another in 2020, with future
affect how we fund the Oregon
increases indexed to inflation.
Department of Fish and Wildlife,
These increases come at the
and whether some of the Pacific
same time other hunting and fishing
Northwest’s outdoor traditions are
costs also are on the rise. In addition
able to continue.
to the constant struggle to afford
Our Capital Bureau reported last
insurance and upkeep on vehicles
week that a task force charged with
and vessels, hunters in particular
finding sustainable funding for ODFW face steep increases in fees they must
is considering waiting on scheduled
pay for access to many previously
license fee increases.
free forestlands.
It wants to see if the
If parents can’t Weyerhauser and other
Legislature approves
corporations have
afford to go been aggressively
either an income tax
surcharge or a surcharge
raising access fees —
hunting or fish- ostensibly as a way to
on beverage containers
to fund the department.
for forest upkeep.
ing themselves, pay Why
should the
About a third of the
majority
of citizens who
agency’s budget —
it’s unlikely their neither fish
nor hunt
roughly $60 million a
care about any of this?
year — is generated
children
will.
Many who enjoy nature
by selling hunting and
in ways that do not require licenses
fishing licenses. State and federal
— everything from birdwatching
funds account for two-thirds.
Like many other states, Oregon has to the satisfaction of knowing wild
places exist — individually pay a
experienced a gradual but inexorable
few dollars in taxes a year to ODFW
decline in the number of people still
operations, as opposed to $180 for a
interested in harvesting their own
full combination adult license fee.
wild fish and game. And like other
Oregon Public Broadcasting
states, Oregon has partially offset this
reported this week on the difficulties
decline in participation by raising
license fees on those who remain. This ODFW has in funding conservation
measures for nongame species
results in a cycle of less financially
— everything from bats to frogs.
advantaged residents being squeezed
out of hunting and fishing, along with Problems like this will get nothing
but worse if hunting and fishing
those whose who have only marginal
participation rates and license income
enthusiasm for rod and gun sports.
continue to languish.
As much or perhaps more than
What can we do? Certainly support
other recreational activities, interest
legislative efforts to establish a
in hunting and fishing typically is
reliable safety net for ODFW funding.
established in childhood or not at
Other voluntary options already
all. ODFW and its peers around the
exist and are fully described at www.
nation have taken a variety of steps
dfw.state.or.us. One of the easiest
to encourage parents to get kids
engaged in the outdoors, offering free is buying $20 habitat conservation
stamps via the internet or at any
or discounted license options, special
location that sell fishing and hunting
events and other incentives. But if
licenses.
parents can’t afford to go hunting or
If we care about Oregon wildlife
fishing themselves, it’s unlikely their
— and surveys show we strongly
children will.
do — we have to figure out new ways
This leads to the kinds of internal
to pay for the vital work performed by
struggles evidenced by the state’s
Fish and Wildlife.
task force, which is reluctantly eying
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board of publisher
Kathryn Brown, managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, and opinion page editor Tim Trainor.
Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not
necessarily that of the East Oregonian.
The post-familial election
H
ow did we get here? How did
ahead into their country’s future, white
it come to this? Not just to the
baby boomers especially see less to
Donald Trump phenomenon, but
recognize immediately as their own.
to the whole choice facing us Tuesday,
This alienation is heightened when
in which a managerial liberalism and an
the descendants they do have seem to
authoritarian nationalism — two visions
be faring worse than they did — as in
of the president as essentially a Great
those white working-class communities
Protector: a feisty grandmother or fierce
where opioid addiction, worklessness
sky father — are contending for the
and family breakdown have advanced
Ross
votes of an ostensibly free people?
Douthat apace. The combination of small
Start with the American family. Start
families and social disarray feeds a
Comment
with my own family, as an illustration
grim vision of the future, in which after
— white Protestants for the most part on
you’ve passed, your few kids and fewer
both sides with a few Irish newcomers mixed,
grandkids will be beset, isolated and alone.
rising and falling and migrating around in the
This sense of dread, in turn, bleeds easily
way of most families that have been in this
into ethno-racial anxiety when the benefits
of that imagined future seem to belong
country a long time.
increasingly to people who seem culturally
My maternal great-grandfather had five
alien, to inheritors who aren’t your natural
children, four of whom lived to have families
heirs. For this reason mass immigration, the
of their own. His son, my grandfather, also had
five children, two sons and three daughters, who technocratic solution to the economic problems
created by post-familialism — fewer workers
grew up as part of a dense network of cousins.
On my father’s side, the families were a little supporting more retirees — is a double-edged
sword: It replaces the missing workers but
smaller. But my dad was one of three siblings,
exacerbates intergenerational alienation,
meaning that I had six aunts and uncles overall.
because it heightens anxieties about inheritance
Then the social revolutions of the 1970s
and loss.
arrived. There were divorces, later marriages,
In this landscape, the white-identity politics
single parenthood, abortions. In the end all those
of Trumpism or European nationalism may
aunts and uncles, their various spouses and my
be a more intuitively attractive form of right-
parents — 12 baby boomers, all told — only
wing politics than a libertarian conservatism.
had seven children: myself, my sister and five
Right-authoritarianism offers some of the same
cousins.
welfare-state protections that liberalism offers
So instead of widening, my family tree
to its Julias, it offers tribal solidarity to people
tapered, its branches thinned. And it may thin
whose family bonds have frayed — and then
again, since so far the seven cousins in my
generation have only three children. All of them it links the two, public programs and tribal
consciousness, in the promise of a welfare state
are mine.
This is a very normal Western family history. that’s only designed for you and yours.
For conservatives who abhor Trumpism
Everywhere across the developed world,
families have grown more attenuated: fewer and this presents a hard dilemma. No politician can
address a Trump voter (or a LePen or UKIP
later marriages, fewer and later-born children,
supporter) alienated from their country’s future
fewer brothers and sisters and cousins, more
people living for longer and longer stretches
and say — as strangely true as it may be — that
on their own. It’s a new model of social life, a
“you should have had more children when
“post-familial” revolution that’s unique to late
you had the chance.” So conservatives have to
modernity.
figure out how to go partway with their anxious
For a while, conservatives have worried
older voters, to push against the post-familial
that this revolution is a boon to liberalism,
trend in public policy while also adapting to the
to centralization and bureaucratic control
anxieties that it creates — and all without being
— because as families thin people are more
swallowed up by bigotry.
likely to look to politics for community and
For liberals, to whom an expansive state
government for protection.
is a more uncomplicated good, the challenge
This idea is borne out in voting patterns,
may seem easier. They can hope that with time
where marriage and kids tend to predict
the racial and ethnic differences between the
Republican affiliation, and the single and
generations will diminish, and that eventually
divorced are often reliable Democratic
state programs can more smoothly substitute
partisans. The Obama White House’s “Life
for thinning families without ethno-cultural
of Julia” ad campaign in 2012 — featuring a
anxieties getting in the way.
woman whose every choice was subsidized by
But I’m not so sure that it will work like
the government from cradle to grave, with a
this. A post-familial society may unleash tribal
lone child but no larger family or community
competition within the coalition of the diverse,
in sight — seemed to many conservatives like
as people reach anew for ethnic solidarity and
a perfect confirmation of our fears: Here was
then fight furiously over liberalism’s spoils.
liberalism explicitly pitching the state as a
Or else a technocratic and secular liberalism
substitute for kith and kin.
may simply not be satisfying to a fragmented,
But while we worried about the liberal
atomized society; there may be a desire for a
vision, our own ideological side was adapting
left-wing authoritarianism to bind what’s been
to the family’s attenuation in darker ways —
fragmented back together, in comradeship and
speaking not to singletons or single mothers, but common purpose.
to powerful post-familial anxieties among the
In either case, the demagogues of the future
middle-aged and old.
will have ample opportunity to exploit the deep
Human beings imagine and encounter
loneliness that a post-familial society threatens
the future most intensely through our own
to create.
progeny, our flesh and blood. The Constitution
This loneliness may manifest in economic
speaks of “our posterity” for a reason: We are
anxiety on the surface, in racial and cultural
a nation of immigrants, but when people think
anxiety just underneath. But at bottom it’s more
about the undiscovered America of the future,
primal still: A fear of a world in which no one is
its strongest claim on them is one their own
bound by kinship to take care of you, and where
descendants make.
you can go down into death leaving little or
If those descendants exist. But for many
nothing of yourself behind.
native-born Americans there are fewer of them
■
— fewer children and, as birthrates drop and
Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as
marrying age rises, still-fewer grandchildren or
an Op-Ed columnist in 2009 and previously a
none at all. Which means that when they look
senior editor at The Atlantic.
YOUR VIEWS
CONTACT YOUR REPRESENTATIVES
U.S. Senators
U.S. Representative
Consider the Constitution this
election and vote
Ron Wyden
Greg Walden
Washington office:
221 Dirksen Senate Office Bldg.
Washington, DC 20510
202-224-5244
La Grande office:
541-962-7691
Washington office:
185 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
202-225-6730
La Grande office:
541-624-2400
Jeff Merkley
Governor
Washington office:
313 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
202-224-3753
Pendleton office:
541-278-1129
Kate Brown
160 State Capitol
900 Court Street
Salem, OR 97301-4047
503-378-4582
The Preamble of the U.S. Constitution is as
follows:
“We the People of the United States, in
Order to form a more perfect Union, establish
Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide
for the common defence, promote the general
Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty
to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and
establish this Constitution for the United
States of America.”
If you still have your ballot, please
consider our U.S. Constitution and fill in
those ovals, sign your ballot envelope with
your ballot enclosed and take it to the county
courthouse.
If you heard on the news that today’s post-
mark counts, you must have been listening to
a Washington station. For Oregon, the ballot
must be received by 8 p.m. Tuesday. That is
easy in Pendleton. I’m not sure of locations
elsewhere in Umatilla County. Hopefully the
newspaper will list them prominently.
In Pendleton you can drop your ballot into
the box in the parking lot at the rear of the
courthouse (closer to Southeast Fifth), acces-
sible from either Southeast Court or Southeast
Dorian before 8 p.m. Or, you can deliver it
directly to the Elections Division office. That
office is on the building’s Southeast Fourth
and Southeast Dorian corner, with a basement
entrance. It is open until 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Garnet Olson
Pendleton
LETTERS POLICY
The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. The newspaper
reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Submitted letters must
be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. Send
letters to managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.