Reply #9: The farm crisis of the 1980s didn't help the Dems [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

since with few exceptions, they did little to help the farmers who were losing farms that had been in their families since the days of the Homestead Act.

Both Dakotas are very sparsely populated, and so the same attitude you get in the non-coastal West (We're self-reliant, and everything we have we got on our own) also kicks in.

Social conservatism is another factor. The Dakotas are made up of ethnically homogeneous towns. Remember that Lawrence Welk had a German accent, even though he was born in North Dakota. That's because his whole town was German immigrants. When my grandfather first began teaching school, he ended up in another town in North Dakota where everyone except him, my grandmother, and the railroad station agent, was Norwegian.

A lot of kids from North Dakota attended the college in the Twin Cities that I graduated from. Some of them literally had never met anyone who wasn't a Norwegian Lutheran, and the sight of African-Americans (right on campus!) freaked them out.

A note about Norwegian Lutherans in North Dakota: most of them are descendants of the Haugeaners, who were a sect of Lutheranism in opposition to the state church of Norway. There were good things about them--they thought the state church had become too bureaucratic and not spiritual enough--but they were also very Puritanical. Put a bunch of Haugeaners in a small town with nothing but prairie for fifty miles around, isolate them from other types of people, and simmer for about a hundred years. Voila, social conservatism.

Yet I knew some very liberal students from North Dakota as well, including one who had intended to spend the summer after high school working on Robert Kennedy's campaign. (Of course, she never got to, because he was assassinated.)