Pitchforked Nation

Wyo-tana-kota-ho: A Modest Proposal for a New 46th State

Thanksgiving is a good time to be grateful for the big land we live on, 3.7 million square miles from sea to shining sea with purple mountains majesty and fruited plains. We like our space: 96 people per square mile, compared to China, where almost 400 people share every square mile. We have a lot of room in which to enjoy our birthright, the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of happiness, is of course, no guarantee of happiness. Reach too often exceeds grasp.

I’ll leave the reasons for our unhappiness to the wellness influencers because today I want to talk about the space between us. Not our existential loneliness but literally our empty lands. Because each state gets two Senators regardless of population, every election skews more power toward MAGA-leaning voters in states with more tumbleweeds and cows than humans. We call ourselves a democracy, but we actually live increasingly under minority rule by a fraction of voters who get more say in national affairs than people living in denser states.

One person in Wyoming has the political influence of 68 Californians, 50 Texans and 37 Floridians. Each Senator from Montana represents 1.1 million Montanans, while each Senator from Illinois represents 12.6 million Illini. New York State’s two Senators represent almost 20 million inhabitants, while Idaho’s two Senators are sent to Washington by just 1.9 million people. Black and brown Americans have even less per capita representation. Whites make up 48 percent of the U.S. population, but they account for 78 percent of the five least populous states, each of which gets two senators. This is a baked-in disadvantage for progressives and it trickles up into presidential elections. In the past six senatorial elections, Democrats received 34 million more votes than Republicans, but only once held the Senate. Since each state gets two Presidential electors for its two senators, Democrats won the popular vote five times in the last six elections, but only won the White House three times.

The relatively tiny subset of Americans that has pitchforked the U.S. Senate don’t align with the rest of the country on major issues from national health care (a majority of Americans support it) to women’s rights (majority support for right to abortion) yet they control the upper chamber of Congress. The skewed Senate balance of power has allowed this minority to pack the Supreme Court with forced-birth fanatics and halt every piece of progressive legislation the House and Democratic Presidents send over.

The rest of us are more than taxed without representation: we are literally overruled on almost every policy issue.

I’m not suggesting we disenfranchise rural whites. They have as much right to one-person one-vote as anyone else in America. But it must be obvious to Big Lie believers obsessed with illegitimate voters that it’s highly undemocratic for a single voter in Wyoming to wield the political heft of 68 Californians.

There is a solution. It’s on this map below. Welcome to the great state of Wyo-tana-kota-ho.

The Great State of Wyo-tana-kota-ho

Consolidating Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas and Idaho would form a new middle-size state with a population of 5.1 million people, about the size of South Carolina. Wyo-tana-kota-hoans would still get their Senators. The state would surely still be Republican. And its inhabitants would still have more per capita representation than Americans in more than 20 larger states.

Politically, the U.S. Senate will look a lot more like America.

This solution should appeal to the anti-government crowd in those states: eight politicians, sent home to sell insurance. Libertarians and conservatives should approve: Consolidating five states would defenestrate a battalion of state government bureaucrats overnight and over years, save billions in taxpayer money. The Heritage Foundation should take a break from plotting autocracy and add Wyo-tana-kota-ho to its Project 2025.

We might not be discussing this if the Democrats had quickly done what I and many others suggested when they held House, Senate and White House in 2021: make DC and Puerto Rico states, and pack the Supreme Court with a few more moderates to ensure the new statehoods didn’t get overturned. Those are exactly the kind of bold moves the Republicans would try to pull off. So is Wyo-tana-kota-ho.

I’m not here to bash country folk. I know rural America. I grew up in the woods and farms of Michigan, was in 4-H, and one of my first jobs was on a detasselling crew. Today, I live in the woods of upstate New York where gunfire cracks across the hills on this, the second afternoon of hunting season. Rural life has some advantages over city living, but in general, in the USA, it is poorer and harder. Doctors and dentists are few and far between, so are decent jobs. Dollar Generals have replaced boarded-up storefronts on Main Streets. Almost no one works on farms.

Whether the country folk admit it or not, the image of rural life is now myth. By mid-last century, family farms were mostly gone or going. Rural farm jobs were replaced by factory jobs and military installations, the former attracted by cheap nonunion labor and the latter by wide open space on which to blow things up. When those jobs went overseas, rural people suffered badly. Many former family farmers have been reduced to vassals for Big Ag (that was true when I worked in cornfields that Cargill controlled). If they try to make it on their own, they must scratch up enough money to keep their machines in working order and struggle to figure out when to plant and harvest in this era of unpredictable climate.

“To call 1,500 acres of corn, genetically modified to withstand harsh chemical pesticides and intended for a high-fructose corn syrup factory, a ‘farm’ is a bit like calling a highly automated GM factory a ‘workshop,’ ” writes historian Steven Conn. Conn recently published a book called The Lies of the Land, that shows how economically and culturally, rural America is not Norman Rockwell or Andy Griffith anymore, if it ever was. “A laid-off veteran buying Rice-A-Roni at Dollar General isn’t our favored image of rural life,” wrote a reviewer of Conn’s book in The New Yorker. “But it’s more accurate than the farmhouse tableau of ‘American Gothic.’ And it’s an image especially worth contemplating today, as rural discontent increasingly drives politics.”

Do we really need 50 states? Fifty is a nice round number, 50 stars look good on the flag, and 100 senators has a nice ring to it. But state borders - all borders, really - are manmade and, as we know, subject to change by war or, less commonly, peaceful agreement. Some U.S. state borders are natural - the confluence of two great rivers, for example, forms the border between Illinois and Kentucky. Other borders seem arbitrary to us, generations down from gerrymandering and property agreements among powerful men long gone.

Everyone knows these borders are not carved in stone. Conservatives in more than a dozen counties in eastern Oregon recently voted to secede into Idaho, where forced birth, mining sans environmental regulations and unfettered gun ownership are more to their liking. The “Greater Idaho Movement” aims to move Oregon’s border hundreds of miles west, expanding Idaho and drawing a political line between themselves and the progressive and denser coastal population. The argument on their website is exactly the one I‘ve made here about minority control of the U.S. Senate: “Five of Oregon’s 36 counties now control 100 percent of Oregon’s legislative activity. None are rural. None are east of the Cascades. None are outside the Willamette Valley.”

Next year, Democrats are very likely to lose their razorthin margin in the U.S. Senate. Again, a regressive minority - so desperately in need of social net and policies like Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and yet susceptible to the politics of fear and race that Republicans play - will control a legislative body that, inarguably, has done absolutely nothing to help them out.

With Sen. “Maserati Joe” Manchin deciding to cash in his fossil-fuel chits, West Virginia is certain to add a Republican to the count. Four other Democratic-held Senate seats are vulnerable. It’s always possible Republicans could lose a few: Texas could boot the Trump-toadying, perpetually sneering Ted Cruz whose appeal as a politician utterly mystifies everyone outside the state. Maybe Missouri Democrats can make enough meme-use of the video of Sen. Josh “Run Josh Run” Hawley sprinting from his own insurrectionists to send him back to a comfy lobbyist job in Northern Virginia (where Ivy-educated fake populist Hawley lived until moving to Missouri quite recently).

Last time Republicans controlled the Senate, the Majority Leader from the Koch Brothers’ laboratory called Kentucky committed one of the most heinous acts in American political history when he refused to allow a vote on Obama’s Supreme Court nominee because the 2016 election was only 11 months out. Four years later, two weeks before the 202) presidential election that Trump would lose, Mitch McConnell put Trump’s final rightwing fanatic SCOTUS nominee, Amy “Handmaid” Coney Barrett on the bench. The cadaverous McConnell has seemed lately to have missed the juvenile blood transfusions or whatever kept him upright. He will not, one must assume, lead the Senate if the R’s regain it next year. Someone younger and probably worse will be in charge. And like McConnell, that person will not represent the views or interests of the majority of Americans.

RELATED READING

Oregon secessionists

New Yorker essay on The Lies of the Land

My 2021 article on statehood for DC and Puerto Rico

Stats on red states’ health disaster

SOUNDING THE DEPTHS

Leonard Leo’s dark money donations surge to Republicans’ disgusting Project 2025

Moral collapse of Evangelical Christians was never more evident than in this quote from a (nominally) Christian college professor in an excellent New Republic article about the intellectual underpinnings of the modern American fascist movement: “Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd,” argues author Kevin Slack, a professor at Hillsdale College, in a lengthy book excerpt published in Claremont’s online magazine, The American Mind. “Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.”