Last year 81% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans said the opposing party makes them angry. IT IS A coincidence that two of America’s best-known bipartisan political organisations were, until recently, led by Oklahomans. David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, helmed the US Conference of Mayors, while Kevin Stitt, the Republican governor of Oklahoma, led the National Governors Association (NGA). These groups offer something novel in American politics: civility. But at recent gatherings in Long Beach, California (the mayors), and Oklahoma City (the governors), Democrats and Republicans high-fived, hugged and waxed eloquent about the dangers of America’s hyper-partisan politics.
It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history. McVeigh wanted to retaliate against what he believed to be a tyrannical government. Mr Holt was in high school at the time, getting ready to deliver a campaign speech for student council vice-president. “We got back to class, and they were rolling the TVs in. Messrs Holt and Stitt admit that it will be hard to overcome the incentives politicians have to be nasty. Mr Trump is America’s bully-in-chief—and Americans elected him president twice. But the Oklahomans aim to set a better example. They do not always succeed. They also offer more tangible reforms. Mr Holt thinks that doing away with closed party primaries, in which only party members can vote, would make it harder for extreme candidates to win nominations. (Research on whether open primaries produce more moderate candidates is mixed.) Mr Stitt—ever the conservative—prescribes more federalism and a smaller central government. Another prescription is the Oklahoma Standard itself. Other governors at the NGA conference expressed admiration for the state’s civic ethos.
In 1995 Timothy McVeigh set off a bomb that blew up the federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. Nearly 170 people were killed.
“There was this rumour backstage there’s been an explosion downtown,” he recalls. Mr Stitt, who was a senior in college in 1995, attributes his niceties to “Oklahoma common sense”. “My grandmother said ‘you get more flies with honey than you do vinegar’,” he says, “so I’m trying to just be nice to everyone. “Man I shouldn’t have said that, this is a bipartisan deal,” he said on stage. “It’s gotten so big that Oklahomans, we’re worried that if Kamala Harris gets elected, she’s going to make Oklahoma like California,” he says. “What’s interesting about the Oklahoma Standard is it used to be the United States standard,” laments Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah who has long urged Americans to “disagree better”.
At the NGA conference earlier this month Mr Stitt took a jab at California, a Democratic stronghold, and instantly expressed regret.
