The Red-Green Delusion and the War Against the Sheepdogs: Why Oregon Is Broken and the West Bleeds

There is a political reality in America which puzzles me: Democrats regularly field winning candidates in entrenched “Red” states who are to the left of the prevailing culture. But the political reality in Oregon – and other entrenched “Blue” states – is that it is twice as hard for even a moderate Republican to break through.^[1]

The data shows this political reality with crystal clarity:

• Since 2000, states that have an R+5 or higher partisan registration advantage have elected 58 statewide candidates in Gubernatorial and U.S. Senatorial elections.^[2]
• States which have a D+5 or higher partisan registration advantage have elected 29 candidates in Gubernatorial and U.S. Senatorial elections—a 2:1 advantage for the Democratic coalition.

But even that vast advantage understates political reality. In Blue State GOP victories (almost entirely in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic), 85% of the prevailing Republican candidates either explicitly adopted “Pro-Choice” branding^[3] or campaigned on a platform of maintaining abortion as “settled law.” In Red State Democratic victories, only 45% of winning Democratic candidates adopted “Pro-Life” branding.^[4]

Given the fact that relatively few voters report “culture war” issues as their (stated) top priority from electoral cycle to electoral cycle, the stickiness of partisan registration can seem bizarre; but campaign consultants and political marketing firms have figured out how to manipulate the market by using culture war issues as a “Veto Gate.” The term indicates a moral filter that activates an emotional response in a voter that overrides their stated priorities.

For decades, the Oregon GOP has walked blindly into these manufactured traps, providing the exact social friction required to allow Oregon Democrats to slam the Veto Gate shut. That failure of strategic discipline has left the state without a functional opposition, which harms us all. Exposing this mechanism is why I have devoted my post-Army career attempting to explain to Oregon Republicanism why they fell off a cliff in 1986.^[5] This has less to do with my interest in politics and more to do with my interest in competent governance.^[6]

Why do I care so much? Because I love our people, and the squandering of human potential that I see every day in Oregon is utterly heartbreaking. That waste compelled me to run for Attorney General in 2016, just as it compelled me to return home in 2023 after four years of contemplation in Florida trying to understand why things seemed so broken. As a career solider, I have worked in places overseas in which the Rule of Law has broken down; and every one of those places is a paragon of personal and political persecution.

My duty is to at least try to rebalance a badly imbalanced system by persuading the minority party to up its game, regardless of which state or which party, because our system doesn’t work without two viable political parties which are strong enough to hold each other to account.

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My statewide electoral run was both delightful (wandering around our state talking about the Idea of Oregon with my fellow Rain People was the greatest job I will ever have) and horrifying (to see firsthand how traumatized and misled our people are was devastating). I learned a lot about how utterly dysfunctional the Oregon Republican Party was (and is), puzzled over why Oregon Republicans seemed so obsessed with continuing to lose rather than helping to fix things, tried to advise the good ones, and continue to write and speak to those who will listen.

No matter how traumatized they are, most Oregonians seem weirdly fatalistic. After forty years of failure, they seem reconciled to that the corruption, incompetence, inefficiency, and indifference we all know is going on. Over and over again, they told me that this is “just being the way things are.”

I disagree. I am a professional soldier by trade; and soldiers are trained to focus on solutions, not focus on problems. “Quit” is not a Ranger word, and I refuse to accept that this is the best we can do.

I went to West Point in 1987 because I knew that Soviet Communism was an existential threat to our way of life. Each of us must decide what hill we are willing to die on, and mine was spending the rest of my life fighting the most evil ideology in world history by body count—Communism.

In a way, I suppose I have.

The fight hasn’t always been easy. I failed in my statewide run, and the very idea of losing is hateful to me. The scars of that rejection led directly to my political self-exile in Florida. I needed a period of reflection and purification, and I found it at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach. (The fact that my wife got to bathe in a warm ocean for a change, rather than remaining on our family farm between Gervais and Mount Angel, was an added bonus.)

Yet, as wonderful as riding out COVID in the Free State of Florida was, I was consumed with guilt over those who couldn’t get out. Even as I commuted back and forth to Oregon to continue my crusade, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I could be doing more.

After much persuasion, I finally got my wife to consent to come home in 2023. Her only conditions were that I had to promise to stay out of partisan politics (as much as I was able); and, this time, we would live east of the Cascades.

While Florida remains a bulwark of competent governance, I am haunted by the feeling that America is on the wrong track. By “wrong track,” I don’t mean that any particular candidate’s failure concerns me. Politicians like Ms. Drazan and Mr. Brock Smith don’t inspire me very much, and my extensive experience with professional politicians has certainly not improved my general opinion of them.

Instead, I am concerned about the viability of this radical experiment in self-government we have inherited.

I believe in the Idea of Oregon, just as I believe that every Oregonian has a God-given right to believe anything they want (even if it’s total nonsense). But I believe just as deeply that no Oregonian has the right to use the coercive power of government to compel you to pretend you believe their nonsense, too. An Oregon that believes in “Tolerance from thee, but not from me” is an Oregon which has betrayed itself.

That impulse to compel compliance brings us directly to the Red-Green Alliance.

The uncomfortable truth of modern radical politics is that the Woke-Left (the Reds) and Islamic fundamentalists (the Greens) have converged into a Brown Alliance which shares a single, toxic premise: The total rejection of the sovereign individual in favor of the cult of the collective.

Both factions operate on tribal mechanics rather than individual conscience. Both openly advocate violence against “class enemies.” Both are dedicated to violently imposing their collective will. Both explicitly believe in “One vote, one time.” And because tribal collectivism is fundamentally stagnant and incapable of organic innovation, this partnership acts parasitically on the open, productive, pluralistic society it actively seeks to dismantle.

Universal suffrage makes zero sense when it is weaponized as a proxy for which clan can mass-produce deindividuated drones most rapidly, but they have mastered the core weakness of people like me. The first rule of opposing evil is “don’t become that which you seek to destroy,” and I diverge from my more dogmatic fellow Republicans in not wanting to replace one rotten political machine with another.

The Brown Alliance might have figured out how to use the power of deindividuation and coercion to achieve dominance, but the real mystery is why self-proclaimed “liberal progressives” would make common cause with a faction that would kill our homosexuals, loot our treasury, defile our women & girls, and sodomize our boys?

The answer, I am afraid, is a mix of vanguard hubris and ideological delusion that dates back to the Comintern’s 1920 Baku Conference, where Marxists determined that any movement fighting Western capitalist hegemony was an ally, regardless of its “internal social regressiveness.” We saw the ultimate manifestation of this suicidal logic in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Secular Marxists allied with Ayatollah Khomeini to overthrow the Shah, naively believing they were the intellectual vanguard using religious populists as raw muscle.

The moment the Shah’s regime fell, the Islamists used the newly seized state apparatus to systematically hunt down and execute their former leftist allies. The Left provided the cover; the Islamists took the state and destroyed their erstwhile “revolutionary comrades.”^[7]

The ease with which modern Western radicals have thrown themselves into this same alliance reveals the fragility and delusion of the radicalized Western mind. They believe they are using the Islamists as a hammer to break the West, entirely blind to the fact that they are sharpening the blade that will eventually be used to slit their throats.

Contrast this delusion with the men whom our Woke-Left works ceaselessly to destroy—“sheepdogs” like me and my soldier son who have completely internalized the principles of self-restraint and self-discipline that the Brown Alliance openly despises. We spend our lives patrolling the perimeter to keep the sheepfold safe, even as the flock denounces us for existing.

We wear their hatred as a badge of honor, but I can see a dark shift that is underway. My son’s peers are increasingly being attracted by the Siren song of the Woke-Right. Since those young men are overwhelmingly the “doers” of our society, these are not the type of men whom any sane society would scapegoat as the “source of all injustice in the world.” They are the men who keep the lights on, the pathological in check, and the perimeter secure.

If the Red-Green Alliance succeeds in eradicating the social contract, the Woke-Left is going to go from being protected by the sheepdogs to being caught in a bloody crossfire between those who despise them and those whom they despise.

That is an extraordinarily dangerous place to be, and it is precisely why I work tirelessly attempting to revive The Way of Balance in what was once the best place on earth to live—Oregon, My Oregon.

Daniel Zene Crowe is a retired professional soldier and long-serving military lawyer. He is originally from Mount Angel and spent decades patrolling the periphery of our vast and trackless empire.

(c) Daniel Zene Crowe, 2026

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^[1] Of course, one alternative hypothesis is that the “Democratic advantage” is merely a byproduct of the fact that Democratic principles are superior. I believe this misreads the elastic nature of political coalitions in a system such as ours in which political coalitions are constantly shifting and changing. I instead hypothesize that the fundamental mechanics of the “Democratic coalition” and the “Republican coalition” are structurally different:

In General, I assert that the “glue” of the Republican coalition is Ideas and the “glue” of the Democratic coalition is Interests. This would explain why politicians of both parties so often seem to be talking past one another: As each side’s politicians address their coalitions (and try to keep them together and motivated), they are actually trying to keep their competitors from dissolving the glue which holds the coalition together.

Of course, my hypothesis should not be read as asserting that every Republican politician is motivated by ideas and every Democratic politician is motivated by interests. Rather, I am just trying to understand why Republican voters seem so much more likely to defect than Democratic voters.

^[2] In “down ballot” races, voters tend to cross over with slightly greater frequency; but only if the candidate explicitly disconnects their campaign from national cultural wars and offers a localized, managerial value proposition. This was the key to Pro-Life Dennis Richardson’s win in the Oregon Secretary of State race in 2016 against hyper-partisan ideological crusader Brad Avakian.

As Dennis explained to me in 2016: “When we make elections about the competent delivery of government services, we win; when they make it about feelings, they win. So why would we ever want to make it about feelings?”

^[3] My experience is that most political candidates are pretty opportunistic, which is why I used the term “branding” concerning positioning on abortion.

^[4] For comparison purposes, those 87 total wins are dwarfed by 385 “Dominant Party” wins (19% to 81%). The fact that Oregon Republicans have sat on the wrong side of that overwhelming national disadvantage since 1986—and haven’t broken through since Gordon Smith in 2002—illustrates the “stickiness” of modern political affinity.

^[5] In 1986, the Oregon Republican Party fell under the sway of the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance (OCA). Somehow, the OCA managed to convince Oregon Republicans that what Oregon voters really wanted was Evangelical gay-bashing…in one of the least churchgoing states in the Union. Needless to say, this political malpractice did not make it more difficult for Oregon Democrats to slam the Veto Gate shut on Republican candidates’ fingers.

^[6] When I went into political exile in Florida from 2019 to 2023, I felt zero need to actively engage in politics. Competent delivery of government services seemed a given. They didn’t need me.

^[7] In all fairness, mass murder was exactly the same playbook the Marxists used against their former Socialist allies at the conclusion of the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922, so maybe the Mullahs just decided to beat the Communists to the punch. And my lifelong hatred of Communism is probably a byproduct of growing up alongside the Starovery (the “White Russians” who lost the Russian Civil War) who fled to the mid-Willamette Valley instead of being killed in the Soviet Gulags.

© Daniel Zene Crowe, 2026

About the Author:
LTC Daniel Zene Crowe, U.S. Army Retired, is a West Point grad, Army Ranger, Cavalryman, and Paratrooper who spent the last two-thirds of his Army career as a military lawyer. In 2011, he returned to his native Oregon to assume duties as Oregon’s Veterans Advocate, serving Veterans and Veteran Families throughout Oregon struggling with homelessness, mental illness, and addiction. Dan was the 2016 Republican nominee for Oregon Attorney General.