The Jurisdictional Wars: Alliance Theory and the Battle for Montana Conservative Authority

Conservatives in Montana do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral languages that frame their authority as fidelity to the Constitution, loyalty to Montana values, or responsibility for preserving independence against federal overreach and demographic change. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions. In Montana, phrases like “protecting our way of life,” “standing up to Washington,” and “keeping Montana Montana” do not merely describe commitments. They define jurisdiction. They determine who gets to say what Montana is, how it should be governed, and which forms of accommodation still count as faithful.
Before going further, the framework needs a limit acknowledged. Alliance Theory, applied without restraint, becomes a closed system. When every position gets decoded as a power move, the analysis loses precision. The rancher who rises before dawn to fix a fence line is not primarily executing a coalition maneuver. He maintains a form of life he genuinely values. The woman who refuses a developer’s check for twenty years inhabits a world whose demands are real, not merely performed. The constitutional principles that govern public-lands use, water rights, and property law are not a rhetorical structure. They carry genuine authority over the people who accept them. Alliance Theory names something real about how institutional authority functions in Montana. It is not the whole picture.
With those limits stated, the analysis can proceed.
Ernest Becker argues in The Denial of Death that human beings are unique among animals in their awareness of their own mortality, and that most of human culture, religion, and social life organizes itself to manage the terror that awareness produces. We construct hero systems, cultural frameworks that promise symbolic immortality, that tell us our lives participate in something larger and more permanent than our individual bodies. To be a faithful member of a hero system is to transcend death symbolically. To lose one’s hero system is to be thrown back against the terror it was built to contain.
Rural Montana is a hero system of unusual density. To live there as a serious conservative is to participate in a tradition of survival against centralization, against soft city life, against the creeping uniformity of coastal values. Every drive to a county commission meeting, every hunting season that turns the backcountry into a different kind of space, every fence line that marks the boundary between private land and federal domain: these are not merely civic obligations. They are acts of fidelity to a people who sustained their independence through conditions far worse than Washington bureaucrats or Californians with money. That is a hero system. It promises that a life lived seriously within this framework participates in something that neither death nor the surrounding culture can dissolve.
Montana does not merely exist as a place. It summons people. The state calls its residents into being as Montanans through institutions, interactions, dress, tools, meetings, and ordinary public recognitions. The thickness of the place comes from more than shared geography or social ties. It comes from repeated acts of summons. To live there is to be hailed, continuously and from multiple directions, as a particular kind of person.
Through Becker’s lens, those summons are not merely social. They are the hero system doing its maintenance work. Each summons interrupts private drift. The community that can summon its members reliably keeps its hero system operative. The community that loses its summoning power leaves its members to manage existential terror through whatever substitute frameworks suburban America offers.
That is why defection carries such disproportionate social weight. The person who stops attending town halls, or who supports federal land transfers when his neighbors do not, or who sells a ranch to a developer and takes the money, is not merely making a lifestyle adjustment. He weakens, in the community’s felt logic, the collective structure through which everyone manages the terror that the tradition was built to contain. This is not cynical. It is how hero systems function. The stakes feel existential because they partly are.
Becker also illuminates the state’s relationship to the world around it. Rural Montana defines itself against an outside: Washington bureaucrats, California transplants, urban values, the tourist in the leased SUV. That outside is not only a threat. It is functional. Every regulation from Washington, every wine bar on Main Street, every Zoom worker who moved from Portland forces the local resident to renew his identification. The profane surroundings are part of the machinery through which the enclave sustains itself. Hero systems need a border. Montana has one immediately and constantly available.
Within that structure, three types of residents emerge. The first is the fully committed, often a multi-generation Montanan or an ideological transplant who chose the state for what it represents. For this person, the hero system is fully operative. The demands are not a burden. They are the structure through which life acquires significance. The second is the negotiator, someone who accepts the framework but quietly adjusts it. He attends the meetings, talks independence, and may quietly accept federal subsidies or cut deals with developers while maintaining the public language of resistance. The third is the cultural participant, for whom Montana is a setting rather than a calling. He wears the hat and attends the rodeo, but the underlying framework of frontier survival carries no real weight. The state still summons him, but the summons produces habit rather than conviction.
The community does not merely exist to provide hunting, open roads, and county governance. It exists to define and reproduce a conservative form of life in a nation that is not conservative. Whoever controls the legitimate rhythm and intensity of that life controls Montana’s most valuable currency: social capital, marriageability, institutional belonging, moral prestige, and access to the dense web of commissions, associations, and everyday recognitions that make conservative life viable here.
Three domains organize the struggle over that control.
The first is moral authority over what counts as serious conservatism. The hardline coalition, concentrated in ranching families, extraction-oriented communities, and eastern Montana, claims the state’s value lies in its capacity to sustain a demanding form of life against the nation around it. The point of Montana is not comfort. It is character. To soften the summons is to weaken the very thing that makes the state worth defending.
In Becker’s terms, the hardline coalition defends the integrity of the hero system against accommodations that slowly evacuate it. Every softening of the summons is experienced not merely as a social adjustment but as a threat to the structure through which the community manages its existential stakes. One household’s quiet accommodation becomes everyone’s problem, because the hero system is collective. Its power depends on enough people maintaining it with enough seriousness that the summons retains authority.
This coalition’s power shows in symbols. Small variations in trucks, hats, and gear sort people into subaffiliations before a word is spoken. The difference between a work truck with a rifle rack and a luxury SUV with a “Montana” sticker is not aesthetic. It is jurisdictional. It signals which authority structure a man accepts as binding and which summons he stands ready to receive. A “Don’t California My Montana” decal does constant jurisdictional work. A man who displays one in a parking lot becomes a visible participant in the myth, available to be hailed by strangers, pulled back into his political identification regardless of what he was thinking about before he stopped for gas. The summons arrives through a stranger’s comment at the pump.
Against the hardline coalition stands a pragmatic-engagement coalition, strongest among younger professionals, some transplants, and those trying to build sustainable conservatism in a state pressured by tourism, recreation, and demographic change. Their language is balance, context, workability, and livable seriousness. Their claim is not that the Constitution should be abandoned. It is that Montana cannot be governed as though it were 1889. The state must function not only as a site of boundary maintenance but as a bridge between tradition and economic reality.
Pinsof’s framework makes the move visible. Once one side defines Montana’s purpose as sustaining the maximal summons, flexibility looks like drift or surrender to California. Once the other side defines Montana’s purpose as making conservative life sustainable under modern conditions, maximal summons looks like burnout, performative intensity, or status competition dressed as principle. Neither side says it is fighting over prestige, land value, institutional influence, or the marriage market. Each says it is protecting Montana life.
Stephen Turner’s critique of essentialism explains why the fight never resolves. There is no single stable essence of authentic Montana conservatism being transmitted intact from one generation to the next. There are competing reconstructions. One faction builds the state around grit, density, and stricter independence. Another builds it around sustainable balancing, selective permeability, and workable frontier fidelity. Both claim continuity. Both select from the same body of constitutional history, state lore, and social practice to authorize current positions. What gets transmitted is not a stable essence but material from which each coalition selects the passages and emphases that serve its needs.
The second domain is organizational. Montana is not governed by one top-down authority. Its power comes from overlapping institutions: legislatures, county commissions, zoning boards, ranching associations, PACs, rod and gun clubs, and the informal authority of people who know who belongs where. Power belongs to those who can make a summons binding. Who can fill a room. Who can shame someone into showing up. Who can define a land-use vote as loyalty or betrayal.
A county commissioner who can coordinate action across communities sets the terms of debate. A ranching association that can mobilize members defines reality more than one that issues statements. The real currency is the capacity to summon, and that capacity does not come from title. It comes from the accumulated weight of reputation, relationship, and demonstrated seriousness within the hero system.
The third domain is the daily network, and this is where the deeper logic shows most clearly. Montana is not only a social world. It is a moral obstacle course. The nation around it pulls with ease and consumption: federal regulations, urban leisure culture, vacation-home prices that reward selling, the steady drift toward amenity and convenience. The problem is not simply maintaining difference from outsiders. It is disentangling oneself from the summons of the modern world while still working, driving, shopping, and moving through it.
Through Becker’s lens, this is the hero system’s daily maintenance work. Every act of navigation, every practiced refusal, every route chosen to avoid the tourist strip, every moment of self-monitoring in a mixed environment: these are not merely behavioral habits. They are the repeated acts through which a person sustains his participation in the framework that gives his life its larger significance. The discipline is psychological as much as social. It is what keeps the terror managed.
Wolf management illustrates this at the level of policy. The lines drawn on maps marking hunting zones are literal technologies of jurisdiction. But the decision about whether to support aggressive wolf hunting is also a public positioning on the totem pole of seriousness, a visible statement about which hero system one has accepted as binding. Some stricter circles reject any compromise, treating accommodation as a semipermissible workaround for those who take the easier path. The wolf debate is a debate about the hero system’s threshold. How demanding must the system be to remain credible as a structure for managing existential stakes? Where is the line between a discipline that genuinely matters and an accommodation that hollows out what the discipline was for?
Across all three domains, the same pattern holds. Hardliners claim fidelity to uncompromising independence. Pragmatists claim fidelity to sustainable conservative life under actual modern conditions. Organizational leaders claim the coordinating power needed to sustain a thick enclave. None presents its position as interest-driven. All present it as what authentic Montana life requires. That is how coalition language works. The power move and the genuine conviction arrive together, and neither can be cleanly separated from the other.
What makes Montana especially revealing is that authority here is exercised less through formal decrees than through repeated social summons. The state works because private drift is constantly interrupted. There is always another town hall, another rodeo, another neighbor’s crisis, another moment at the gas station or the feed store at which one is hailed as a certain kind of Montanan. Through Becker’s lens, those interruptions are the hero system defending itself against the entropy that threatens every collective framework for managing mortality. The community’s power lies in making the frontier difficult to forget and difficult to privatize, because a hero system that can be privatized has already begun to fail.
Montana is therefore not governed by one unified authority. It is governed by competing coalitions operating through constitutional discourse, organizational density, and everyday summons, each trying to define the legitimate balance between rigor and navigation, enclave and nation, relentless availability and sustainable life. The tensions visible in legislative affiliation, degrees of conservatism, transplant and multi-generation distinctions, wolf-hunting positions, truck-decal gradations, and daily street-level negotiations are not signs of a community losing itself. They are the mechanism through which authority is continuously made and remade.
The jurisdictional war is a struggle over who gets to define what being summoned really requires. Beneath that, it is a struggle over which version of the hero system is strong enough to keep the terror contained.