Guys, "what if a bunch of people moved to Portland who weren't aligned with the preexisting culture as it stood" is the subtext...
Guys, “what if a bunch of people moved to Portland who weren’t aligned with the preexisting culture as it stood” is the subtext of like everything in the real Portland for the last decade
Which involves things like “Portland identity involved elements of both working class AND petit bourgeois idealization; after new arrivals shifted the economy there was a reaction against them in the name of working-class Portland, in response to which bourgeois forces have been co-opting them with the understanding of defending Portlandishness.” That’s how these things go.
It also involves things like “the Oregon Democratic Party never went through the ‘70s-'80s realignment because the state was so white that race wasn’t relevant as a cleavage and Christianity/family traditionalism wasn’t enough to power a Republican relaunch, but the national party did, and new arrivals come from state political traditions that did and so replicated those practices by habit, while state Republicans out of power were drawn by national trends to a niche, but this election the whole thing is rupturing and it’s legitimately unclear what form state political coalitions will take for the next few decades”