The threat to Idaho is from the far right, not from the so-called socialist agenda
If you want to see how the middle drops out of American politics and the extremes of the right take over, as liberals or progressives fumble the ball, come to Idaho and Boise, where the “middle” can be heard only as muffled sounds in the background, and the partisans of the right and left dominate the political stage, giving the media juicy headlines and fomenting the kind of right-wing reaction Boise and Idaho has experienced in recent months.
If we follow the breadcrumbs of the liberal or progressive role in escalating the war of words and actions coming from partisans of the right, some of them lead to the mayor’s office and the equity transition committee she created with no apparent guardrails for what the committee was to consider. In my experience, transition committees are carefully chosen by the newly elected leader as people who can be trusted implicitly and who know the boundaries of what the victor can do and what she can’t do, especially in the first year when the electorate is watching closely to judge the quality of the new leadership. Transition committees can also serve as ways of bringing citizens from across a community or state together where they can share their differences and also unite around what they have in common.
Boise Mayor Lauren McLean’s equity transition committee — which she appointed — did nothing of the sort. Although it listed some lofty and worthy goals for the city to consider, it also included a few kegs of political dynamite for folks on the right to blow up way out of proportion. As she correctly reminded critics, these were not policy documents but recommendations for future public policy, which she can reject as not appropriate for city business or simply such red-hot topics that they will drive a wedge right down the middle of the city. However, that message would have been better delivered to the committee at the outset of its deliberations so members understood there would be serious political consequences for the mayor and the city if everything but the kitchen sink from the liberal playbook found its way into its recommendations.
The issues of the campaign were crystal clear to anyone who paid the slightest attention: unbridled and unplanned growth, affordable housing and property taxes to name the most obvious. So why create a controversial forum for a divergent set of issues that divides rather than unites and that did not emerge as the major issues of the campaign?
No matter the mayor’s effort to put distance between her office and controversial proposals such as free abortion, making Boise a sanctuary city and other very expensive proposals that would require the gold of Fort Knox to fund, transition committee members who may have meant well took the mayor down a rabbit hole that was sure to stoke the fires of the right. (Yes, in Idaho, there is another side to the debate about whether Boise should be a sanctuary city. This is not Massachusetts, and the reaction to such a move in the Legislature would certainly bring punitive legislative measures to Boise city. It’s just hard to believe someone in the mayor’s office or on the equity committee could not have figured that out.)
The equity recommendations were not without result. They did earn the mayor a recall effort and give the right-leaning Republican Party and its right-wing enabler, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, some red meat to dangle before its hungry members. A “socialist” agenda, they call the equity committee’s agenda.
Idaho’s new Republican Party chairman, Tom Luna, once a moderate by the standards of today’s Republican Party, was gifted front page coverage last Sunday in the Idaho Statesman as he threw some fresh red meat to his increasingly right-minded base now fully in support of a president running for re-election who has violated over the years most moral and ethical standards Republicans once espoused. Luna can ask Sen. Mitt Romney for details on that history!
For Luna to suggest that what Boise or Idaho has to fear is a “socialist” agenda from the left is about as far removed from reality as Donald Trump serving as the role model for how men are to treat women.
Whether it’s armed civilians standing guard at peaceful protests at the Capitol to intimidate the crowd, pickup trucks cruising through downtown Boise waving the Confederate flag, protesters showing up at the mayor’s home to protest her mask requirement, or Ammon Bundy breaking up a meeting of the Southwest District Health board in Canyon County, the last thing Boise or Idaho has to worry about is some kind of “socialist” takeover.
It’s the right wing that is clearly ascendant in Idaho’s politics, on our streets and in the Legislature and the governor’s office, where Gov. Brad Little seems more concerned about offending his right-wing lieutenant governor than stepping up to require the kinds of protections that will diminish the impact of the coronavirus that is surging in Idaho.
Luna’s Republican Party deserves a challenge from Idaho’s centrists who aren’t afraid to call out those who wander off to the fringes of the political spectrum. Boise enjoys some of the finest corporate and business leadership in the nation with headquartered firms doing business across the nation and the globe. As Idaho’s politics grows more reactionary, it will take corporate and business leadership to step up and challenge the politics of fear and intimidation to which many of our elected officials have succumbed. Idaho’s elected officials must be held accountable and challenged for their complicity in building a case for an Idaho that will be branded as a state off limits to job creation from companies who subscribe to values such as diversity and inclusion in the workforce that too many of Idaho’s politicians have tossed by the wayside.
In short, Luna has it all wrong. The real threat to Idaho’s future comes from the far right he and his fellow Republicans shudder in fear of offending. It’s time to bring Idaho’s politics back to a respectable center that will regain its stature across the nation and the globe.