Guest opinion: Don’t give up rural Idaho to white supremacy, anti-democratic forces

For many Americans, the first wake-up call to a resurgent white nationalist movement came three-and-a-half years ago: Angry, torch-lit crowds shouted “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, followed by the killing of peaceful protester Heather Heyer. The alarm rang louder still watching violent, sometimes-deadly clashes on the streets of Portland and the politically driven killings in Kenosha last month.

In the West, organizations like Western States Center and United Vision for Idaho have been countering this phenomenon of right-wing extremism for decades. Experience on the front lines has taught us that the fate of rural communities and the fight for robust and inclusive democracy are tied up together. And this collective future is under violent attack.

Progressives and mainstream politicians for years have largely abandoned rural areas for more seemingly target-rich environments. In the political calculus of limited resources and short-term victories, it may seem easy to write off a state like Idaho, with its four electoral votes and landslide Trump victory in 2016. But failing to organize and invest in responsive government in rural areas is a short-sighted mistake that threatens our individual and collective well-being. As the dangerous advances of Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer and other like-minded groups in Western states have demonstrated, in the absence of alternative social and political forces, the far right fills the vacuum.

The good news is that confronting these ugly, violent forces does not require abandoning a bold, progressive vision or condoning racism. In fact, it requires just the opposite: It requires us to show up and engage people on their shared issues and values.

We must recognize and speak to the pain of people living in these communities. Rural places, like many others, have suffered increasingly with poverty and joblessness, lack of access to quality health care even as the opioid epidemic has raged, and displacement by large corporations (namely factory farms).

We cannot continue to cede these areas to anti-democratic extremists. White supremacy threatens us morally, physically and politically. While the stakes vary from person to person (say a black man in Portland and a white woman in Boise), we all suffer if the alt-right and anti-democratic movements persist and grow. These movements are a cancer on our democracy, and they are a parasite that feeds on the chaos and division.

An election in and of itself will not erase this vicious cycle, heal the harm it has caused or repair the desperation in which it finds shelter. Instead, we must pursue a strategy to leave no one behind. We cannot defeat a resurgent white nationalism without engaging rural America, and we cannot engage rural America without tackling white nationalism.

To be successful, we must debunk the myth of an urban-rural divide. White supremacist and alt-right groups have used this separation as kindling and dutifully stoked it into a fire. But embers of progressivism abound. “People over profit” is but one example of overlap between democratic and rural interests. When we are willing to show up and to listen, progressive and rural citizens find there is much more that unites than divides us: a desire to be seen, heard and valued; a desire to be included; a demand for better health care and community solutions that support the working class over huge corporations, be they factory farms or big banks.

We have a playbook, the People’s Action Rural Agenda, developed over the course of two years and thousands of doors knocked in rural communities. UVI’s experiences, drawing on deep analysis and on-the-ground organizing in Idaho, reinforce this agenda as a course forward, replete with proven strategies. For instance, through relational organizing, a white man living in a trailer park in rural Michigan and progressive organizers were able to find common ground between his experience and that of undocumented immigrants in need of wage protection and government support.

Finding this common ground often requires us to hold multiple truths and to abandon a “good” versus “bad,” “us” versus “them” binary. When we blame each other for our feelings of disenfranchisement, we allow our common enemy to reap the rewards. Pitting “Trump voters” against “progress” reinforces this division, creating a Trojan horse for authoritarian solutions and fear-based organizations to strengthen their hold. We cannot stand by while these hateful forces exploit the pain people are feeling to further polarize and demoralize us.

To ignore Idaho and rural America is to snuff out the embers of a truly inclusive future, while handing more fuel to feed white supremacist fires. It is time to reinvest in rural places across the country, a reinvestment in policies that address the needs — strikingly amenable to progressive solutions — of these communities, and in the organizing to enable those policy changes to be demanded, channeled and enacted.

We all want to care for our families and live free from fear. None of that is possible if we allow far-right extremism to upend our democracy.