The Politics of the Personal: Growing Up Idahoan

[First of a five-part series, appearing Mondays.]

There's one thing about growing up in a place like Idaho: If you can't make friends with conservatives, you won't have many friends.

And as my oldest friends can tell you, once upon a time I was myself fairly conservative politically. I come from a working-class Republican family -- my mother's side of the family was in road construction, and my dad's was mostly a farming family, though his father actually was an auto mechanic. Dad himself worked at the local airport for the FAA, and I remember well the Goldwater bumper sticker on the red ’59 Ford Fairlane that was our family car in 1964.

My dad, who was born and raised in southern Idaho and is still an accomplished marksman and woodsman, was a gunsmith in his spare time, and so we often hung out in gun shops. This meant I was exposed to the NRA worldview at an early age, not to mention the John Birch Society, which was everywhere in Idaho Falls. Certainly I had it drilled into my head to be on the lookout for commies, gun-grabbers, and other loathsome forms of humanity. Most of these, I learned, were Democrats, and so even through high school I identified with all things Republican.

When our junior high school held a mock presidential debate in 1968, I eagerly took the Nixon side. In high school I worked on the congressional campaigns of local Republicans, and I continued doing GOP campaign work in college. I paid for my first couple of years of college by doing farm work, mostly hauling irrigation pipe, later moving up to higher-paying road construction jobs. I knew well the value of hard work. My belief in blue-collar virtues -- like integrity, decency, honesty, common sense, and fair play -- was imbedded like the work lines in my hands. And until I got out of college, I really believed that conservatism best embodied those values.

Over the years, like most people, my views morphed, especially as, after college, I began working as a newspaperman (this was about 1976, when I was just turning 20) in Idaho and Montana. I was confronted innumerable times with realities that challenged my old preconceptions. I came to know hard-working Democrats who had the highest integrity and greatest decency (people like Senator Frank Church and Governor Cecil Andrus). I got to know Republicans who were prolific liars of the lowest integrity (like Reps. George Hansen, Steve Symms and Helen Chenoweth). Along the way, of course, I also encountered dishonest Democrats and honest Republicans alike, people who jibed with my old worldview. But it was obvious that the former construct, while not exactly turned on its head, was not really valid.

The right in Idaho, in fact, had a long history of being a fertile place for extremism to take root. From the mid-1950s onward, anti-communist paranoia, embodied by the John Birch Society, was a dominant political force in southern Idaho. The first time I saw Gen. Jack D. Ripper, the cigar-chewing paranoid who blows up the world in Dr. Strangelove, on TV, I thought it was depicting our neighbor down the street, the one who had the bomb shelter. He also worked at the local nuclear engineering laboratory.

The Birch Society was everywhere at the time; I think I saw copies of Gary Allen’s eminently digestible Bircherite opus, None Dare Call it Conspiracy, in the homes of just about all my parents' friends. My grandmother dated an ardent Bircherite for many years and I used to thumb through his conspiracist library in his farmhouse just outside Twin Falls. Southern Idaho generally was also quite dominated by the Mormon Church (about two-thirds of my graduating class was LDS), and the "Church-Birch connection" was well known and oft-remarked. When I was in high school in the early ‘70s, the local Birch unit became ardently involved in the fight over our school district’s dress code; we were told that letting boys grow their hair long was part of the communist conspiracy to feminize our men. Fortunately, the district ignored them and let us grow our hair.

It even followed me to northern Idaho. I remember spending one evening in Sandpoint, Idaho, when I was editor of the local paper there in the late 1970s, at the home of a local businessman who had invited me to dinner. I barely knew the man and wasn’t sure why I was there, but he had made an effort to seek me out so I went. After the meal with his wife and children, we retired to his den, where he got out one of those filmstrip projectors with an accompanying phonograph and proceeded to show me a Birch Society recruitment film. Afterward, I thanked him and declined any further contact. By then, I had seen enough of the Birch Society to stay away.

I still considered myself a Republican, but in those days there were such creatures as moderate Republicans. My political instincts were, I thought, fundamentally conservative, with a premium placed on basic decency, fair play, civility, and a patriotic love of America’s democratic institutions; yet I also gravitated to the moderate Republicans who favored civil rights, environmental awareness, and economic fair play. But increasingly I saw that all those were shared values that crossed party lines – and in fact, as I watched the careers of the George Hansens and the Steve Symmses in Idaho, I came to doubt to what extent they were shared by the people who called themselves “conservatives.”

A basic realization took shape, perhaps typical of the age, but it has persisted: even though I had always believed (and still do to some extent) upper-class and urban liberals are prone to indulging a paper-thin compassion that more resembles a parlor game rationalized with a tortuous intellectualism, it was also clear that conservatives, conversely, were fond of wrapping themselves in my old-fashioned, working-class values (along with the American flag, of course) even as they systematically undermined the ability of ordinary, working-class people to make a decent living and obtain equal opportunity.

I realized that conservatism had come less to represent those old-fashioned values, and instead had become a watchword for rampant, unfettered corporatism, flavored with rancid veins of old-fashioned anti-intellectualism, nativism, and bigotry. Republicans in Idaho particularly were fond of gutting my state's heritage -- letting "free enterprise" pollute our streams, wipe out fish runs and wildlife habitat, destroy the forests in which I used to hunt and fish and hike -- while proclaiming they were doing so in the name of "liberty." They weren't the party of the little people, despite their pose, which so many people I knew bought into. They were the party of the fat cats who bellied up to the public trough, trashed our lands, and walked away fatter and fancy free.

Wandering in this kind of political wilderness, I finally arrived at what remains in my mind a clear view of things: I realized that, when it came to everyone from personal friends to politicians, ideology mattered a great deal less than the person. The proof, I think, lies both in the personal integrity they exhibit and in the kinds of policies they promote. It came to matter less and less to me whether a person was Republican or Democrat; what counted, in both the friends I made and the politicians I voted for, was how straightforward and honest they were in dealing with people, and how they affected the lives of the people they touched. For politicians, the key question was how well they balanced the needs of everyone with the rights of the individual, and most of all, how better they made the lives of ordinary people.

I simultaneously came to almost instinctively mistrust ideologues of all stripes because it seems that to them, ideas are more important than people. This observation arose first out of personal experience, since ideologues are often likely to reject friendships with those who don't think like them or fit their ideologies. I might be able to maintain a relationship with an ideologue (right or left) for awhile, but inevitably, they would reject me because I didn't fit the pure mold they had in mind. People who disagree with them or challenge them assault their egos and are placed out of their personal realms. This dynamic – valuing ideas above people -- played out on the larger stage as well; indeed, it’s virtually a guarantee that when ideologues act out their ideologies, in both national politics and everyday interpersonal dealings, ordinary people in real life are harmed.

This is probably why, when I first became involved in anti-racist organizations, I became embroiled in some nasty fights with some of the avowed Communists who often partake of this work. No doubt influenced by my upbringing, I still view Stalinist Communism as the epitome of the blinkered, anti-personal ideology of the left, and remain profoundly skeptical of Marxist thinking in general.

But over the past decade and more, I've become much more concerned about conservatism, largely because it has itself morphed from a style of thought, like liberalism, into a decidedly ideological movement. One never hears of a "liberal movement" (though you of course hear of various sub-movements, as with environmental and gay-rights causes) while the "conservative movement" proudly announces its presence at every turn. Conservatism has become highly dogmatic and rigid in its thinking, allowing hardly anything in the way of dissent -- indeed, it is nowadays practically Stalinist itself, especially in the way it punishes anyone who strays from the official "conservative" line.

This became abundantly clear over the years, on a personal level, as I became increasingly accused of being a "liberal" merely for questioning conservative dogma. Of course, my truly liberal friends always suspected me of latent conservatism (probably true), but in the past decade especially, I've come not merely to accept but embrace the "liberal" label simply because it has come to be plastered on anyone who is simply "not a movement conservative."

Still, this has never changed my basic view that people are more important than their politics. I've always managed to maintain a substantial number of conservative friends (not to mention all those members of my extended family who are conservative). These are people I go hunting, fishing and camping with; people whose weddings I attend, and whose children I babysit and tend, people I stay with while on vacation. Because their value as my friends always far superseded whatever politics they might choose to espouse, and this was something I always felt was reciprocated. And of course, I always voted a split ticket, looking usually to reward moderate and progressive Republicans -- though this has become increasingly difficult in recent years.

But in the past seven years, all that has changed, dramatically.

Next: Two Turning Points

[Editor's note: This series, "The Politics of the Personal," is the opening essay of a work in progress, whose working title is The Eliminationists: Newspeak and the Rise of the Pseudo-Fascist Right in America. It's based to some extent on the author's previous work at his blog, Orcinus. See his explanatory note here.]