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Posts published in “Day: June 21, 2024”

Boundaries of extremism

A reader wrote recently with a reasonable question which likely is not his alone:

“My question is what you consider extreme.  Some current law makers and organizations that support them, such as the Freedom Foundation, you continually label extreme. Many of their ideals have been quite central in Idaho for generations. So just wondering why you consider their views being so far from central.”

Several ideas are packed into this, so let’s separate them.

First, not everything said by the IFF or the leadership of the Idaho Republican Party is extreme. The Idaho Republican Party has a platform running over quite a few pages, and much of what’s in it could be endorsed by most non-Republicans as well as party members, and close analogues for some of it can be found in the Democratic platform.

But any organization making policy decisions has to be judged not by its blandest statements but by those that mark out distinctive territory - that make it really different from the others.

Here’s a little more from the Republican 2022 Idaho platform: “We believe Social Security must be stabilized, diversified, and privatized … We support the total abolition of inheritance taxes [which are paid only by the very wealthy, not the vast majority of us] … The Idaho Republican Party hereby recommends that the Idaho Legislature and Governor nullify any and all existing and future unconstitutional federal mandates, federal court opinions, and laws, funded or unfunded, that infringe on Idaho’s 10th Amendment sovereignty.” Idaho citizens should lose their right to elect their U.S. senators, too, and the income tax should be wiped out without anything to replace it.

To that, this year you could add opposition to state funding for education beyond the high school level (the language of that measure was interpreted by some people as specifically targeting vocational-technical education, but that was unclear - and not a lot better). In-vitro fertilization was targeted as well, along with demands for tougher abortion laws (and considering where Idaho is now in that area, this should be interesting to see). When I see librarians and physicians arguing that a party’s direction is making it impossible for them to do their jobs in the state, you just might be extremist.

But many of us have what are clear minority opinions. So let’s weigh a couple of other considerations as well.

Second, extremism is also marked by an absolute unwillingness to accept the legitimacy of anyone who thinks differently. Don't listen to them, Anything they do is illegitimate. Even if what they’re doing is something you agree with, don’t join them because they're evil.

You can point to a near-obsession with concern about any involvement in the political process - not just the party organization - on the part of anyone who doesn’t toe a strict party line. The sensibility is strictly totalitarian.

Third, an organization waves the flag of extremism when it shuts itself off from transparency and outside review. We all need an editor (I know I do) and if we have any sort of power, we all need some oversight; it’s mainly the operators of far-gone organizations that shut out the outside world.

Mary Souza, the former legislator who ran for state GOP chair last week, recognized as much, saying, “When the party obfuscates and covers things up and isn’t transparent – and this leadership is not transparent – this kind of lack of transparency, lack of honesty, all of those things need to change. I’m running because there is a lack of respect for people in the party from leadership, and also (a lack of respect for) the voters.” She said that before the convention was held, a convention in which armed guards patrolled the grounds to make sure reporters and others weren’t watching any of the party activities which for decades had been commonly assumed (in the Republican as well as the Democratic party) to be open-access to the public.

She lost to the incumbent Dorothy Moon, who laughed when asked about transparency, and when asked if it was a consideration said, "Yeah, not really. Not in my mind. In my mind, this is a private group. It's a private association.”

I’ll credit her at least with honesty about that.

The Republican Party Idahoans have chosen by simple biennial reflex to run their state has morphed into, according to its chair, a private organization with broad control over the state’s public decision-makers and which is totally unconcerned about whether the policies it is pushing - with enforcement by penalties - are acceptable to more than a sliver of the people of the state.

To my reader inquiring about extremism: Yeah, in the context of politics I’d say that’s close to a practical definition of extreme.

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