Tom Foley and Western Political Transformations

Tom Foley’s death is a worthy time to think about the late 20th century transition in western politics. Foley was really the last of a generation of western politicians who could come from rural areas but support a progressive agenda, including on environmental issues. He was mentored by Scoop Jackson, who for all the rightful disdain he gets from progressives on foreign policy and military spending was actually a very important environmentalist who did more than any other politician to push the National Environmental Policy Act through Congress in the wake of the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 and other environmental disasters. He was hardly the only example of this. Mike Mansfield, Frank Church, Wayne Morse, Mo and Stewart Udall–there was a lot these types in the West.

It’s also worth noting how much foreign policy dominates progressive political judgment in the post-Vietnam era. Whereas Jackson is remembered as the Senator from Boeing, Mark Hatfield is remembered as the Good Republican who opposed Vietnam. But on environmental issues, where Jackson was doing really good work, Hatfield was a total and unrepentant timber industry hack. If Jackson was the Senator from Boeing, Hatfield was the Senator from Weyerhaeuser. I’m not particularly comfortable with one being lauded and the other denigrated and I think that this has happened says an awful lot about progressives and not all for the better.

Foley was a part of this world. When he was defeated by George Nethercutt in the 1994 Republican landslide, he bemoaned the inability of Democrats to appeal to rural people anymore. But this was really part of the natural realignment of American politics in the wake of the civil rights movement. This was not only palpable in the South, but also in the West, where it was paired with environmental politics. In the wake of three decades of wilderness expansion, the Endangered Species Act, and the ancient forest campaigns, rural westerners believed the government was attacking their way of life. In fact, corporations were far more at fault, particularly in logging. But since Americans love their corporate overlords, the government and the hippies in Eugene and San Francisco and even Moscow, Idaho were a lot easier to blame.*

So Foley was caught in a larger political shift that he couldn’t have done much to forestall. Eastern Washington has remained Republican dominated for 20 years now and it’s hard to imagine it any differently.

* I have documents of loggers in Idaho complaining about Frank Church serving the interests of Moscow hippies instead of Read Idahoans.