Insider/Outsider

Let me elucidate the point I made earlier today about what it means to be an insider or an outsider in modern politics today with a story from Idaho.

A bipartisan forum in a small Latah County community took a turn when Republican Senate incumbent Dan Foreman stormed out of the event, following a racist outburst directed at a Native American candidate.

On Tuesday, local Democrat and Republican representatives organized a “Meet your candidates” forum in the northern Idaho town of Kendrick. Three contenders from each party vying for Legislative District 6 seats — one senate and two house representatives positions — answered questions submitted by audience members.

When asked if discrimination existed in Idaho, conservative Sen. Dan Foreman said no.

In a statement released Wednesday, Democratic candidate for House Seat A and member of the Nez Perce tribe Trish Carter-Goodheart said she pushed back on that idea when it was her turn to speak, pointing to her own experience and the history of white supremacy groups in North Idaho.

“[J]ust because someone hasn’t personally experienced discrimination, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Racism and discrimination are real issues here in Idaho, as anyone familiar with our state’s history knows,” Carter-Goodheart’s statement read. “I highlighted our weak hate crime laws and mentioned the presence of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho as undeniable evidence of this reality.”

Foreman stood up and angrily interjected, using an expletive to criticize what he cast as the liberal bent of the response, according to the release and people present at the forum.

Carter-Goodheart said he then told her she should go back to where she came from, and heatedly stormed off. One event organizer and two other panelists confirmed Carter-Goodheart’s account, adding Foreman appeared very agitated.

Go back to where she came from. As a Nez Perce. OK.

Well, clearly Foreman is a True Idahoan. After all, he’s from Illinois, served 30 years in the Air Force, and evidently moved to Idaho to live in a conservative safe space. But note that he’s the one getting elected to the state senate there. But this is the thing–by any actual definition of the word, he’s an outsider. A rich guy, presumably, or well off enough anyway, a man with basically no connections to the state, but one who makes the white voters there feel good about their own hates, which very much includes the Tribes.

What this means is the nationalization, or even globalization, of identity. Northern Idaho whites–and remember that a century ago this was IWW country and there was a very strong New Deal working class identity in these counties for decades–embraced radical politics as their mining and timber jobs disappeared for issues of both the global economy and environmental restrictions. Randy Weaver and Bo Gritz and the Aryan Nation could set up shop there and take advantage of the economic dislocations and the Tribes showing greater political power (both the Nez Perce and Coeur d’Alene in this case) just pissed them off more, and if anything could have held local whites from embracing this shit it was the unions, but they were gone too with the jobs. The lunatic proto-Trump Helen Chenoweth won the Congressional seat in 1994 over the largely excellent Larry LaRocco and northern Idaho has never looked back. Locals create new identities based on grievance, assholes from Illinois or California come move there, and they are the insiders. The Nez Perce are the outsiders, but of course even lefty white workers mostly classified them that way even since dispossessing them of their land in the 1870s.

So what the hell do you do about that?

I got nothing.