Party pooping

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The Reader has never published its own endorsements of candidates. The closest we’ve ever come to doing so was actually a dis-endorsement I wrote of Reader co-founder and editor-emeritus John Reuter’s bid for a Sandpoint City Council seat 15 or so years ago. However, we have never shied away from expressing an editorial opinion on the issues, policies and ideas that animate local, state and national politics. And if there’s an issue at play in the 2024 primary election that begs further comment, it’s “authenticity.”

This has manifested itself in a variety of ways throughout the campaign season, with candidates jockeying to position themselves as locals of varying vintage (though none of them were actually born here) or somehow especially attuned with a mythical set of “Idaho values” that seem more inspired by how much they disliked the place from which they came than the place to which they moved.

There is a staggering degree of hypocrisy and projection required to move from, say, California and immediately start denouncing people from California for influencing the preexisting political culture by trying to influence the preexisting political culture. All the while, in a feat of delusion worthy of study by experts in abnormal psychology, go on to claim to be defending “us” from outsiders trying to influence the preexisting political culture.

In the words of Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski: “She kidnapped herself, man.” Or, as Pogo put it, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” 

But the central front in this battle for authenticity has been defined by who gets to call themselves a “real” Republican. Which makes sense on one level — primaries are, by definition, contests over who can best bear a party’s standard in the general election — but the question of RINOs (a.k.a. “Republicans In Name Only”) takes on an outsized importance in Idaho.

The most sensitive members of the Idaho GOP have spent years filling their diapers and tossing their toys out of the crib in a tantrum over supposed “philosophical Democrats” masquerading as Republicans in the Legislature, put there by citizens who affiliate as Republicans in order to vote in the party’s closed primary despite not adhering to its increasingly John Birch-addled platform.

This isn’t fair, they cry; it’s dishonest and, well, it’s just not fair.

Yeah, wow, it’s almost like people treat voting as a strategic act and affiliation with a political party as a political tactic to achieve a desired political outcome. 

And jeez, it’s almost as if the Idaho GOP is so angry about open primaries and ranked choice voting because its authoritarian wing knows that its greatest existential threat is representative democracy uncontrolled by party hacks, ideological zealots, cynical lobbyists and culture war grifters tapped into rivers of lucre seeping up through cracks in America’s mental basement.

The sniveling over “RINOs” and chest thumping over who’s the “true Christian, conservative, Constitution-freedom-liberty-eagle-flag-gun-loving patriot” are nothing so much as the “irritable mental gestures” (to borrow Lionel Trilling’s phrase) of low-imagination party apparatchiks terrified that they’ll be outflanked by someone even loonier than them or (worse) lose the artificial leverage they’ve enjoyed since 2012 when they turned their primary into the political equivalent of a treehouse for mean kids.

(Read: “Secret Recording Shows How A Right-Wing Idaho Lobbyist Tried To Keep A Legislator In Lockstep,” published by InvestigateWest on May 13 at invw.org.)

When you have this level of dread and need to assert legitimacy within your own ranks, your party is broken. And when you can’t keep the panic-tinged loathing out of your voice when you talk about open primaries and ranked choice voting signaling “the end” of political parties, it’s clear that you don’t actually care about representative government — you’re a lackey.

Yet, these same sectarians tell us that Idaho isn’t really as conservative as we think it is, and try to scare us by reminding us that we used to elect Democrats — which seems to suggest that our “traditional Idaho values” are more nuanced than hunting for porn-peddling Commies under our kids’ beds. Might it be that the so-called RINOs are simply Idahoans who aren’t particularly interested in being dictated to by puffed up party pedants and petty power-grabbers?

One thing that this primary has made abundantly clear — and gives ample reason for an endorsement — is the need to reject the toxic strain of self-obsession within the Idaho GOP and go on in November to achieve a citizens’ victory for open primaries and ranked choice voting, so we can stop the cycle of performative authenticity and get back to electing authentic Idaho leaders rather than partisan thralls.