The Idaho farmer-labor solution

Today there appears to be a great amount of anxiety stemming from the rising cost of living. While most people have been hanging on for the last few years, and I know very well people are hanging on and still finding places to rent at or under 500 dollars a month, this will soon not be the case. From the city to the countryside, there seems to be a general sense that the working class will be gradually emptied out of the area and replaced by upper middle-class individuals that move from out of State.

This environment has produced interesting sentiments in the cities and the countryside. In the cities there are young middle class people who don't see a future here in Idaho and plan to run away to another state. For the working class in the cities, those that cannot afford the mentality of “escape-ism,” the prevailing sentiments have been hopelessness for some, anger for many, and annoyance for all. In more rural areas we see a common distaste for real estate agents. There are a great number of people there who believe, and it is hard to blame them for believing, that real estate agents are going where money/demand is: marketing almost exclusively to wealthy and out of state individuals, and leaving locals behind. In the rural areas one might have heard the whispers of laws restricting commissions of real estate agents in the state, many of these whispers have great distortions within their contents, but the feeling that something is wrong is more than observable.

On top of all of this, trust in the current political institutions and the two political parties are so remarkably low that statisticians are having a field day with “all time” or “ever before” types of headlines. Pew Research has been talking about “historic lows” with their statistics that, according to them, demonstrate that Americans have less trust in the Government today than they did during the Vietnam War. While partisan hostility has grown between Democrats and Republicans, apparently between 3-4/10 Americans do not feel well-represented by either party and see both quite negatively. “63% of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the candidates who have emerged so far,” and this does seem to line up with the uncommitted votes cast in the Presidential primary and Reuters polls that demonstrate that regardless of race, gender, and age everybody is unhappy. At least on paper, many Idahoans do not affiliate with either Party. According to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office, not only a mere 23.1% of the voting age population actually voting in local elections, as of January 2020, out of 872,794 registered Idaho voters, 308,784 are unaffiliated to any party. According to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office, the largest block of registered voters are Republicans at a little over 400,000, then in second place, unaffiliated voters, and in third place is the Democratic party at 112,000.

This means, to put it frankly, not even half of the population of the City of Boise, considered a liberal bastion within Idaho, are registered Democrats.

Shedding the exhausting baggage of the two Parties is a crucial move in Idaho to reach an ever-growing trend within the United States of dissatisfaction. With dissatisfaction, there also comes exhaustion with both the Left and Right. While working people juggle ever busier schedules, the absurd politics of democrats have been on the decline. At the same time, the insane policies of the right have effectively brought government bureaucracy into our lives in ways never before imaginable. The State Government is now obsessed with questions of the books your children can read, words your children can say, and bathrooms your children can use. What was before The old party of so called “limited Government” has apparently taken most questions out of the hands of parents and school boards and made them all matters of the State. The tiresome politics of a perpetually fragile and guilty left and a perpetually paranoid, frantic, and emotional right has had most people looking to boredom with a sense of longing to be bored again.

What Is To Be Done?

First, any solution must be able to shed the old party politics and the agents of chaos which exist within these two parties. These parties are certainly not popular amongst working people, but an alternative, which can be legally secured with canvassing, has not been offered yet. Labor already has a base of voters that, with their signatures alone can initiate aThird Party. A third party, so long as it appeals to both rural and urban citizens, can effectively attract those who might casually vote Republican in rural Idaho, and those that might casually vote Democratic in urban Idaho. We are not looking for those who are especially energetic about either party, and fortunately there appear to be only a few anyway.

Second, after shedding the two Parties any solution must understand the cynical and heinous nature of the “Culture War” we currently see. The appeal of Farmer-Labor on this front would be in positioning itself as an attempt to bring stability to the lives of the great majority of the exhausted working class through common good politics. The common good politics I describe will confuse those on the Right and those on the Left. It rejects the right-wing obsession with the market and instead takes the concept of Self Government as the North Star. It rejects this strange hatred of the foreigner, the immigrant, and all those “different” as not only entirely irrational and immoral, but also as a criminal attempt to distract working people from their real adversaries. The hatred of those who are born outside of this country, those with a different color skin, culture or those who are not heterosexual is plain to see in so many people today, and this must be combated on the terms that this divides the camp of the working people. The consequences of division is ancient knowledge even described in the bible (Mathews 12:15), that “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.”

Farmer-Labor, in the same breath rejects the liberal obsession with the self and all its “individualized” truths. Common good politics does not find an ally in trains of thought which demand the acceptance of all points of view or interpretations as wholly legitimate just because a person has them. This negates more than it affirms. Instead, I see Farmer-Labor championing the concept of toleration even with those whose views on social norms one may privately disagree with. Conversations on social norms and taboos are worth having in a Democratic society, and this requires toleration of views but also the ability to not accept and even disagree with views regarding social matters. To be a mass-movement, a truly mass movement, a common shield is required to protect all people on the basis of toleration. This does not mean that one must advocate nor accept all views another has, only be willing to hold up their end of the shield.

However, there is a line, the outlawing of one way of life is a serious matter which strips democratic and human rights away from a people. Broadly Farmer-Labor, and every decent person, opposes such a thing and offers to protect all sections of the working class from abuse, maltreatment, and persecution. This does not mean that one must advocate nor accept all views of those Farmer-Labor will protect, but a strong democratic culture requires broad unity for the defense of democratic and human rights, a common agreement to hold up the shield. If there is no room for this way of thinking then there is no tolerance, there is no mass movement to begin with.

Third, to put it plainly, the Farmer-Labor solution is an attempt at mass “common good” politics which appeals to the city and countryside with a sense of democratic life. Farmer-Labor values self-government and democratic life in Idaho and identifies threats to self-government in a small elite group of shareholders who profit while the great majority suffers. It is here that the argument for expropriation and nationalization, even a Workers and Farmers Government, are best found. Farmer-Labor identifies the monopoly of industry, credit and communication in the hands of a small group of shareholders as a great contradiction to the concept of self-government. The development of a small elite few has meant that the lives of the rest of the population have been entirely dictated by the needs and interests of a small group’s profit motive. Contrary to the principles of self-government, the real center of political and economic life today is not the demands of the citizenry, but the profitability of a very small group of shareholders. This violates what I see as Common Good politics that starts from the undeniable fact that a stable, democratic political order of self-government must be in the hands of the great majority - that is the working class.

This is only possible of course, through a more democratic government, a Republic worthy of the name Republic - a Workers and Farmers Government.

Those things and people harmful to the tenets of Self-Government, namely those economic players and practices that breed mass dependence, are the chief enemies Farmer-Labor identifies.

What a fresh idea it is, Farmer-Labor will finally actually publicly identify enemies honestly, a practice unheard of in American politics.