Idaho's Stockholm Syndrome
Stockholm Syndrome is a quirk of human psychology where victims bond with their captors. Basically, you connect with the assholes in life. You usually hear about it with kidnap victims, or victims of other violence. Those are individual cases. This is about an entire state. For almost as long as I've been alive, Idahoans have had Stockholm Syndrome with our single-party governing overlords.
I grew up in Idaho Falls in a blue/no collar household. The adults in my orbit complained about the state of their world, and I listened. One of the oldest pastimes of the lower classes is joining in solidarity around the general suckiness of things, and whoo-boy, did things suck. As I grew older, I understood the problems better. In my naivete, I tried to diagnose, triage, or solve some of them. One of the biggest issues I saw, and still see, is that people won't look at where these problems come from.
One detour into political theory. I promise it's short, so hold on. 99% of what I write on this site is my opinion, period. This one I'm claiming as fact. If you disagree, come at me. Most of the thousand cuts that kill our spirit come from local political choices. The rest are tolerated and ignored by local politicians who could effect change. I know complaining about the federal government is the hotness now, but the president and your congress people have little ability to mess with you directly (more so lately, sure). Your local leaders: city, county, state make decisions that hit you harder and faster than anything out of the swamps of D.C. Yet ask any Idahoan who's at fault for problem X and they'll say Obama, Pelosi, Democrats, George Soros, LeBron James, or Taylor Swift.
This came back to me recently around some of "my people," meaning the ones who saved (?) me from a life of actual working for a living. They were complaining about all sorts of sucky things, so I asked, for science of course, if they'd vote for Todd Achilles instead of Jim Risch this year. The answer was a unanimous "no," because "he's not Republican." So I said alright, what about our state reps and governor? Surely those people aren't getting your vote, given the state of things as you've described? Again, "no," because "those are conservatives!"
Here's the part that made me connect this behavior with Stockholm Syndrome. I pointed out the disconnect. They're frustrated with the way things are going but committed to maintaining the status quo. They didn't answer with a rationalization, an argument for their position, or even anger. What I got was looks of confusion. Like I was speaking another language, asserting people could fly, or describing the ending of Lost. It was a true instance of unconscious misalignment between cognition and reality. And that sucks.
The point of this post isn't to poke fun at my overwhelmingly conservative neighbors, insult them, or shout them down. It's to help them. I'm not saying you need to "vote blue no matter who." I'm begging you to think through whatever mental shenanigans have happened to you over the past 35 or so years. You were sold a bill of goods. Maybe once upon a time those goods were fresh, but they've sat on the loading dock for decades and they're rotten. There are a million ways to solve this problem, but all of them start with conservative voters acknowledging they've been quasi-brainwashed into a peculiar form of political insanity: the people most capable of solving the problems have no incentive to solve them, and you're totally okay with continuing to give them power. Until you take that step, we're all on a sinking ship and you're the captain wondering where the rain is coming from that's wetting your boots.
