According to the New York Times, “Mary Peltola, the Democratic Senate candidate in Alaska, is a complicated officeseeker. She is pro-gun, pro-oil and pro-gas, but also pro-environment and pro-fish. Her campaign has been marred by accounts of her outbursts, which have left some aides unnerved.” And yes, it is hard to endorse a candidate who appears to be unstable in unpleasant ways. But let us focus on the ideas and especially why the Times can’t imagine someone being pro-oil and gas but also pro-environment. Answer: the climate cult swallowed it along with most of the environmental movement. There actually was concern for nature long before “carbon pollution” was an imaginary thing, so long ago it used to be called “conservation”, and will be long after this fever has broken. But instead of helping bring clarity from outside, the Times tries to enforce orthodoxy from within.
They’re having a hard time partly because Peltola is half-indigenous and therefore half-untouchable. (And not in the bad Indian caste system way.) And also partly because she’s a Democrat in a red state and therefore in the finest traditional of impartially left-wing media must be helped to win. Hence the teaser’s “Here’s a look at Peltola’s path to Washington.” Do not look for them to explore her GOP opponent’s path.
To their credit, they do deal with the widespread impression that she has issues with her temper, her tendency not to show up for work, and staff turnover. On which we will merely say that if so she is not the first person to be different (and worse) in private, nor the first politician. We do not offer it as an excuse, merely a comment that humans are complicated and often in deeply flawed ways. But as usual we prefer to focus on ideas so let us look instead at how her politics baffles the Times:
“Her politics are complicated, too, reflecting the idiosyncrasies of her state: She is pro-gun, pro-oil and pro-gas – but also pro-environment and especially pro-fish. And she is, at root, a person whose people’s way of life is dying after decades of disruption to salmon fishing, the cascading consequences of climate change, corporate excess and government restrictions. There are fewer fish and more limits on fishing. People smile, but grievance stews.”
It’s a revealing passage… not about her politics, but about the Times. Including the tendency to romanticize the ways of the ancestors, and the fact that with so many clear and direct reasons for a decline in fisheries they have to throw in the climate bogey ruining streams or whatever it’s doing. The thing about “her people’s way of life” is particular odd, unless you are versed in the complexities of identity politics, because her dad was a white guy from Nebraska which may like much of the world be facing struggles and disruption. But apparently if you’re half-aboriginal you’re entirely aboriginal. Thus Republican colleague, now Senator from Alaska, Lisa Murkowski described her as “a warm, positive, smart and authentic Yup’ik woman”. Not, be it noted “some Nebraskan”.
Why the Times would then be baffled that she was in favour of guns, resource development and a kind of Davey Crockett style is odd. Among other things, aboriginals are famous for hunting which is tricky without weapons. Of course purists might say they should use traditional ones not European firearms, but it’s a view more popular in universities than hunting camps. Instead the Times writes that in the 2010s, as she took a break from public office while serving on a City Council then becoming a lobbyist, before serving as Executive Director of “the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, an intermediary between Alaska Natives and the outside agencies establishing and enforcing the rules and regulations” and writing “Like nearly everyone raised on the Kuskokwim, I am made of fish,” in its 2020 annual report:
“the fish crisis mostly kept getting worse. The Yup’iks of the Kuskokwim couldn’t fish the way their people had fished for thousands of years. In an attempt at conservation, state and federal restrictions now determined when, how and how much they could fish, a scenario utterly counter to their culture of subsistence, severing the rhythms of generations and upending their relationship with the river and the salmon.”
Ah, the wisdom of the elders. If only others had it. But of course “the way their people had fished for thousands of years” was with bone or wooden hooks wearing animal skins without motorboats, firearms, flashlights, Gore Tex or any of that stuff so it’s all a bit of a western liberal fantasy. As is the idea that you could let people use all these modern tools and they wouldn’t overfish because they are of a uniquely virtuous race genetically in harmony with nature.
We do not dwell on identity politics because we are obsessed with it. We dwell on them because the Times is:
“To succeed statewide here, said John-Henry Heckendorn, an Anchorage-based Democratic strategist, a Democrat must assemble a convoluted coalition almost at odds with itself – Natives and not, rural and not, commercial fishermen and subsistence fishermen, on and on. ‘Mary’s political talent,’ he said, ‘has been her ability to inhabit those tensions.’”
But why should there be “tensions” between different races? Why can’t people live in a city and love nature, or live in the country and value urban amenities? Why for that matter can’t “commercial” fishermen, apparently code for “white people”, have similar interests with “subsistence” fishermen, code for “aboriginals” in stuff like, oh, say, preserving fisheries.
Well, see:
“She inhabits those tensions because she is born of those tensions. Ms. Peltola is Alaska and Nebraska, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and the Lower 48, Yup’ik collectivism and American individualism. Being ‘double’ can be an advantage, she says, and she is not wrong. It also, though, can be a source of some untenable tug.”
Ah yes, aboriginal collectivism. The red red man, one cannot say but can apparently think, before writing tortured prose like “some untenable tug”.
Incidentally the piece also writes that in 1998:
“Then known as Mary Sattler, she campaigned for the State House as a Democrat, prioritizing would-be voters in villages. ‘Villagers say Sattler is a kass’amirteq, meaning someone who acts like a white person,’ a reporter from The Anchorage Daily News wrote that August. Her campaign manager, who spoke better Yup’ik than she did, doubled as her interpreter.”
Despite which, and having gone to school in Pennsylvania and Colorado, and being praised by a friend as “doing the things that I would traditionally put in the male category” like, um, driving a boat:
“As a college student, she was the runner-up for the Miss World Eskimo-Indian Olympics in 1993 and then crowned Miss National Congress of American Indians in 1995, performing two Yup’ik dances and wearing a wolf-hair headdress when she won.”
Egad. Eskimo? It’s amazing the Times will even print the word.
Here it is worth noting that many people who, in a neutral and unbiased way, desperately want Democrats to win elections and liberalism to stop being a recipe for disaster and become a prescription for good government, have been trying for years to create a “Blue dog” kind of Democrat who is left-wing without being a divisive lunatic.
Think of The West Wing’s, President Josiah “Jed” Bartlett, a nice down-home name, who among other things had won a Nobel Prize in economics, Keynesian of course and developing-country-focused but not an overspending inflationary nitwit, was brilliant at chess, a devout Roman Catholic and not prone to messing with interns although Martin Sheen, who played Bartlett, “described the character as being drawn largely from Bill Clinton” according to Wikipedia.
Or think, if you have a long memory by modern standards, of Senator Sam Nunn, who represented Georgia in the Senate for 25 years as a Democrat “who often broke with his party on a host of social and economic issues”, received bipartisan praise on his retirement, and then tried to reestablish a bipartisan centrist position on foreign policy while his party galloped madly to the left instead, by now turning savagely on Israel. Nunn, predictably was active in the Coalition for a Democratic Majority inspired by “cold war liberal” Senator Henry Jackson (D WA 1953-83+) that also tried to keep the Democrats from going crazy left, many of whose members transitioned via neoconservatism to the Republican Party when the effort failed.
Then think of the New York Times, which is baffled that a person could be left-wing without being divisive, that they could be pro-gas and pro-environment, that they could be pro-gun and a MAGA nut.
By the way, in a classic piece of modern journalism, the piece winds up “This race, say independent analysts, could go either way.” Ah, the experts who say. But the big point is that the Times wants Democrats not to be weirdos, but if they find one who isn’t, they ask why they’re such a weirdo as not to be weird.
