Republican No More!Well, it’s true confessions time for the Historian. You see, I was once (literally) a card-carrying member of the Republican Party. I grew up in a staunchly Republican household, with only a single “yellow dog,” Irish-Catholic grandpa around to present an alternative point of view (which he offered rarely, knowing how vastly outnumbered he was in the family). I cut my teeth in politics, so to speak, as a young boy on a street corner passing out “Nixon Now” pins and leaflets to passersby. I helped Gerald Ford win Pennsylvania in 1976, and worked many long hours on the 1979 primary campaign of George Bush, Sr. under the direction of a young local attorney named Tom Ridge (later Governor of Pennsylvania and Director of the Department of Homeland Security). I even have a nice thank-you letter from the first Reagan presidential campaign gathering dust in some long-forgotten drawer of my house.
You see, I grew up in a “Rockefeller Republican” household, named after long-time Republican governor of New York (and sometime presidential hopeful) Nelson Rockefeller. This comprised the wing of the Republican Party that was basically fiscally conservative but socially moderate, to which I happily appended myself for many years. Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 marked the triumph of the sort of religiously-based social conservatism that eventually drove me out of the political party of my birth.
My formal exile occurred in a typically surrealistic fashion. One night, unbeknownst to me, my fellow college Republicans met in secret conclave and formally expelled me for the crime of “excessive moderation.” I kid you not – their own words! And to add insult to injury, they neglected to inform me of their decision; they simply stopped sending me notices of upcoming meetings. Apparently, what finally set them off was my refusal to join in a public protest intended to disrupt a major feminist conference being sponsored by my college. While not yet much of a feminist myself, I failed to see the wisdom in attempting to shut down an exercise in free speech, especially on the campus of a well-known liberal arts institution. So, when a fellow College Republican and National Guard member talked excitedly about borrowing a tank to park on the lawn outside the conference venue, I thought he was just kidding. They expelled me within the week. Talk about missing the joke!
I was bitter, and avoided another formal declaration of party allegiance for many years afterwards. It was only in 1996 that I changed my registration from Independent to Democrat, and only because of a brief but pleasant encounter with Christie Vilsack, wife of Iowa’s current governor. Christie showed up outside my office door one day to stump for her husband, who was running in the gubernatorial primary. Not only was she a very compelling speaker on his behalf, but she very sweetly interacted with my then three year-old son, and even gave him one of her few “Vilsack for Governor” pins. I have never looked back.
I certainly can’t go back. I’m appalled by what the Republican Party has become in recent decades. The Reagan years were only a foretaste of the mean spirited, hyper-aggressive, fear-mongering, blindly patriotic, self-righteous, and fiercely anti-intellectual beast that calls itself the Republican Party today.
On all fronts, the leaders of the Republican Party are cheerfully tearing down the pillars of an educated, civic-minded citizenry in this country. They hate the public schools, they despise the university faculties, they rally against the courts, they brand government the enemy in all things, they feel nothing but contempt for a free and public press (Fox News excluded, of course), they question all science, they dismiss the arts as elitist, and they seem incapable of writing or reading a book with footnotes!
The Republican leadership demands our blind submission, and in return offers us a simplistic view of the world that validates our purported superiority over every other people in known history. They torture, and dismiss it as mere “hazing.” They censor, and blame it on “popular opinion.” They spy on us, and have the audacity to say it’s for our own good. They wage war on a noun, while arrogantly refusing even to define that noun. They constantly stoke our basest fears with an ever-growing litany of amorphous, so-called “enemies” – homosexuals, feminists, environmentalists, liberals, immigrants, “Old Europe,” Arabs, Muslims, terrorists – and then use our fears to manipulate us into compromising our very freedoms. They preside over the ruination of our national economy and their own enrichment at the same time. They waste billions on a war without end, and against an enemy with neither face nor place (yes, I realize there are people out there who hate us, but how do we successfully fight a vast abstraction?). They know responsibility, but never accountability!
Or consider the following depressing fact. Thanks largely to Republican-generated anti-intellectual propaganda, the United States may be the only major world power that has cultivated a visceral distrust of intelligent, informed candidates (pity poor Al Gore and John Kerry). Alas, we Americans would rather accept as President an arrogant, draft-dodging, ‘good old boy’ with atrocious language skills, scant knowledge of the world, a paper thin resume for high office, and a stubborn unwillingness to take into consideration other points of view. Bush, after all, “seems nice.” That he’s arguably a complete ignoramus matters less, apparently.
Is it any wonder, then, that the United States is now bogged down in what threatens to become a permanent military commitment in an increasingly troubled Middle East?
The Democrat Party has a golden opportunity here. We can fight fear and ignorance, and stand tall as the party of hope, confidence, and thoughtful reflection about the problems of the world. It’s what the American people really need. Let’s make it so!
Peace!
Historian
