Now that the mid-term elections are over but for the weeping (or gloating, depending on whether your favorites won or not), I feel calm enough to write about how I ended up jumping ship and becoming a Democrat.
The first thing you must understand is that the state I live in is as dyed-in-the-wool conservative as you could want, and always has been. But that means something very different now than it did when I was a child. When I was a kid, your Democrat neighbors were still neighbors, and when all was said and done, we found a way to work together, even when we didn't agree.
Not anymore.
Now, being blue in a red state is akin to being a Chicago Cubs fan back during the interminable "goat years"--we're something of a laughingstock. But we are also, more and more, being portrayed as the enemies of various American freedoms, and even of democracy itself. So my changeover has nothing to do with wanting to be on the winning side, or the most popular one, but rather the one which was the more right about things.
So here, for better or worse, are the main reasons I switched parties.
1) The Mean Girls (And Boys)
Remember when there was no Rush Limbaugh? No Fox News? No Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, or Jonah Goldberg? I do, and it seems that the news and how it was reported was a little calmer back then. (I once read of an editor who growled at one of his stringers, "I don't care if your mother said it's true--get two corroborative sources!") Now we have a whole raft of so-called "right-wing" news and opinion outlets, and they are meaner than a spitting cobra with a case of hemorrhoids. From Rush's infamous "White House dog" pic (nope, Rush darling, you will never live that one down); to Bill O'Reilly's out-of-his-ass assertions with no regard for truth (the real "O'Reilly Factor"); to Jonah Goldberg's bizarre statement after the devastating Haiti quake that sending aid to that country would do them no good because the people there seemed to have no desire to better themselves (in this case, Jonah could have saved himself a world of embarrassment by reading the Britannica entry on Haiti's history--the wrongs we have done to that little country entitle it to more than we can ever repay); to Michelle Malkin's diatribe against Peter Yarrow's anti-bullying program "Operation Respect" because Yarrow apparently was a pot smoker back in the day and because what kids really needed in these warlike times (this was just after the second undeclared Iraq War had started) were self-defense lessons so they could give the bullies what-for; to pretty much anything Ann Coulter has ever written or said--wow. I grew more and more horrified by what "my side" was saying.
But I could have written all that off if the same sort of rhetoric hadn't started appearing on campaign flyers, in TV ads, and even in the halls of Congress. I blame Newt Gingrich for that; his meanness was so effective that the GOP put out a pamphlet full of words which you could use either for or against a person or cause. They were all words and phrases that Gingrich had used in his campaigns. And along with Gingrich came a wave of "new Republicans" (Molly Ivins wryly called them "pod people" for their lockstep adherence to their party line) with no respect for the compromise model of government. Nope--it was their way or the highway, and it's only gotten worse since then.
2) Let Them Eat Cake!
(Note: there is a great deal of doubt as to whether Marie Antoinette actually said this in response to the news that the poor Parisians had no bread to eat; I am simply using it in its traditional sense. Thank you.)
The "new Republicans" love supply-side economics. It used to be called "trickle-down" economics, but once it became obvious that what was actually trickling down to the common worker was considerably browner and smellier than money, some spin doctor came up with the new name. And it's more accurate: the bulk of the tax breaks go to the corporations and the uber-rich, not to the poor or middle-class worker. The magical thinking behind this is that when the rich get more, they build more factories, hire more workers, and pay them better.
Uh-uh.
Corporations--large ones especially--who get more money pay their stockholders more, and their CEOs...but unless they're union, the common line workers probably won't see much of that, and if they do, it's a bone with most of the meat cut off compared to what the suits upstairs get. Adding insult to injury, it's possible for a corporation to pay no US income tax if they use all the loopholes they're entitled to...loopholes not available to the lady up the street who runs her own little bookkeeping/tax service, or to the self-employed retired guy who trims trees and mows lawns. (Next time you see one of those huge Walmart supply trucks on the highway, think about the wear and tear on the infrastructure, and then remember who's not paying their fair share of upkeep on it.)
Meanwhile, good-paying factory jobs have been disappearing for decades, not because nobody here can do them, but because those same corporations discovered that they could make their stuff cheaper by opening factories in China, Honduras, Bangladesh, India, etc., etc. And since safety regs aren't as stringent there, and the minimum wage (if any) is very small, well, then, everybody wins--except for that former Rival floor manager who now drives past her old factory building on her way to her part-time minimum-wage convenience-store job. (I wish I were exaggerating, but my own city once housed at least five different factories. Now there are two. A small assembly plant and a distribution center for a discount store have opened since then, but they have not been able to absorb the people who were displaced by the loss of those other factories.)
Oh, and the safety net? You know, unemployment, food stamps, ADC, Medicaid/SCHIP? Thanks to Gingrich and his Norquistian successors, both on the federal and the state levels, these things have become harder to access and easier to be expelled from. On the federal level, you can be on ADC (now TANF--Temporary Aid to Needy Families...well, at least they ditched the "no man in the house" rule) for no more than five years, but in many states the limit is much lower--less than four years here. Same with unemployment--in my state, the maximum time you can collect benefits is 20 weeks (26 weeks if you qualify for an extension). And the benefits aren't much--you couldn't keep up an average apartment and feed yourself on what you'd get, and woe to you if you're supporting a family.
And why is this? To get lazy people off their butts and into the work force! But if you can only get a crappy job because the factory jobs have mostly gone overseas, and the crappy job pays little and has no vacation or medical benefits, and you still have to pay for child care for your kids when there's no school...well, that sounds a lot like "let them eat cake" to me.
(Go to college? Get training? Move to where you can get a better job? Sure. Only...your money, your time and your energy are all going toward keeping your family housed, clothed and fed. There's no extra. The reason there's so much debt among the poor is that their average salary doesn't quite make ends meet, and it's easy to fall for scams like payday loans when you're desperate.)
3) War Pigs
Last year, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, we spent $610 billion on defense. According to their chart, that's more than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the U.K., and Japan, combined. (Let it be noted that according to Business Insider, we sold weapons to 98 countries in 2017, including Saudi Arabia--in fact, we're the world's largest arms dealer!) That is a lot of money. If we cut out a bunch of those corporate loopholes, we could fund part of our present military and free up some funds to fix the infrastructure and maybe even let needy families stay on food stamps a while longer. And if we quit selling weapons to other countries, we might not need new stuff so often, and we could shrink that military budget without sacrificing pay or vet benefits. Ya think? I bet Harry Truman would've thought so.
But the GOP doesn't. They love military spending, and Harry Truman would have been branded a traitor today for speaking out against the waste he saw. Obama took heat for it in his time, and he's got the gray hair to prove it.
4) The Abortion Disconnect
I don't like the idea of abortion. The death of a helpless child, whether in or out of the womb, is a tragedy. Republican pols will scream themselves hoarse about how Dems are the party of abortion--in fact, many conservative voters will choose their candidates only on that issue.
But...
Once the child is born, his mother ( often poor, and for some reason, the dads seem to get off free and clear) is faced with that Incredible Shrinking Safety Net. She can get WIC and SNAP for a while, and Medicaid, and TANF...but even in the most generous of our states, she can only get those things for 5 years at most. The housing and child-care credits have become block grants--meaning she might not get any if she's too far back in line--and preschool education isn't as accessible as it would be for a child with wealthier parents. Once that mother is knocked off the safety net, she'll have to get whatever work she can, and out-of-pocket child care is costly.
All of this is to illustrate that if the GOP really cared about children, they would be more careful about helping take care of them not only before they're born, but after. And yet, those poor mothers and their children are regularly described by right-wingers as lazy, entitled burdens. And if the GOP says it isn't the government's responsibility to take care of those children, well...maybe it also isn't the government's responsibility to dictate whether an abortion should occur. Horrible as it may sound, a rape or incest victim might very well not want to carry her pregnancy to term...and only God should be her judge.
5) Meddling With The Primal Forces Of Nature...
Only not like in "Network." I'm talking about our physical world.
Did you know it was a Republican President who started the EPA? It was. Nixon, of all people. He was a tremendous asshole in many ways, but he was behind the EPA! (He signed an executive order to do it, BTW...people respected those in the old days.)
40-odd years later, my Congresscritters were objecting to some new water regulations by telling an audience at the State Fair that "the EPA is not your friend." And now, the EPA's power to do anything has been pretty much gutted.
And we keep spewing filth into the sky and the water, and putting God knows what into the food...but the GOP's line on this is that none of it can possibly be affecting the climate, or our health, or the welfare of ecosystems the world over, when even careful lay observation says otherwise (and scientists the world over have been coming to these conclusions for years now).
Think about this:
You have a computer program that you know nothing about, other than that it works. Would you dare to mess with its coding if you didn't know what you were doing? I'm betting not. Yet we keep doing stuff to the environment in the name of business and profit, as though those two words would defend us against melting ice caps, disappearing rain forests (and the species supported by them), and increasingly-unpredictable weather patterns (and the resulting destruction and lost crops). Not to mention the increase of pollution, which causes its own brand of health problems. We know so little about how the Earth works...and yet we meddle, and then we deny that it hurts anything. We have sown the wind (we started long ago), and now we're reaping multiple EF-5 whirlwinds, not to mention killer hurricanes.
Yet when Al Gore began speaking out on these things, the GOP branded him a whack job, and they and their media allies continue to pooh-pooh the idea of human-influenced global climate change. All in the name of industry. It's an import from the Ayniverse. It would be nice if we could slap a punitive tariff on that!
Epilogue: Nobody's Right If Everybody's Wrong
If I sound a bit angry right now, you're reading me correctly.
You see, none of this happened suddenly; I've spent years trying to fit my square-peg mod-GOP self into the increasingly-round alt-right hole my former party has become. I never agreed with the conservative idea of big military budgets, but I endured it. I approve of the pro-life plank, but hated Gingrich's welfare "reform" package. And the hate speech just made me want to go put on headphones and listen to classic prog for hours on end (in fact, that's still my go-to for that...way better than systolic hypertension).
So, finally, I switched.
I can't say I'm really happier, or that I agree with everything the Dems say; but I agree with them more than I do the GOP, which is the best I can do for now.
But there's one thing the Dems seem more willing to do than the GOP, and that is compromise. It's not a dirty word; sometimes you have to meet in the middle on things you don't agree on. The secret is that you don't stop there--you continue to work together until you can find a better solution. But to do that, you have to actually listen, with respect, to what the other side is saying. Republicans don't seem eager to do that right now, but I keep hoping.
I mean, c'mon--an eagle needs both a right wing and a left in order to fly. And if our two wings don't start working together, our nation is going to crash and burn.
And if we crash hard enough, we may never recover.
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