I used to be a Democrat. Yes, I was. I grew up in Memphis, TN with Al Gore, Senator Jim Sasser, Rep. John Tanner, and Governor Ned McWhorter. I volunteered on Al Gore’s 2000 Presidential Campaign. I was even a member of the University of Kansas Young Democrats in 1997. Even when Republicans won in Tennessee, however, it was ok. They tended to be a pragmatic type. Governor Lamar Alexander, Senator Fred Thompson, or Governor Don Sundquist, for example. The Tennessee of my childhood seemed a place where there were disagreements, however, there was always a place for dialogue and your rival was never, ever evil….just wrong.
Over the years, my political beliefs have stayed relatively stagnant. I still believe in a person’s right to make their own way in the world. I see the economic advantage in keeping the weakest of our society(elderly, young, disabled) out of the streets. I still believe in the goodness of the private citizen while still fearing the evil that can perpetrated by a mob mentality. As I get older, unfortunately, the basic vehicles of political thought in our nation, Democratic and Republican Party, have drifted farther and farther from me.
I can no longer in good conscience call myself a Democrat. While I hated many of their economic policies, I knew that they were for the middle and lower class, for the right to live your personal life as you see fit, and the equality of all Americans. These days are over. No longer are there men of conviction leading the Democratic Party, but rather a collection of rats fleeing a sinking ship looking for the last piece of driftwood to save their own skins while the rest of us drown in debt, unemployment, and the shrinking of our personal freedoms.
I, also, could never associate myself with the Republican Party. Well, let me clarify. I could see a place for me in the Party of Reagan and Bush I. A party that were the grownups of our civic discourse. A party that was pragmatically pro-business. A party that saw the need to change their policies in line with the realities of the day. Reagan, the fetish of many on the far-right, was a man who raised taxes as did Bush I when the time called for it. These weren’t men of the ideological Right. These were men of America. Doing what they thought was in the best interest of the nation even if it was against their supporters wishes or against their own reelection chances. This is a party I could support, and one my fairly liberal mother did throughout the Eighties and early Nineties.
Today, the Republican Party should take heed of their hero. They should see negotiation not as a basis of weakness but as a strength of our nations democracy. The unbreakable ideological hold on the Republican Party has deprived our nation of our one true need in this perilous time….a grown up at the table.
Political discourse in this nation now is not much more mature than what my brothers and I used to call dinner conversation in our childhood (minus the food fights, of course). How are any of our existential issues that face our nation….our debt, the rising challenge of China, diminishing prestige around the world…do you see honest answers about from anyone in Washington or even in your own state governments?
Instead, we have two factions shouting past each other refusing to acknowledge the validity to any idea from their “enemy” on the sheer basis of the origin of the idea. This has got to stop or our long national experiment in democracy is over.
