Confessions of a former Republican
Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney cheer following Romney's address at the Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in Tampa, Fla., Aug. 30, 2012. / AFP/Getty Images
(TomDispatch) I used to be a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented, who planned for a public-service career in Republican politics. But I am a Republican no longer.
There's an old joke we Republicans used to tell that goes something like this: "If you're young and not a Democrat, you're heartless. If you grow up and you're not a Republican, you're stupid." These days, my old friends and associates no doubt consider me the butt of that joke. But I look on my "stupidity" somewhat differently. After all, my real education only began when I was 30 years old.
This is the story of how in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and later in Iraq, I discovered that what I believed to be the full spectrum of reality was just a small slice of it and how that discovery knocked down my Republican worldview.
I always imagined that I was full of heart, but it turned out that I was oblivious. Like so many Republicans, I had assumed that society's "losers" had somehow earned their desserts. As I came to recognize that poverty is not earned or chosen or deserved, and that our use of force is far less precise than I had believed, I realized with a shock that I had effectively viewed whole swaths of the country and the world as second-class people.
No longer oblivious, I couldn't remain in today's Republican Party, not unless I embraced an individualism that was even more heartless than the one I had previously accepted. The more I learned about reality, the more I started to care about people as people, and my values shifted. Had I always known what I know today, it would have been clear that there hasn't been a place for me in the Republican Party since the Free Soil days of Abe Lincoln.
Where I Came From
I grew up in a rich, white suburb north of Chicago populated by moderate, business-oriented Republicans. Once upon a time, we would have been called Rockefeller Republicans. Today we would be called liberal Republicans or slurred by the Right as "Republicans In Name Only" (RINOs).
We believed in competition and the free market, in bootstraps and personal responsibility, in equality of opportunity, not outcomes. We were financial conservatives who wanted less government. We believed in noblesse oblige, for we saw ourselves as part of a natural aristocracy, even if we hadn't been born into it. We sided with management over labor and saw unions as a scourge. We hated racism and loved Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., particularly his dream that his children would "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." We worried about the rise of the Religious Right and its social-conservative litmus tests. We were tough on crime, tough on national enemies. We believed in business, full stop.
I intended to run for office on just such a platform someday. In the meantime, I founded the Republican club at my high school, knocked on doors and collected signatures with my father, volunteered on campaigns, socialized at fundraisers, and interned for Senator John McCain and Congressman Denny Hastert when he was House Majority Whip Tom DeLay's chief deputy.
We went to mainstream colleges -- the more elite the better -- but lamented their domination by liberal professors, and I did my best to tune out their liberal views. I joined the Republican clubs and the Federalist Society, and I read the Wall Street Journal and the Economist rather the New York Times. George Will was a voice in the wilderness, Rush Limbaugh an occasional (sometimes guilty) pleasure.
Left Behind By the Party
In January 2001, I was one of thousands of Americans who braved the cold rain to attend and cheer George W. Bush's inauguration. After eight years hating "Slick Willie," it felt good to have a Republican back in the White House. But I knew that he wasn't one of our guys. We had been McCain fans, and even if we liked the compassionate bit of Bush's conservatism, we didn't care for his religiosity or his social politics.
Bush won a lot of us over with his hawkish response to 9/11, but he lost me with the Iraq War. Weren't we still busy in Afghanistan? I didn't see the urgency.
By then, I was at the Justice Department, working in an office that handled litigation related to what was officially called the Global War on Terror (or GWOT). My office was tasked with opposing petitions for habeas corpus brought by Guantanamo detainees who claimed that they were being held indefinitely without charge. The government's position struck me as an abdication of a core Republican value: protecting the "procedural" rights found in the Bill of Rights. Sure, habeas corpus had been waived in wartime before, but it seemed to me that waiving it here reduced us to the terrorists' level. Besides, since acts of terrorism were crimes, why not prosecute them? I refused to work on those cases.
Jeremiah Goulka writes about American politics and culture. His most recent work has been published in the American Prospect and Salon. He was formerly an analyst at the RAND Corporation, a recovery worker in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice. He lives in Washington, D.C. You can follow him on Twitter @jeremiahgoulka or contact him at jeremiah@jeremiahgoulka.com. His website is jeremiahgoulka.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Goulka discusses his political journey, click here or download it to your iPod here. This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
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Most people of today would be shocked if they actually understood all 87 federalist papers. I haven't read them all, and I'm shocked at the presumptions, the omissions, the inferences, and the total disregard for contrary opinions. It's a real reality check.
Any actual Republicans can no longer remain loyal to a bunch of radical, extremist misfits.
The TV reporter put two men outside in one of New York City's busiest intersections to hail cabs. One was a causally dressed White Man. The other a well-dressed Black man.
What happened? Well, no surprise to me, cab after cab, stopped to pick up the White gentleman. The Black guy, an ocassional cab would stop for him. I don't recall the numbers, but just guessing in the same time period about 20 or so cabs stopped for the White Guy, and 1 or 2 for the Black guy.
At the end of the experiment, the White actor turned and said "Now, I get it".
His lesson took a lot less time the author of this article but the point was he finally "got it". I can assure you as a hard-working Black woman, to those of you who think it is our imagination, it is not.
Along with a bunch of other anecdotal gibberish his argument is made on two main premises: (see paragraph 3) New Orleans and Iraq.
Issue1: Louisiana and especially New Orleans, has a backwards education system, a corrupt legal system, and government that allowed institutional racism.
Facts: Since 1877 22 of the 25 Louisiana Governors have been Democrats, New Orleans has had Democrats for Mayor's since 1936, the last Republican mayor was in 1872. The author criticizes the federal response which was slow, no doubt. But the federal deficiencies here were easily eclipsed by the ineptitude, lack of planning and preparation by its city and State government. His conclusion to all of this.....it's the Republicans fault.
Issue 2: Iraq was a bad idea and the surge a worse one (yes a Republican President authorized it but there was plenty of backing from both parties... and this debate is too old to bring back up). He states "he thought he know a lot about war" and that before Iraq he was under the understanding that since 1775 we administered a precise global justice. I guess his military expertise must have been limited to TV shows and movies. Did he never hear about atomic bombs and carpet bombings? Both Republicans and Democrats have been dishing those out for decades. Not too precise compared to what were using now.
He was "told" (by who?) that insurgent attacks came less frequent during the surge. The surge was the "death rattle" of the bulk of the insurgency, it was called a surge because it increased the pressure, of course that resulted in more conflict, we were finishing off the bulk of the insurgency in kinetic operations. And owe yeah, Jeremiah, working for an insurgent group for cash doesn't make you innocent. The rest of his rant on Iraq is so full of anecdotal rhetoric it's not worth addressing. Finally, the orchestrator of this surge strategy (which is lauded as brilliant by most actual military experts in the U.S. and around the world) must have been such a bain to the Democrats given that President Obama later appointed General Petraeus as the Director of the CIA. There's more I could say but this is already too long.
Finally, he goes on to say how Republicans are "creating their own reality" and don't want to "be dictated by fact-checkers". Maybe this guy should fact check his own crappy article.
Issue 2 Isn't it wonderful how one party's mistakes are totally irrelevent after only 5 or 10 years, while the other party's supposed misdeeds going back 140 years are relevent when you are trying to divert attention from your own party's mistakes.
Both parties have made countless mistakes especially recently and neither of them seem interested in solving problems as much as they are interested in tearing down eath other. We need someone who will build up the country and borrow the good ideas from each party and shut up all the haters and selfish do nothings and rebuild this great nation.
Undeniably the charge into Iraq was led by Republicans but it's hardly a "one party mistake" take a look at the number of Democrats that voted to support the war, there's plenty and I can send you sabre rattling rhetoric from Democrats before the war all day long. Besides, my problem with the author here isn't his stance against the war but that he shomehow tries to tie the most successful campaign of the war to Republicans (it was a military strategy, not a political one) and then say it was a failure (which by both parties standards it wasn't) and then says it was more reason to not be a Republic. Ask me, this guy is a phony convert. It's not the issues I disagree with, it's ommitting key facts and blatent partisnship.
I agree with your final comment and from the beginning I said the fed's were slow to Katrina and hard chargers into Iraq. The beef I have with the author is he leaves out key information on the Democrats control of New Orleans and Louisiana and support for Iraq and holds them completely harmless in both cases.
The main problem with the Republican Party is, they can't empathize with people in dire circumstances. Most of them are born into privilege, or lose sight of where they came from AFTER they become better off. They are led by right wing ideologues to believe these myths about society. It's no coincidence that right wing ideology has gotten so extreme at the same time conservative media has become so prominent.
This person is really a liberal.
The only folks that are dillusioned former Republican party members become aligned w/ the Tea Party - never liberals.