At the beginning of this year, I did the unthinkable. At least, for me, it had been unthinkable for over half a century. Nonetheless, early in 2024, I changed my political party affiliation. It was a dramatic change that had been brewing for a very long time.

I've never been a party person. I like my encounters with people to be in small, quiet groups, centered around discussion, homemade music, and food—a scenario that many people today would not even recognize as a party.

There's another kind of party I'm not happy with: political parties. I believe—I have always believed—that the best person for the job should get my vote. (Or sometimes, sadly, the least bad.) I've always registered with a party, however, in order to have a say in the primary elections.

My parents never talked much about politics. I vaguely knew that they that they were not party-liners, but voted for whomever they thought best for the job, though they never shared who that might be.

When it came time for me to register to vote, they didn't blink an eye when I chose to become a Democrat, although I knew they were registered Republican. All my father said about it was that I was consigning myself to having no say in local elections, which at that time and in that place were always decided by the Republican primary. But I was a student—what did I care for local politics? Besides, almost all of my friends were becoming Democrats, and we had campaigned enthusiastically, if uselessly, for Hubert Humphrey against Richard Nixon, even though we weren't at that time old enough to vote. There I was, proudly proclaiming my independence by doing exactly what my peers were doing. But such, ofttimes, is youth.

Besides, the Democrats seemed to be concerned about many of the same things that were important to me: family, the environment, women's rights, caring for others, and freedom of thought. (How and when the Democratic Party betrayed my trust in all these areas is a subject for another time.) What the Republicans were concerned about was largely a mystery to me.

I had chosen to align myself with the Democrats, but that didn't mean I voted the party line. My parents were right about that. I always thought the old, mechanical voting machines were bizarre, because one feature was that you could vote for every candidate of a particular party by throwing a single lever. Who would want to do that? I registered as a Democrat, and voted as I pleased. After we married, Porter and I found it particularly useful to have one of us registered as a Democrat, and the other as a Republican, as it gave us votes in each political primary. (We've always lived in states that did not allow non-party members to vote in party primaries.) It also signed us up for information from both parties, which helped with decision-making, though it also more than doubled our junk mail, and e-mail-, text-, and phone spam.

I've never had any trouble getting along with both Republicans and Democrats (as well as the odd Independent), as people. As long as you ignore what they say on certain subjects, and keep your mind on what they do and are, our friends, neighbors, and relatives are almost all good folks, the kind you want to have around.

And so it went for over 50 years.

It didn't take me more than a decade to realize that while the Democrats largely said the right things, their policies often accomplished the opposite of what their words indicated. I'm old enough to have seen in real time the damage Lyndon Johnson's policies did to impoverished urban families. Many of the homeschooling movement's leaders were left-leaning, yet the Democratic Party remained solidly in the pockets of the teachers' unions. And they kept dragging women's rights, care for the environment, and other issues in decidedly wrong directions.

Still, it never occurred to me to change parties. Those were the days when the causes that I worked for (such as conservation, and food, educational, and medical freedom) were very much bipartisan, respectful (for the most part), and even joyful in our common causes—we were too small not to get along. I stuck with the Democrats, and voted faithfully in all the primary elections, hoping to slow what appeared to me to be serious decay.

I'll admit to being far too lazy when it comes to politics. Actually, I hate politics. However, as I believe Pericles said, "Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." I vote faithfully, and hopefully at least somewhat intelligently, though I'm far from being as informed as I could be. I write to various elected leaders, but only rarely. I need to do better. All that is to say that was doing a mediocre job, just going along and getting along.

Then along came 2016. That's when I finally decided that I should actually read the platforms of both the Republican and the Democratic parties. To see what they claimed to stand for, and what they hoped to accomplish.

And I was shocked. How much had changed! Maybe my own Democratic Party had gradually evolved to its present state—as I said, I hadn't been paying much attention to the official stance, just individual candidates. Of course there were things in the Republican platform I didn't care for; that didn't surprise me in the least. But the Democratic platform nauseated me. Was this what I had been supporting all those years? I don't regret the people I voted for, not really—people are almost always better in person than the ideals they claim allegiance to. But how could I remain officially in a party whose goals were so antithetical to my own deeply-held beliefs? What had happened to my party? Granted, in the interim I had pretty much done a 180-degree spin on gun issues, but aside from that, my thoughts had refined, but not substantially changed.

Why not become a Republican at that point? (Other parties were out of the question; I still wanted to vote in the major primaries.) Why did I remain a Democrat? Hope, partly. Hope for change from within; I know I was far from the only Democrat who thought the party had gone off the rails. And there's both power and hope in being able to say, "Not all Democrats believe in X; I'm a Democrat and I disagree."

But mostly, I confess—it was inertia. After all, just being a party member didn't stop me from voting as I pleased. The only time I regretted not switching was when I couldn't vote for Ben Carson. But Porter didn't get to vote for him either, since he was out of the race when Florida held its primary.

Ah, primaries. That, actually, was what kicked me into leaving the Democratic Party. I had been looking forward to voting in this year's presidential primary election, but Florida's Democratic Party proceeded to disenfranchise me. "We will have no primary; we have decided that Joe Biden will be our candidate, and the people will have no say in the matter." That attitude ticked me off almost more than the important issues.

So this life-long Democrat became a Republican, and happily voted in their primary.

In a way, nothing has changed. I will still vote for the person I think will do the best job, no matter what letter they put after his name. (Though I confess the D's have a much better chance in local and state elections than nationally.) But it's time to take a stand, and I can no longer tolerate having my name on the rolls of those who ostensibly give their approval to what the Democratic Party has become.

Actually, I took that stand months ago, when I switched parties; it just took this long to find the words to explain why.

Posted by sursumcorda on Sunday, July 14, 2024 at 5:30 am | Edit
Permalink | Read 418 times
Category Politics: [first] [previous] [next] [newest] Here I Stand: [first] [previous] [next] [newest]
Comments

The quickest way to get thrown out of the Wightman house is to call Porter a Democrat. LOL. That was epic :)



Posted by Billq on Wednesday, July 17, 2024 at 1:00 am

It was. And into the snow, as I recall. Those were the days. Mind you, he only did that with his gaming buddies, never me. :)

And he, too, votes according to the best for the job, regardless of party. New York had all sorts of wild parties, at least back then. I think at one point or another I voted for most of them, except Socialist or Communist.



Posted by SursumCorda on Wednesday, July 17, 2024 at 6:28 am

I can empathize with drifting apart from a party like that. I've never been registered for either party, but I came of age politically at roughly the time Bill Clinton was running for office. It was drilled into me from all kinds of sources that character mattered, that it was wrong to had the controls of a country to man who couldn't control his zipper. Or who told silly lies about inventing the internet. Or who lacked the integrity not to flip-flop. The Democratic candidates were morally bankrupt, and it behooved us to vote for the men of integrity on the Republican ticket.

And then, 2016. The Republicans field a candidate who had broken nearly all ten commandments (not sure of the fifth, and I'll give him a pass on the sixth), often publicly, sometimes boastfully—a candidate who called people names, made fun of handicapped people, and bragged
about being able to grab **** or hypothetically shoot someone on Fifth Avenue.

Suddenly, somehow, character no longer mattered, and I became disillusioned, both with the Republican party and with the folks that excused Trump's character flaws with "God can work through anyone."

And this summer I saw signs saying "Trump save America." Not "God save America," echoing the British anthem, but signs expressing the desire for a morally bankrupt person to save America from moral decay. I no longer recognize the Republican party; it no longer makes sense to me in this incarnation. While I didn't have to officialize it the way you did, it was a disturbing and disorienting experience and I imagine you felt similarly as you looked up and no longer recognized the party of your youth.

I'll note, for the record, that the Democratic party wasn't terribly innovative in canceling a few primaries: the Republicans did it as well in 1992, 2004 and 2020 in several states, and the Democrats had already done it in 1996 and 2012.



Posted by Stephan on Wednesday, September 18, 2024 at 4:21 pm

I was older than you are when I finally realized that what makes a good president has little to do with what makes a good person. The two most obvious examples for me are Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, both of whom seemed to me pretty good people, but terrible presidents. On the other hand, I found both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton objectionable on a personal level, but think they did better than average jobs as president. This is one reason I try to look more at a candidate's actions than his words. We may disagree on the value of any particular action, but at least this time around we have two candidates with bona fide White House experience to judge by.



Posted by SursumCorda on Wednesday, September 18, 2024 at 5:56 pm
Add comment

(Comments may be delayed by moderation.)