Lift Up Your Hearts!

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.