With the recent changes in the Republican Party, I’ve been thinking on the origins of my own political leanings. I’m a Liberal Progressive and proud of it. I hold off calling myself a Democrat because at the moment I’m deeply disappointed in my President’s tendency to lean Right. My father is a Conservative and would call himself a Republican, but at the moment he is also disappointed at his party and their lean to the Righty Right.
So how did this Lefty spring from such a Righty upbringing? Was it rebellion or something else?
When I was in High School I was a Republican. My parents were politically active with my mother being the Precinct Committee Person for our voting district. (All the voting districts in our part of Federal Way were named after characters from Camelot. Years later they changed to a numbered system which was a lot less fun.) We did doorbelling for candidates and the presidential caucus was held in our living room every four years. I voted in our caucus at 17 (1984) because nobody outside the family showed up. I was a Reagan supporter like my parents.
There were other ties to the Republican Party in my early life. My father’s friend and co-worker at Boeing was State Representative Dick Barnes. Dick was an Engineer at Boeing, a State Representative for the Republican Party for years and years and played semi-pro football into his sixties. A big bear of a man, he sponsored me for a three week stint as a House Page when I was 15. I was always around our elected officials growing up and they were a good group of folk.
When I went off to college at the University of Washington I was still a Republican, but I made the fateful mistake of seeking out the Young Republican group on campus; I met with them only once. They were nothing like my father or like Representative Barnes or frankly anyone I had known as a Republican. It was all about the beauty of Capitalism and Free-Markets and “Yes, I am a business major.” The compassion was missing. The need for efficient government was replaced with this idea that government was incapable of doing anything but limiting our freedom.
The second shock to my system was from the 1988 Washington Election and the rise of Pat Robertson. As I mentioned before, we held the Presidential Caucus in our living room and this was the first year I could officially vote. I was a Bush supporter, but my parents were split between Bush and Dole. Two couples showed up at our house that night; one in their 40’s and the other in their 60’s. They came from the same conservative church in the area and from the start they proclaimed themselves Pat Robertson fans. During the discussion about party planks, they talked about government being broke, ending welfare, banning abortion and such. We were pretty taken aback and I think my parents found themselves having an entirely different debate then what they expected. My dad got the younger couple to talk about their wanting to get rid of Social Security which I think caused a minor split in their ranks. In the end, the main focus of a caucus is to pick the delegates for the State Convention. The voting was a bit weird, but was designed to provide proportion representation and not allow the majority to pick all the delegates. The wife of the young couple got 4, 1st place votes and my mother got 3 1st place votes so they were our delegates with the husband of the young couple the alternate and my dad as second alternate. There was a minor argument about this; their feeling was they had four votes to our three and therefore should control both delegates, but a close reading of the rules showed that it was a 1st place, 2nd place system and we didn’t vote separately for each slot. My suspicion was they left feeling tricked; they had brought a majority, but ended up with a 50-50 split. That was the last time I considered myself a Republican.
I wish I could find an article or even a book that talked about the weird split in the Republic Party in Washington State that started with the 1988 Primary and continued for the next 2 years. Pat Robertson won our State (he also won Hawaii and Alaska that year) and the Local and State Republican Conventions were a mess. We ended up with two Conventions, one run by Robertson supporters and one by the long-time Republicans. Much like our living room caucus, this stemmed from the Robertson Camp wanting total control rather than proportional representation. In the end, I believe their convention was considered illegitimate. The State Republican Party was never the same after that; always struggling between mainline and extreme candidates. The state voted later in 1988 to do-away with the caucus system and In 1992 I was a Clinton supporter.
But why should I move to the Liberal and Progressive side of Politics? When a person gets disillusioned with their party, they usually start calling themselves Independent or perhaps distance themselves with an adjective like my parents do; “Coffee-Cup Republicans”. When the veil came off in 1988, I found myself looking at my core values and found that beyond personal associations, my actions were more in line with Progressive and Liberal values. In fact, my confusion was not over my own transformation, but that my Parents shared my values, but continued to call themselves Republicans.
Over the next month I’m going to look at each of these topics and explore my views and how they were formed by my parent’s values and experiences. The Topics to come will cover:
Conservation and the Environment
The role of Government
Race and Equality
Gun Control
Church and State
Abortion
Unions and Corporations and Elections
In the end, I hope that I have a better understanding of my own mind and hopefully can demonstrate that labels like Republican or Democrat often keep people apart when in fact there are natural alliances to be had.
I found this interesting and insightful, thanks Charles.
ReplyDelete-Matt