Dyed in the Wool

I’ve been a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat since I was just a tyke. I remember jumping on my friend Tracy’s bed and shouting “Humphrey! Humphrey!” with her repeatedly on a hot August night during the 1968 Democratic convention when Hubert Humphrey became the nominee after front-runner Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June. Our parents were crowded around a 12-inch black-and-white TV in the living room with a bunch of other adults watching the convention. I was only five, but my friends and I were already aware that Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated that year, that there were riots breaking out in major cities, and that the world felt like a dangerous place where people, presidents, cities and whole countries were on the edge of death or madness much of the time.

We lived in a safe little suburb but were only 45 minutes from places like Berkeley and San Francisco, where Governor Ronald Reagan was gassing students for speaking freely on college campuses. Black Panthers based in Oakland were shouting about black power issues on the TV news, Mario Savio led the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and issues of race, class, gender equality and other hot-button issues were discussed all the time on TV, radio, in magazines, even at Tupperware parties. Most of my friends were also the children of educators, so we were raised in little progressive intellectual greenhouses. We’d be dragged to parties where our parents would drink sangria and smoke a lot of cigarettes. (There were cigarette burns on almost everybody’s coffee tables when I was a child, made when a filter-tipped True or Pall-Mall or Salem cigarette burned down too far or got knocked aside and left a charred black oval that would later be covered by a bowl of mixed nuts.)

Our parents would discuss gender politics and racism too loudly, somebody’d get too earnest and two dads would go out on the patio to talk alone for a while as they hashed out the finer points of foreign policy. Then somebody would put on Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and we’d all dance. We kids would all stay up too late, eat too many Bugles or Fritos or Beer Nuts, sneak peeks at some dad’s stash of Playboy magazines in the master bedroom, and then eventually we’d pass out on beds and sofas and be dragged home by our parents in the wee hours after the parties died down.

By 1968 the country had been at war in Vietnam my whole short life, and the students my young mother taught in her high school English classes were graduating, some going straight to Southeast Asia. Worry about the war was on everyone’s mind, on posters, cars bumpers and sung about on the radio regularly. In retrospect many people may think the time only seems as if it was especially politicized because of all that’s been made of it in movies and books since then. But even to me, a child on the verge of kindergarten, life really was politicized; even as little children were aware of big political issues. All my little friends and I hated President Nixon just as much as our parents did. We were inculcated with political beliefs that had been passed down from parents who threatened disinheritance (perhaps seriously) if we considered straying from the Democratic party line.

So the Democratic Party is in my blood. I get disgusted with elements of the party’s politics at times, of course, because of the way it gets bogged down, bloated and politicians get bought by special interests. But I believe in the core values of my party as I see them, not just because I grew up being told they were right, but because, time and time again, I’ve watched the core values of the Republican Party damage the fabric of our nation and the people in it. The core values of my party have echoed the values that I was taught to cherish when I was at my grandmother’s knee. Things like respecting and fostering diversity. Showing mercy to those in need. Valuing diplomacy over unnecessary force. Fighting for others’ rights to express themselves in ways that I don’t necessarily personally agree with. Remembering that we’re part of a world community and wanting everyone to do better, not just ourselves and our friends. Being willing to sacrifice a little personal comfort for the benefit of the greater good. Of course, these are not solely Democratic values, but I believe the Democratic Party has done a better job of emphasizing and exalting these values, while the Republican Party has done a great deal to undercut them.

I have some dear Republican friends with whom I get along well because we stick to issues that we agree on, for the most part. When I make new Republican friends they are often surprised to learn that Democrats can have strong family values and attach huge importance to self-reliance, discipline, honesty, integrity and honor, too, just as their families do. Somehow millions of Republicans have been led to believe that those are conservative traits that accrue only to Republicans, and that Democrats are necessarily permissive, careless, amoral at best and immoral at worst, and disrespectful of private property and personal boundaries. Partly, this is because easily offended ultraconservatives who don’t approve of people who engage in activities they don’t personally enjoy will often note one example of iffy behavior by a Democrat and tar all progressives with the same brush. There’s no way to have thoughtful, fact-based, rational dialog with people who jump from one logical fallacy to another and refuse to look at facts.

But not all Republicans or independent voters are like that, and we Democrats have to be honest and respectful, too. It’s easy for us to paint all Republicans with labels like selfish, militaristic, judgmental or unforgiving. We Democrats believe that because Republicans vote for a party with, yes, a selfish, militaristic, judgmental and unforgiving party platform, they must believe in all the tenets of that platform. But they may just be afraid of being taxed beyond their ability to stay in their homes or to save enough to pay off their credit card bills. They may believe that waging big wars is the only way to save their grandkids from being blown up by religious zealots. I disagree with them, but they’re sincere and many of them do want the best for the greatest number. I think they’re seriously misguided, but they don’t have to be monsters just because they’re not Democrats.

In my twenties I spent a great deal of time with young, almost exclusively male, members of the Libertarian party. Most of them had Stanford graduate degrees, which they believed proved that they were intellectually superior in every way and that their political beliefs must therefore be perfectly and unassailably logical. (They did not understand that getting perfect SAT math scores does not guarantee that one is wise, logical or insightful.) I had hundreds of debates with them on the limits of a totally free-market-based government to ensure a clean environment, build safe roads and neighborhoods, redress grievances or oversee product purity, among a million other things. They couldn’t bend me to their beliefs, and I couldn’t be swayed to theirs. But I learned about a different way of thinking and saw how even very smart people can fall prey to logical fallacies based on emotional factors (even if they swear to Ayn Rand that that they’re above all that). It was great mental training to argue the permutations of their belief system, and I learned how to get them to listen to me more carefully by proving to them that I would listen to and understand their ideas, even if I did not agree with them. And that’s a start. I believe in respectful discourse; one must listen closely to the opposition and be polite enough to get them to let down their hair and speak honestly to glean enough information to counter their arguments effectively. Sun Tzu was right: know thy enemy.

What I find saddest is political infighting among people who are of the same party and who share about 95% of their beliefs, but who backbite, attack and take each other down based on the remaining 5%. I am so frustrated with my party now when people like James Carville publicly attack someone like Bill Richardson and call him Judas for having the timerity to stand up for the candidate he believes is best for the country (in this case Barack Obama) rather than pledging himself blindly to someone whom he feels cannot win the election or serve the country quite as well (in this case Hillary Clinton). Carville believes Richardson’s guilt at feeling politically beholden to Hillary’s husband should trump Richardson’s doing what he believes to be the right thing for the nation. Disgusting. The mud-slinging, name-calling and low-blows being delivered during this campaign have sickened us all. The saddest part is that it divides the party, alienates those who are independent or undecided, and weakens us in the eyes of those who will vote in the November election.

We shoot ourselves in the foot when we engage in public intraparty backbiting. And then we end up with people who say, “I’ve been a Democrat all my life, but I’m so angry at [the candidate other than my own] that if that nasty [other Democratic candidate] is nominated, I’m not going to vote at all. Or I’ll just go and vote for McCain!” I’ve heard Hillary supporters say if people aren’t smart enough to line up behind their woman, they’ll be too disgusted by the nearsighted sexists all around them to vote for Barack. Yeah, letting the party that represents everything they say they’re fighting against win—that’ll show ’em! And I’ve heard even more people say that they think Hillary is so much in the thrall of behind-the-scenes power brokers and special interests and has moved so far to the middle and done so much damage to her party’s image, she’s essentially a Republican now, so voting for a straightforward Republican would be better than voting for a stealth Republican like her.

Wait a minute!

I totally understand disgust and anger with the current situation. I wonder at times whether Hillary and Bill are engaging in some sort of horrible political murder-suicide pact, seemingly trying to destroy the Democratic party and the country (and their own historical reputations, ultimately) by dividing the country and damaging the one hope the country has to save ourselves from slipping further into the cesspool W has dragged us into. Several journos even suggest that Hillary, knowing she can’t win the nomination, is trying to taint Barack so completely that McCain will win—and then people will be so horrified after four years under him that they’ll be thrilled to give her another shot in 2012. I think this is a wacko conspiracy theory, but so many wacko behind-the-scenes political maneuverings have been uncovered in the past decade that I’m loath to dismiss anything as impossible now.

But listen—

A Democrat who refuses to vote is, to my mind, essentially voting for McCain. Remember the Latin maxim: “Qui tacet consentire videtur.” He who is silent is assumed to give his consent. If you refuse to provide a vote for the alternative out of a devotion to lofty principles over pragmatism, you aid the other side. Unless Democrats lift our voices against Republican candidates, we give them our tacit consent, and that’s the message we send to the whole world, not just to the 5% of the world’s population that happens to live in the U.S. If we can’t be bothered to exercise the right to vote that people died to secure for us, and which people around the world are willing to die for even today, we’re lazy and careless and deserve what we get.

I find much distasteful about Hillary’s recent behavior, and her chance of securing the nomination is now minuscule. However, because Democrats are now so polarized we risk having a significant number of her supporters simply bow out of further political participation out of petulance. I hope that they will consider this: there are a huge number of reasons why either Obama or Clinton would be infinitely better for the nation (and the world beyond our borders) than McCain. Here’s the number one reason:

McCain would appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court who would continue the wholesale attacks on civil liberties and the general war on good sense that we’ve seen under Bush. That would be a tragedy.

McCain has made it increasingly clear during this campaign that, overused and misleading “maverick” label aside (he’s one of the biggest insiders there is and he toes the conservative line—he’s no maverick), he is nothing if not a conservative Republican. He would appoint people who would continue to undercut our civil rights in dozens of ways, as the court has done under Bush. Corporate America would get a free pass to continue environmentally disastrous behavior, like opening more pristine areas to drilling, removing protection from threatened species and dragging behind in setting guidelines for slowing global warming. Conservative judges will continue to narrowly interpret the constitution to support big businesses and intrusive government that puts ruthless administrative expediency before your rights. (Recount legitimate votes? Naw, toss them out and anoint the man with half-a-million fewer votes! Miranda rights? Who needs them! Habeus corpus laws? They don’t apply when the administration doesn’t want them to. And on and on.) Reproductive rights could keep being diminished until even more people end up having back-alley abortions, since legal ones and RU-486 could become so hard to secure. (In hundreds of counties across the U.S., access to legal, first-trimester abortion is already hard or impossible to obtain, even for adult women with ready money, under the current administration.)

McCain says he would leave the troops in Iraq. He thinks watching millions of people lose their homes to foreclosure and glutting the market with homes that nobody takes care of that are sold as-is at auction makes more sense than urging the companies that got rich on their irresponsible mortgage lending decisions to find ways to help irresponsible mortgagees restructure debt and help keep the housing market afloat. (A misguided desire not to show mercy to people who’ve made mistakes may seem more “fair,” but helping them find ways to keep their homes means saving the industry from free-fall and helping the housing market keep more of its value, which benefits us all.) McCain would continue our belligerent foreign policy, making sure our name continues to be mud around the world, making us more prone to terrorist attacks and harming us economically as well by showing indifference to other cultures and using force instead of diplomacy. Hillary voted for funding for the current war, but she knows now what a disaster it was; McCain still supports it.

I believe that Hillary Clinton would be less progressive, less diplomatic and less proactive on the subjects I just listed than Barack Obama, so I support his candidacy over hers. But she and Obama agree on most of the important things. Their health care plans are very similar, they agree in their opposition to continuing the war in Iraq, to stopping the mess in Guantanamo, to ending the violations of habeus corpus and stopping the disregard of the Geneva Conventions. Many of their economic plans are similar, too. Their ways of expressing themselves differ vastly, of course, enough so that I think it would make a great difference in their ability to get the country to go along with them and to get the rest of the world behind us. So yes, it matters to me a lot that Obama be our nominee and win. But with all her faults, Hillary would be a much better choice for our country than McCain, the hypocrite, who’s all big talk about not being in lobbyists’ pockets while being in their debt, who voted to continue waterboarding (so much for all his fancy words about it being torture a few months back), and is famous for his nasty temper and bullying manner.

There are myriad reasons why I feel we would all be better off under a Democrat than a Republican, but the number one reason to vote for Democrats is because of the decades of horrible influence that Republican presidents would have on the future of the country because of their power to nominate Supreme Court justices. We have several justices on the brink of retirement right now; the next president could have as many as three new seats to fill, since Justice Breyer, an introvert who hates living in Washington, is aching to retire and leave D.C.; Justice Ginsberg (my heroine!) is almost 75, has had colon cancer and is rather frail; and Justice John Paul Stevens turns 88 this month.

Right now we often have a 5-4 conservative majority of the court, but swing votes sometimes save us from the worst decisions, and the strong voices of reason on the moderate left still on the court at least make important arguments that become part of the record that is reviewed when these issues come back before the court later. Their dissenting decisions are influential, if not now, then later. If the conservative majority becomes lopsided, they not only get their way on every decision, and choose to decide more dangerous cases because they know they’ll get away with whatever they want; they can also quash dissenting opinion and the open airing of other points of view. They fill seats with people who may serve 20 or 30 years and damage the fabric of our lives and our Constitution for a generation.

Please, fellow and sister Democrats, don’t even THINK of staying home when a Republican has a chance to put another civil rights-hating conservative on the bench.