Salon.com: Why I left the GOP

[smock]

Thanks for posting. Clearly the GOP decision to go after votes from the religious right and push social issues has alienated a lot of the fiscal conservative and moderate voters in the party. I really wonder where the party will go in the future.

[Deleted]

ditto Smock

[heyjude]

At least with respect to this person, I didn't get the sense that the religious right affinity was the reason for his defection. Rather gross inequalities and this idea that "bootstraps" is answer to all. I don't know. He got a little long windy and I skimmed the final few paragraphs.

[zelda25]

Sept 12, 2012 13:27:04 GMT -5 heyjude said:

At least with respect to this person, I didn't get the sense that the religious right affinity was the reason for his defection. Rather gross inequalities and this idea that "bootstraps" is answer to all. I don't know. He got a little long windy and I skimmed the final few paragraphs.

You skipped the wrong paragraphs, LOL--that's where he finally got to the meat of his point. The first 3/4 of the piece have a "rich babe-in-the-woods/wide-eyed innocence" tone that that seems too impossible to be true and actually turned me off.

I suspect that the board Rs will be eye-rolling aplenty over the notion that "wow--if only we knew people don't choose to be poor, we would never have been Republicans!" As though that sort of ignorance is the only reason people who are not far-right nutjobs vote Republican. And I say all this as a liberal!

I get his point and I appreciate that he's making it--even though something about it feels disengenous to me--but suggesting that all, or even most, Republicans are Rs because they grew up too privileged to know better is not going to further his cause.

[msmerymac]

Sept 12, 2012 13:27:04 GMT -5 heyjude said:

At least with respect to this person, I didn't get the sense that the religious right affinity was the reason for his defection. Rather gross inequalities and this idea that "bootstraps" is answer to all. I don't know. He got a little long windy and I skimmed the final few paragraphs.

Talk about life not being fair, eh? Bootstraps don't work for everyone! Which party is the party that thinks everything is "fair" now?

[NitaX]

Many people see the wider spectrum of reality because they grew up on the receiving end. As a retired African-American general in the Marine Corps said to me after I told him my story, “No one has to explain institutional racism to a black man.”

I seriously laughed at this. Not because it was funny, but because it's the dayum truth. You don't have to explain this to black people. They know it. They navigate it daily. When reports come out about disparate treatment, the running joke among my friends is "In Sky Is Blue News ... Minorities were given worse loans than equally qualified whites ..." like we just made that shit up.

But honestly, this article sums up why I'm a Democrat. All of those reasons. It would be nice if the nation would operate along the lines of fiscal issues and realities are important, but they don't line up when the policies negatively impact people who were already worse off. The playing field still isn't level. Until it is, Democrat Fo' Life!

[wrathofkuus]

The description of war-torn Iraq and the musings about what it must be like for the people who actually live there... this is what bothers me most of all about military interventions. One of the undergrads I mentor moved here from Iraq, and she talks about her childhood during the original Desert Storm and how her brother used to cry and beg the soldiers for bread because the family had no food... it's heartbreaking. And they weren't the underclass there, either - this is a family of educated, middle-class people who were living this way.

[shouldbworkin]

I can relate to what he's saying, but it happened much earlier to me.

[basilosaurus]

I can actually believe the wide-eyed rich kid stuff. I went to school with a lot of rich kids. Campus republicans were huge. Everyone I still follow on fb has listed their political views as varying forms of super liberal, even the former president of the group.

Although I didn't come from as wealthy a background, I was still privileged and surrounded by privilege. And I for the most part knew that (private education is a big indicator), and my family made sure to stress that we were lucky.

But I still believed a lot of the bootstrap mentality because I heard it so often from my grandpa. It's taken me a bit longer to realize that, yes, he did well for himself, but a white man in the 50s had a different world in which to succeed than everyone else. Those are realizations I had in my 20s, and still have today. It would be embarrassing to admit some of my unexamined assumptions.

[zelda25]

Sept 12, 2012 16:11:41 GMT -5 basilosaurus said:

I can actually believe the wide-eyed rich kid stuff. I went to school with a lot of rich kids. Campus republicans were huge. Everyone I still follow on fb has listed their political views as varying forms of super liberal, even the former president of the group.

Although I didn't come from as wealthy a background, I was still privileged and surrounded by privilege. And I for the most part knew that (private education is a big indicator), and my family made sure to stress that we were lucky.

But I still believed a lot of the bootstrap mentality because I heard it so often from my grandpa. It's taken me a bit longer to realize that, yes, he did well for himself, but a white man in the 50s had a different world in which to succeed than everyone else. Those are realizations I had in my 20s, and still have today. It would be embarrassing to admit some of my unexamined assumptions.

I don't doubt that your experience (and that of the writer) is real or that there is a tier of white, rich Rs who have lived so far above and beyond the fray that they can only see in the most black and white terms--my H was one of those until he grew up and got outside his sheltered upbringing. What I take issue with is his suggestion that all Republicans are Republican because they live in a bubble of unexamined privilege.

I don't know--maybe I'm just outrageously naive. I think I'm also at loose ends with respect to what it actually means to be a Republican right now, kwim? If you take the wingnuts that we all hope are a temporary aberration out of the equation, what does your garden-variety R look like? It wasn't that long ago that Rs were largely pro-choice and saw the value in not destroying the environment (yeah, pre-Reagan, but within my lifetime, so it can't have been that long ago )

I'm probably not making any sense.

[basilosaurus]

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I don't think it's a widespread cause of republilcanism, either.