I used to be a Republican. I was a Young Republican. I worked in both Reagan campaigns, and I contributed to the Republican National Committee. It was the party of Lincoln, and I saw it as a leader of social justice.
Eisenhower was my first president. In 1952, my father dropped me off at the Chicago Amphitheater for the Republican National Convention. I made signs on the fifth floor, until someone told me to go across the hall and listen to Eisenhower speak. I was high up under the eaves of the building, a nine-year-old girl in a proper dress, peering down at the floor of the convention and at our future president.
Around 1954 Eisenhower read a statement on television saying that he would uphold the Supreme Court's order regarding desegregation of the schools. On TV I saw a little colored girl in a white dress being escorted into school, surrounded by federal marshals. I didn't know what to think about the marshals.
In 1957, around the family dinner table, my dad told us that he was integrating his division of Standard Oil, and the management problems that were involved in his effort. He sort of tossed off that the law would make him integrate at some point, so he thought he'd do it now. That statement rang false to me, because I had seen my father weep as he listened to Mahalia Jackson sing spirituals. My father had also been saved by a quick thinking colored service-station dealer during the 1943 race riot in Detroit. He would not have integrated his 50,000-person division unless this was also the will and direction of the Board of Directors, and they were Republicans to a man.
Within the family, I don't think we discussed civil-rights violence, but I saw poverty and hopelessness in the deep South on family vacations. Later my dad's credit-card operation on Wacker Drive in Chicago was picketed by blacks, and he gleefully told the story of his black assistant taking the picketers through uniformly black employees to the office of the credit-card manager, also a man of color. Maybe it wasn't true integration, but it was jobs.
Down South, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and others pushed open the door of justice and marched through, while Republicans up North oiled the hinges. I do not agree with the sneering opinion that the birth of the Civil Rights Movement was accidental during the Eisenhower administration and under the Warren Court, nor do I agree that Eisenhower was an unwilling participant in history. I saw with my own eyes the will of Republicans regarding civil rights. The actions taken at that time are what counted, and not the postulations of the future.
That was the party of Lincoln.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was proposed by President John F. Kennedy. After his assassination, it was pushed through by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Democrats lost the South, and Republicans, thinking it a political advantage, took to their bosoms the evil bastards who loosed the dogs on the Selma marchers in 1965. It was at this moment that the party lost its integrity and descended into mediocrity.
I loved President Reagan. I understood him. My grandparents were from rural Illinois, and when Reagan talked, he sounded like a relative. Reagan had vast communication skills and a moral compass. He did not have a great mind, but he was a great proponent of Conservatism.
We speak a lot of the political movement Conservatism, but conservatism is also a state of mind. It's in the nature of an emotion, and it's a pretty good state of mind or emotion too. Conservatives of the mind don't like a lot of change. They speak carefully. They keep their lives under control, for the most part. They are kind to their spouses and children. They have a plan for their lives. They'll listen to you, but rarely say a thing if they don't agree. A conservative is a rather happy person, in a conservative sort of way. The conservative mind tends to accept data without a lot of critical thought, as long as the data does not challenge the status quo.
Disorder is a big problem for a conservative person. A lot of half-truths will be accepted by the conservative person in order to maintain the feeling of safety that goes with conservatism. The operation of the free market is one of those half-truths. Sloganeering like "What's good for business is good for America," or "the Free Market is the great leveler," or "We can trust the market to make correct economic decisions" are all part of a conservative endeavor to keep chaos at bay. If you are conservative (with a small c), you don't like chaos. And change is BAD.
Except markets are chaotic. And that's just the way it is. Hell, life is chaotic. Change is constant, and there's nothing to hold it back. That butterfly in Brazil is always flapping its wings.
Change itself is a kind of disorder, or can be experienced as such by the conservative mind. You can probably see where I am going with this. Conservatism with a capital C is the dramatization in political life of the personal emotion of conservatism (lower case c.) A great deal of the policy of the Republican Party is an effort to calm the fears of its adherents. Even the great discipline within the Republican Party is an outgrowth of the fear of chaos, the fear of change. This fear of change is also played out in the inconsistent application of Christianity to conservative theory. There's not a whole lot of loving one's brother as oneself in the Republican Party, because that might cause CHANGE.
So what's an honest person to do? Quit the Party.
I'm a lawyer, and lawyers know a lot about order in the society. That's what lawyers do -- create order. When the Republicans started to go after Clinton and misused the impeachment process, that was the last straw. I hadn't been represented for a long time within the party, I felt disquieted by the growing role of Christian conservatives who I thought acted not Christian at all, and I saw too many people declare bankruptcy because of medical bills. There was just too much disorder in the society.
I also felt that I was being marketed to. I didn't see authentic candidates before me. I was being offered symbols. The Republican machine selects symbols for which we vote, symbols to sell us, but symbols have no character, no judgment. Symbols do not make decisions. The Republican descent into symbolic candidates began with Reagan, as it was hard for career politicians to figure out why what he did worked. And with the start of symbolic candidates, other men, inconspicuous men we never elected, began to make the decisions for these elected symbols. These inconspicuous men have sent our young people off to war, sacrificed our national treasure for the benefit of friends and corporate interests, and then selected the next symbol whom they will control for their own benefit.
We are now presented with the war-hero symbol and the hockey-mom symbol. The war-hero symbol has even less relevance to the challenges of the presidency than the hockey-mom symbol. Alas, the main stock-in-trade of wars, and war heroes, is destruction. At least all a hockey mom has to do is run a car pool.
I don't think the Republican Party can come back. They've just done too much bad stuff and are too corrupt. In a person, too many evil deeds cause the person to draw back and become ineffective. It's no different with groups or nations. There's a very good reason to choose a righteous path, because righteousness keeps a person or a nation proud and reaching out. One righteous path we chose was to embrace the civil-rights movement.
In the brief arc of our Republic, the issues of slavery, succession, and then the integration of minorities into our larger society have been often determinate of both domestic and foreign policy. Some historians say, and I think rightly, that the issues of black and white have been the central conundrum and burden of a society that prides itself on its goodness and its rightness with Providence.
We are at a moment when the threads of American guilt and triumph will come to us in one man. We will choose that man not because he is the most brilliant, or has the highest character, or even because by the choice of that one man we start to close the pages on America's past great shame. No, we will choose him because he is the best organized, and that will be very American too.
And choosing Obama, we come at last back to our own, into the full acceptance of our goodness, having in part settled a debt of the past. We come back to a righteous path.
My sister Sarah called this morning. Her neighbor learned I was blogging on Huff Post. The neighbor suggested that our father would be turning over in his grave if he knew we were both Democrats now. Sarah asked me what Dad would think of us both deserting the Republican Party. I told her he would say, "Serves the bastards right."