Why I Used to Be a Republican-And Why I Changed

I was raised in a deeply conservative family. (I hasten to add that my mother didn't brook prejudices against other people and was generous to others--and we didn't have a big margin for error in our own finances.) I was a strong Goldwater kid in 1964, at the age of 12. I was fiercely for Nixon in '68, in part because I was convinced he had been cheated out of what had been rightly his in 1960. (Long, irrelevant story about why I felt I had been cheated in my own life.) I lived in northern Illinois and the Mafia-connected Democrats in Chicago sickened me. I was for Nixon also because the 1960s had been so chaotic that I was hoping he could restore some kind of sanity. Oh well.

Nixon's failure to end the war began to disillusion me. In college I drifted toward the Democrats, casting my first vote for McGovern. I rejoiced at Nixon's political destruction in the Watergate scandal. I was impressed with the decency and common sense of Gerald Ford, which was such a profound contrast to Nixon.

At the same time, however, in college I was majoring in history and political science. I was particularly interested in the USSR under Stalin, and I immersed myself in Soviet history. I was so horrified and appalled by what I found (especially after reading the first part of The Gulag Archipelago) that I became a militant anti-Communist. I also grew to hate Communist China's government as I learned about it. I had been repelled, also, by those who rejoiced at the Communist victory in Vietnam in 1975 (which was NOT how the majority of the anti-war movement felt, by the way). I came to see Communism's defeat as a moral imperative.

After college, living and working in a small, very Republican suburb, surrounded by decent and hardworking conservatives also began to change me. I found Jimmy Carter to be annoyingly self-righteous and voted for Ford in 1976. And I went deeper into the horrors of the USSR under Stalin as I worked on my Masters degree in history. By the late 1970s, I was fiercely anti-Soviet, looking for someone who would have the backbone to defy the horrible system I hated with every fiber of my being. Despite the fact that he made a lot of bone-headed statements, I began to see Ronald Reagan as someone who felt about the USSR the same way I did. Here's the crux of the matter: The Democrats just didn't seem to take the threat of Soviet Communism seriously, and the Republicans did. I voted for Reagan in 1980 because of this conviction.

Although I began to hear accusations about Reagan's actions in Central America, I still voted for him in 1984. Walter Mondale struck me as a tired, whining-voiced, unimaginative northern liberal whose chief "idea" was to restore the New Deal. It was no contest, as far as I was concerned.

But doubts began to creep into my conservatism. Reagan and his people seemed indifferent to environmental concerns, which I was just beginning to embrace. I especially loved the redwoods of northern California and wanted to see them protected. When ERA failed, I was angry. Reagan's speech in 1985 at a cemetary in Germany which contained SS graves also bothered me. My family had always been pretty strongly pro-civil rights (I grew up in an integrated neighborhood and had lots of African-American friends when I was a kid) and I didn't like a lot of the neo-Confederate nonsense I was beginning to hear in right wing circles. And I was adamantly pro-evolution in my thinking, having taught myself a good deal of physical anthropology. Did being a Republican mean I had to embrace creationist idiocy? It was starting to seem so. And I had gay friends, and I sure didn't like the hatred I was hearing directed against people like them.

I almost voted for Dukakis in 1988 because I was disquieted by Dan Quayle, but Duke just didn't seem to have the leadership I was looking for. This was a big mistake on my part. By 1991, the elder Bush repelled me with his tongue-tied rhetoric, his kissing up to the radical religious right, and his general ineptitude after the Gulf War, when he had a strongly unified country behind him and did...nothing. I decided he also seemed to have no real moral or ethical core. There was something wrong with him I couldn't put my finger on. And the Bush deficits scared the hell out of me. By 1992, I gladly voted for Clinton, although his personal lack of discipline (i.e., keeping his fly zipped) was troubling.

I stayed a Democrat because the Republicans continued to move farther and farther right. I stayed a Democrat because Bill Clinton was an effective, capable president. I stayed a Democrat because to be a Democrat meant being for science, for equal opportunity and equal rights, for fiscal responsibility, for economic opportunity, for defending our environment, for the rights of women, and above all for moderation. I stayed a Democrat because I was outraged at the criminal farce of the Clinton impeachment. And faced with the most vicious, unprincipled, incompetent, dishonest, and corrupt administration in history, a regime supported by terrifying right wing fanatics of all stripes, I am a stronger Democrat than ever.

In retrospect, if the Democrats had spoken out as forcefully against Soviet brutality as the Republicans did, I don't think I would have strayed after McGovern. The Republicans seemed to feel that the defeat of the Soviet Union was possible; the Democrats seemed resigned to a permanent Cold War, which I didn't want. I was always more moderate than most of the Reaganites. Maybe with my big goal achieved (the fall of Communism in Europe), my eyes could focus on other issues. And once they did, the Democrats seemed saner and more responsible in almost every way.

I will never really be a hardcore liberal, but I'm still a moderate. And for a moderate these days, the Democratic Party is the only rational option.

My wandering days are through; I will die a loyal Democrat.