A Young Voter Schools his Father

Fathers and Sons: The love; the expectations; the independence. We rear our sons to not need us anymore - to become fully functioning and independent people who make their own choices and live with the consequences of their decisions. Tough love in a tough world.

But we never quit being our father's sons. And that matters deeply.

(I have half-jokingly told friends and KSN&C readers that if I were to start a political party in America it would be the Radical Moderate Party. It would insist upon equality for all citizens but would generally reject extremism from the far right as well as the far left. It would court the middle 60 percent of Americans who see both sides of issues. I think Andrew might make a fine charter member.)

This from journalism and economics senior Andrew Waldner in the Kentucky Kernel.

An open letter to my father:

You’ll take your own advice some day

Dear Dad,­

I know you find my Democratic ideas silly and immature. You always say, “One day you’ll be a Republican, just wait and see.” But I don’t think you understand. I don’t think you understand my beliefs and I don’t think you understand the actualities of your own party.

You think the GOP is something that it’s not. It is not, as you think, the party for free-market ideals and do-it-yourself energy. It used to be, but it isn’t anymore. They’ve abandoned that creed for another: Fear. They incite fear in the electorate using social, “family” issues and ride that wave to power. It’s a wonderful short-term strategy and it worked extremely well for a while. It kept them in power for nearly two decades, all under the watchful eyes of people like Karl Rove.

I’m an economics major, so I know how the free market works. I believe in its ability to regulate itself and run efficiently, the recent credit crisis notwithstanding. I believe that if you lower taxes, you can spur consumer spending and investing and improve the economy. These are all historically conservative and/or Republican ideas, but they’ve been put on the backburner.

They haven’t been on the agenda for the last two decades.Today’s Republican “base” is predominantly white, lower-class and socially conservative. As exit polls are showing, the Republicans have slimmed down this base and are now losing nearly all demographics outside of these people. In the latest election, they only won 3 percent of blacks and 30 percent of Hispanics. They lost every single age group except voters over 65. How’s that for a super-majority, Rove?

Rove and his ilk took advantage of the basic fears of these poor, uneducated Southern and Midwestern voters and spun it into getting George W. Bush elected twice. Politically, it was a genius move. Realistically, it was a short-term solution that created a long-term problem. This strategy further marginalized their base and made people like myself, socially liberal and educated upper-middle class whites, even more scared of the goals of the party. Their views on immigration, related to this idea of fearing all “foreigners,” probably cost them just as many votes with other
demographics.

The GOP isn’t the free-market, small-government party it was supposed to be. It’s now, both in practice and how it’s viewed, the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage and anti-anything not born in America party that focuses on little else. There are good conservatives who have similar views; the Andrew Sullivans, the David Frums, my own father; but they aren’t the ones in power.

The doomed campaign of John McCain is a perfect example. Here you have a moderate Republican who stands for everything good about the GOP and actually appeals to those moderates that you need to win an election. And yet, over the course of the last few years and during his campaign, in an effort to appeal to that base, he’s had to compromise his own beliefs.

Nothing shows this more than the choice of Sarah Palin. I won’t get into attacking her ignorance or “diva” tendencies, because it’s irrelevant. The important thing is that she’s nothing like McCain. He’s a relatively non-religious moderate and he’s forced to choose a hyper-religious neo-con as his vice presidential candidate. I don’t buy the arguments that she ruined his chances. In fact, I think she gave him the only chance he ever had at winning. Joe Lieberman or someone else would’ve just turned off the base and handed Barack Obama the presidency.

But, to moderates and liberals, she represents everything that’s wrong with the party. She has little policy knowledge and doesn’t seem interested in learning, she just wants to thrust her family and moral values on the rest of the country; real policy and issues be damned. Just like Bush, she seems to be an empty vessel that fundamentalist forces can work through to keep their belief systems in power. Rather than work to make the country better for its citizens in realistic ways, they want to control and remake their citizens into their ideal, “true” Americans.

So sorry Dad, but I can’t bring myself to join such a party. This GOP that basically ignores real issues like health care, taxation and the security of our nation just to wage an ideological holy war against Democrats and the rest of the world isn’t something I want to be a part of. The Democrats aren’t perfect. I don’t buy into some of their economic proposals, Nancy Pelosi is an evil succubus and they have their own nutty members to deal with. However, they’ve been smart and have begun to move towards the center away from their crazier tendencies. They also haven’t played into the most basic, religious fears of some of the poorest, least-educated people in our country just to keep in power.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m not saying that you or anyone that thinks like you is evil.

Being conservative is and should stand for the belief that people make their lives and fortunes on their own hard work, that we should carefully and skeptically embrace change and that the government shouldn’t give handouts. It shouldn’t mean controlling people’s lives, marriages, bodies and who knows what else. So if you’re a true conservative, defend yourself and take back your party. If you’re a fundamentalist Christian, that’s fine too, just remember that “fundamentalist” does not equal “conservative,” it’s something entirely different.

So for now, unless something big happens, I’ll continue to be a moderate Democrat and be happy with it. On a side note, I voted for Obama and would have done so wholeheartedly whether a registered Republican or Democrat, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that he won.

Someday, hopefully, the GOP will sort itself out and become the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan again; not the party of Bush and Rove. Until then, I cannot, in good conscience, be part of the Republican Party.

So don’t worry Dad, I believe in you. Someday you’ll be a Democrat, just wait and see.