WHY I DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN

For Vicki at Books'n'Bytes

This essay started as a kind of joke--well, no. Not the essay. The title started as a kind of joke, because after I'd posted the last set of essays (the ones on intellectuals and Marx), I got a small flurry of e-mail and postings to the comments board asking why I didn't just give up the Democratic Party and "come on over" to the Republicans, where a lot of you thought I belonged. And it's true--if you read the essays that were posted before this one, it might seem as if I've belonged to the wrong political party most of my life, or that I do now. After all, I hold a number of "Republican" positions. I'm opposed to hate crimes laws and affirmative action in government entities like public universities. I have no patience for the rule-by-expert and social-service-paternalism that infects so much of the legacy of the New Deal. I don't think George W. Bush is stupid, and I think that Ronald Reagan was probably a necessary corrective to a fifty year near monopoly by a left wing that had become intellectually incoherent, ideationally stagnant, and morally ridiculous.

Still, I'm a member of the Democratic Party, and I vote Democratic nearly all the time. My favorite politician is a fire-breathing feminist liberal of the old school named Rosa DeLauro. Forget Hillary--Rosa still hasn't taken her husband's name, and she's been in Congress for a decade. I find myself more comfortable, intellectually and morally, with Dissent than with The Public Interest, and with The American Prospect than with The American Spectator. Granted, my all time favorite political magazine is Reason, but unlike a lot of other "soft" libertarians, I find my libertarianism better served by Democrats than by Republicans.

The reason why that is so is rather complicated, and has as much to do with cultural climate as with specific policy commitments. It's not the kind of thing I find easy to explain, and it's not about the things most people seem to talk about when they talk about politics. Yes, I held my nose to vote for Al Gore, but I'd do it again--and the only Democrat with a chance at getting the nomination in 2004 that I wouldn't vote for in preference to George W. Bush is Joseph Lieberman. Yes, I understand that Democrats have taken positions on things like tax policy and race relations that I can't in conscience agree with, but they are things I'd rather live with than what the Republicans are offering, at least in this present administration.

Policies are all well and good, but climate matters--and always will--much more than policies do, in the long run, and the climate created by the Republican Party in its present incarnation is not one I can get behind unless I've got a chance to shove it off a cliff. I don't think Republicans are stupid, or racist, or greedy fatcat corporate predators. I don't think that spending other people's money makes Democrats "compassionate." I don't think "tolerance" means not being able to say that some act or idea is objectively, unquestionably morally wrong. I'm not a deconstructionist, and I'm nobody's moral relativist. I'm nobody's NPR snob, either. I do have the car radio turned permanently to All Things Considered, but the CDs next to my CD machine include Californication and Royal Blue as well as Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro.

But climate does matter, and some aspects of the climate matter more than others. Thirty years ago, when William F. Buckley was burnishing the shine on his National Review and working overtime to make the world safe for polysyllabic conversation, the Republicans had a shot at me. Now they don't, and the reason they don't can be summed up in three short phrases: the God thing; the Money thing; and the Stupid thing.

Most of the people who wanted to know, this time, why I didn't vote Republican actually were Republicans, and that makes a change from the usual thing I get--outraged Democrats demanding to know how I dare call myself a liberal. I've dealt with the how-dare-I on a number of occasions. This series is for the people on the other side who don't understand why I remain on this one.

And that's as much as I'm going to say in this introduction, which was supposed to be only three paragraphs long.

You can go to Part One: The God Thing whenever you like.

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