Why I Can't Vote Republican

One of my recent columns provoked a fine discussion including an interesting question from the right. The left talks about bi-partisanism, the reader said, but when did they last vote for a Republican? My answer is that my first national vote was for a Republican, and I voted for a local Republican in the last election, but I would not vote for any Republican on the national level now. The reason is morality.

You think that’s a shocking statement? After all, the G.O.P. is the moral majority, the opposition to abortion, and the party of church-goers, isn’t it?

I think morality is better displayed by seeking truth than by opposition to abortion or by wearing religion on your sleeve. The pro-life morality breaks down in the refusal to relieve a child raped by her father, and in unquestioning support for the death penalty and unnecessary war. Immoral behavior too often hides behind religious boasting. Morality, to me, is striving to live up to ideals by seeking to make the way the world is be closer to the way it ought to be.

The Republican Party has been the party of short-term self-interest for at least thirty years, and I can’t vote for that. After Eisenhower, the G.O.P. has nominated one slow-witted caricature after another and then let a network of very intelligent Machiavellians run the country behind the scenes. The only requirement for a president seems to be a certain ability to wave the flag and look pious.

The way the G.O.P. machine works its Karl Rovian black magic through a media network designed to broadcast any lie that will advance its march toward domination is enough to turn any moralist’s stomach.

Our right wing friends constantly decry the “liberal press”, but I defy anyone to point out a liberal media network as insidiously vicious as the FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck matrix that is underwritten by the “damn the truth, full speed ahead” support that people like our own (thankfully slipped away in the night) Vince Jericho lend it on the local level throughout the nation. It is a network of disinformation that leads by the nose those voters who buy into any sound bite that meets their emotional approval, and it is horribly dangerous to the future of democracy.

Any party that maintains such a media propaganda machine to support the kind of back-stabbing, ends-justify-any-means campaigns the G.O.P. constructs has strayed so far from any acceptable definition of morality that it will never capture a single vote of mine on the national level, and that’s the bottom line.

What’s essential for this nation is not the voter’s undying support for his party no-matter-what, but his or her constant striving to make that party adhere to truly moral behaviors and attitudes. When that happens I, too, will join the moral majority. In the meantime, as long as the G.O.P. continues its present tactics, their opposition will have my vote, and I’ll remain loyal to the moral minority.

Why Not Vote Republican?

One of my recent columns in Springfield, MO’s News-Leader provoked a fine discussion including an interesting question from the right. The left talks about bipartisanism, the reader said, but when did they last vote for a Republican? My answer is that my first national vote was for a Republican, and I voted for a local Republican in the last election, but I would not vote for any Republican on the national level now. The reason is morality.

You think that’s a shocking statement? After all, the G.O.P. is the moral majority, the opposition to abortion, and the party of church-goers, isn’t it?

I think morality is better displayed by seeking truth than by opposition to abortion or by wearing religion on your sleeve. The pro-life morality breaks down in the refusal to relieve a child raped by her father, and in unquestioning support for the death penalty and unnecessary war. Immoral behavior too often hides behind religious boasting. Morality, to me, is striving to live up to ideals by seeking to make the way the world is be closer to the way it ought to be.

The Republican Party has been the party of short-term self-interest for at least thirty years, and I can’t vote for that. After Eisenhower, the G.O.P. has nominated one slow-witted caricature after another and then let a network of very intelligent Machiavellians run the country behind the scenes. The only requirement for a president seems to be a certain ability to wave the flag and look pious.

The way the G.O.P. machine works its Karl Rovian black magic through a media network designed to broadcast any lie that will advance its march toward domination is enough to turn any moralist’s stomach.

Our right wing friends constantly decry the “liberal press”, but I defy anyone to point out a liberal media network as insidiously vicious as the FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck matrix that is underwritten by the “damn the truth, full speed ahead” support that people like our own (thankfully slipped away in the night) Vince Jericho lend it on the local level throughout the nation. It is a network of disinformation that leads by the nose those voters who buy into any sound bite that meets their emotional approval, and it is horribly dangerous to the future of democracy.

Any party that maintains such a media propaganda machine to support the kind of back-stabbing, ends-justify-any-means campaigns the G.O.P. constructs has strayed so far from any acceptable definition of morality that it will never capture a single vote of mine on the national level, and that’s the bottom line.

At this point I have no great love for either party. What’s essential for this nation is not the voter’s undying support for his party no-matter-what, but his or her constant striving to make that party adhere to truly moral behaviors and attitudes. When that happens I, too, will join the moral majority. In the meantime, as long as the G.O.P. continues its present tactics, their opposition will have my vote, and I’ll remain loyal to the moral minority no matter what party's candidate I vote for.

Moral Clarity

The growth of the tea party is the most glaring evidence of the pain poor governance has inflicted on the people of the country. When the right wing, a group heavily conditioned to stay in line, is moved by its government to rise up as the tea party against that government in ways that it has so long and loudly proclaimed as unpatriotic, it is obvious that something is terribly wrong.

To those on the left, though, these protestors seem to have finally seen the need to escape without finding the door. Their cries of protest are defeated by their lack of direction. Their generalities – smaller government, moral leadership, etc – lack specificity while calling for a return to the “good old days”.

The “good old days” of a chicken in every pot sound good to the left, too, but the “good old days” of pre-Social Security and Medicare - both positions expressed by tea party candidates who recently elections to state and national office – do not. That call is for a return to the county poorhouse and death by neglect. Such ideas lead us backward, not forward. What improvement lies within them?

A wonderful book, “Moral Clarity”, by Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum, discusses the rift between left and right in great depth. In extremely limited synopsis - she says that the right, as followers of David Hume, cling to the notion that mankind needs religion because it is incapable of internally governing its own behavior in a moral fashion. The left, as followers of Immanuel Kant, cling to the notion that ideas and ideals are each person’s guides to morality and that good governance explores the potential for ideas and ideals to achieve moral balance in society.

This right wing caution, she asserts, urges us to hold to known quantities – stability and security guaranteed by those whose abilities have put them in socially superior positions - as opposed to accepting the assertions of dreamers whose ideals tell them that “things” ought to be better. Such caution, however, may lead to security, but not to growth and social improvement.

We must be “realistic” the right tells us, and not follow the unproven dreams of idealists, but the expectation that an idea must contain from the outset a proven solution to a problem is absurd. The purpose of ideas is not to solve problems so much as to identify them and act as steps toward their resolution through political debate and compromise.

Poverty, for instance, remains a problem among our African-American population, but it is not as severe a problem as the slavery that preceded it. Nor is it the same problem it was before Dr. King dragged the white population into the harsh light of racial reality through the prism of Alabama State Trooper billy clubs wielded against his ideas.

Society advances through the evolution of ideas into realities. A movement striving to stifle those ideas is a return to old days that weren’t really all that good.