Last September, I officially broke up with the Republican Party on Facebook and not necessarily because I didn’t like it anymore. The break-up was more reminiscent of a Nineties teen flick starring the Republican Party as that nerdy outcast girl who the cool guy was secretly in love with but doesn’t admit to his letter jacket-wearing friends. Being 2009, this means my political affiliation officially became ambiguously “complicated,” and people speculated over my flirtation with the Libertarians.
It felt risqué, as if I were taking a diamond ring off my finger at the bar so I could chatter freely with conservatives and liberals alike with no GOP attached to my name. This was my new life as a political independent, and it made me feel a little guilty because I left the Republican Party during a time when young people were leaving the Republican Party in drones. But I was done fighting back in some sequel to the Revenge of the Nerds that starred Sarah Palin as a weak replacement for Dick Cheney’s intimidating demeanor—I was done with the politics that turned into just that—politics.
Don’t get me wrong. This wasn’t easy and I felt like I was wimping out. I still do—sometimes. I’ve never agreed with everything on the Republican platform, but I do have a dose of a small government twist with a watered-down sprinkle of big military and family values in me. As I watched an increasing number of moderates leave the GOP during and after the 2008 election, leaving the more extreme conservatives to steer the boat, I became determined to stay a Republican, anchoring it down, hoping that I could reform it. Until I jumped ship—
—and here’s why:
The truth of the matter is, most Republicans I know do little to disprove the Republican stereotype: self-interested and closed-minded. Sure, it can be argued that the media is liberal and that doesn’t help the Republican image, but that’s only part of it.
The stigma of the word “Republican” has come to represent a party that combats extremism with extremist backlash. The moment universal healthcare is mentioned, you hear accusations of socialism immediately proceeding it. Its best tactic seems to have became “fear the other side because your grandparents did.”
But I’m not my grandparents. I’m twenty-two and frustrated with both sides of the aisle. This is why I’m writing this right now. How can the Republicans win me back in 2012?
In the last half-century, the Republicans have supported a war, another war, and yet another war, sugar-coating it with some “Country First” rhetoric. It’s become the party of pro-war as opposed to pro-military.
It can begin by taking off the blinders and looking around a bit instead of being the party about blindly supporting war, big business, and tax cuts just because it’s ideologically correct. It can start giving everyone, no matter their orientation, the right to serve their country because so many already do, they just don’t tell, and looked at the facts of the War on Drugs—the fact that it’s not working, the fact that it targets a low-income urban demographic and doesn’t prevent kids in the suburbs from using drugs—at all.
What entitles being a Republican has become something that I feel wrong living up to. I can’t buy an eco-friendly water bottle or support local business without the politically-conservative faction of my friends turning up their noses, drinking bottled water and shopping at Wal-mart just to cancel me out, and asking why I would ever buy into hippie nonsense.
Here’s why I do: Just because I don’t believe the government has the ability to make effective change, which is why I have conservative-leaning beliefs in the first place, it doesn’t mean I can’t lend my hand in for individual change. It doesn’t mean I can’t prefer to buy my clothes at a store that refuses to sell clothes made by the portion of the world who works for less than a dollar, adjusted for standard of living, for a 12-hour work day.
As long as the Grand Old Party continues to be the ghost from the past that gives me a bad rep, I won’t identify it. But the second it goes back to it’s roots and gets its head out of picking on the party of donkeys, maybe we’ll start talking again.
1 comments