Another political changer
Here’s an interesting political change story (hat tip: commenter “Ilana”). The author is a lifelong Democrat, and the proximate cause of his change to Independent was the Democrats’ recent stance on Israel, but it goes deeper than that. The piece is described thusly at the link:
Lifelong Democrat Brad Goverman has finally left the Democrats. His views haven’t changed. It’s the Party that’s left him. Yet he hasn’t become a Republican. Instead he’s politically homeless, reflecting the position of many American Jews and Liberals in this new radical, political landscape. This piece shows America at a tipping point
From the piece itself:
The Democratic Party no longer feels like home. I never imagined I would write those words. …
I was a Democrat because I believed the party represented something larger than itself. It championed civil rights, religious liberty, pluralism, and the belief that Americans from every background could build a common democratic future. It believed government could improve people’s lives without becoming the center of them. It believed that immigration and pluralism wasn’t a weakness to be tolerated, but a strength to be celebrated.
For most of my life, I believed the Democratic Party best embodied those values. That is why this decision has been so painful. I’m not walking away from a political label. I’m walking away from a place that shaped my understanding of public life.
Sound familiar? I understand the sentiment. What is harder to understand at this point is his holding onto his identity as a Democrat for all these years in the face of so much evidence for so long that the Party isn’t what he thought it was (or what it was closer to being long ago). This is especially true because he seems to have been someone interested in politics and not someone utterly disengaged. It took the Democrats’ reaction to 10/7 to get him to see what I think had already been obvious.
On the other hand, I know how very very difficult it can be to admit to oneself, after decades of support for a certain party, that one was either wrong all that time or that things have changed now. It almost doesn’t matter which; it’s the change that matters.
Goverman makes it crystal clear, though, that he’s not a Republican. That is very common as well for left-to-right changers. It’s a bridge too far for most changers to declare a switch like that, even to themselves. Will he vote Republican? I don’t know, although in Massachusetts – where he lives – it doesn’t matter all that much. He may just not vote, or vote third-party.
It’s a start.
No, he will still vote Dem
The fact that he decided he could no longer be a Democrat but is not a Republican is gutless. By not voting for a viable alternative to the Democratic candidate he essentially continues to support the party he insists no longer represents him. He might as well have remained a registered Democrat and just not voted. If he thinks he’s making a principled stand he’s sorely mistaken. If he believes in what he’s saying he owes it to himself to vote — in a meaningful way — against the people who have taken over his former political home.
F; SHIREHOME:
I’ve never registered as a Republican except for primary voting. I’m not gutless. I have voted solely for Republicans since 2004, however. I don’t particularly want to join a party.
“It believed government could improve people’s lives without becoming the center of them.”
Um….that’s not the Democrat party I’m familiar with. Perhaps he was in a different one?
Even if that was their intent (and I don’t believe it is or ever has been), please name one government program that has “improved people’s lives without becoming the center of them.”
I’ll wait.
There’s a reason that charitable donations are consistently so much higher amongst Republicans. Republican altruism is expressed in giving their own money for worthy causes. Democrat “altruism” is expressed by taking other people’s money to filter through 15 layers of bureaucracy that skims 80% off the top, and bestowing the remainder on a public that has come to depend on it for survival.
Sailorcurt, “It believed government could improve people’s lives without becoming the center of them.”
That caught my eye, too. It made me laugh!
The Dems want a strong, active, union type of party where no one can opt out.
Where every Democrat voter is on the government payroll, and gets bonuses for recruiting.
…
The “charity” of government is purely theft and money laundering.
I used to vote Democrat, but never fell in love with them or hated the Republicans. I didn’t see that much difference between the two parties, except that the Democrats were reliably bad at foreign policy. The big change started with Clinton, and by the time 9/11 rolled around it wasn’t traumatic to switch. It was then that the Democrats started to become anti-American and do anything for power. That trend has only accelerated. I guess I was already on the fringe, and so early to change. The rabid hatred many Democrats have for Republicans is something I never felt, and I find it odd.
“Lifelong Democrat Brad Goverman has finally left the Democrats. His views haven’t changed. It’s the Party that’s left him.
Perhaps the saddest thing is that Goverman still fails to grasp that his belief that “government could improve people’s lives without becoming the center of them.” is the very thing that led to the DSA. Which is just a continuation of the trope; if only the ‘right people’ had been in charge… The party didn’t leave him, it simply continued on the path his belief in a nanny government led.
He simply refused, as long as possible, to see the writing on the wall. Where did he think the party would go after the rogue’s gallery of Pelosi, Schumer, Obama, Biden and Harris?
Short version:
“I just noticed that my party—the Democratic Party—wants to destroy the country.
“That leaves me politically homeless.
“(IOW, to me it matters not a whit that Trump and his supporters want to save it.)”
…Now THAT’S one seriously cornfused dude…
OTOH, I guess he still wants to be able to salvage some of his personal and family relationships….which might be understandable though he may well find himself disappointed on that note.
File under: Goverman in exile…
Hmm… the purpose of government being to improve people’s lives is a relatively new conceit, isn’t it? Obviously government should never have and never have had as its purpose actively making people’s lives worse, but it’s an interesting question when this idea started to make an appearance.
After 9-11 I found myself agreeing more with Republicans and conservatives. But it took me years to call myself conservative and register Republican.
* All my social groups were still liberal/progressive.
* I still distrusted Republicans and conservatives.
* I knew I didn’t know what it meant to be Republican or conservative.
* I felt like an impostor when I spoke from Republican and conservative positions.
So I studied a lot, talked to Republicans and conservatives, and grew into a new identity.
Political change is usually a gradual process — not being persuaded by an A->B->C argument, then boom, you’re a changer.
Although I’m a registered Republican and fairly active in local Republican politics, I understand why someone just leaving the Democrats would not want to consider themselves a Republican. There can be genuine philosophical differences between reasonable people on the role of government in people’s lives, but today’s Democratic party is transforming into something that is unrecognizable to a lot of people, some of whom have been lifelong Democrats.
I realize that not everyone will agree on what the optimal tax rates should be, what role government should play in providing health care, or when we should get involved in military conflicts abroad. But we should be able to agree on what a woman is and that children should not be sterilized for life because some psychiatrist convinced them that they were born in the wrong body.
I’m very interested in the stories of Democrats who realize that today’s party has gone crazy and have the courage to say something. I’m reading Nothing Left by Evan Barker who was a former Dem operative who had enough and ended up voting for Trump in 2024. If our country can be saved it will be up to people like her to expose how insane her former party has gone.
Except that DPOTUS had been going crazy for a long, long time.
Remember “Bitter Clingers”(TM), Fast ‘n Furious, Russiagate, Michael Flynn, the 2020 elections, the January 6 op, “Biden”, Harris-Walz, 52 states, umpteen SC judges, the Trump Prosecution Olympics, Hunter Biden for starters…???
And now presenting—remember, these are the party MODERATES:
“Rage Politics: Hakeem Jeffries Will Take A Baseball Bat To The Supreme Court”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/rage-politics-hakeem-jeffries-will-take-baseball-bat-supreme-court
+ Bonus:
“America Enters FAFO-Land: Election Sabotage & Blue-State Mutiny As Communist Jihad Escalates”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/america-enters-fafo-land-election-sabotage-blue-state-mutiny-communist-jihad-escalates
Philip Sells on August 15, 2026 at 9:49 pm said:
“Hmm… the purpose of government being to improve people’s lives is a relatively new conceit, isn’t it?”
I was wondering along those lines myself. The preamble language of “promote the General Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty…” seems the place where some governmental interference with people’s normal lives might have begun, along with a few of the Powers mentioned in Article I, Section 8. But really I presume the Progressives and Wilson’s Living Constitution were the major contributors from the 1870’s onward. The Civil War provided a template for what government could do when really necessary. There may have been futher assistance from an increasing population of settlers and immigrants from places other than northern Europe, who still looked to government for assistance of one sort or another vs. a normed culture of strong personal responsibility.
The technical expertise of the administering beaurcrats might still be justified in an increasingly complicated and technological world. But having expertise says nothing about having virtue and integrity to focus solely on the nation as a whole and/or work within the limits and constraints of the Constitution. That element of humanity and character still needed/needs the restrictions of checks and balances designed into the rest of the federalized national government.
In addition to just reducing some of the Executive branch scope or role for existing agencies, I would suggest moving their adjudication role into a real Article III court of some sort, and moving their rule defining function back into a (probably expanded) Congressional staff. This strikes me as a reasonable move if we are not going to move towards libertarianism, or throw all the babies out with the bathwater.
“…a relatively new concept…”
Not according to Ronald Reagan, it isn’t.
Philip Sells wrote:
“the purpose of government being to improve people’s lives is a relatively new conceit, isn’t it? ”
Then Barry Meislin:
“a relatively new concept…”
“Not according to Ronald Reagan, it isn’t.”
…
Please explain. I don’t think of Reagan when discussing people who pushed for more involved — ie, intrusive government.
I likely just misunderstood you.
…
Funny: I’ve associated government actions “to improve people’s lives” as intrusive.
Yes,well. It mostly is.
Oh, well I was referring to those thirteen “most-feared words…”
(I think it was thirteen…)
Ahhh. So you meant Reagan recognized the problem, rather than promoted it.
Got it, thanks!
Was it Trump or Reagan who said “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step?” 😉
The gentleman in question did ZERO homework on his Democrat party. His party has believed none of what this guy thinks it believes in for decades. Nice slogans but that’s it.
Ronald Reagan said the Democrat Party left him in 1962.
This guy must be asleep at the wheel.
Today the DSA says it is “The Party of the Working Man.” What a joke. A working man to them works for Starbucks, The Public School System or a NGO.
How about what this changer has to say?
https://x.com/i/status/2088731421376672179
Gutless? Yes, but not because he chooses to list as “Independent”. It will depend on where he votes, as some earlier commenters stated. If he said he was an Independent, and as such has decided to caucus with the Republicans because they run closer to what he wants out of government, then he has made a change. There are a couple Senators who call themselves independents but they are former democrats and continue to vote with them… so they have changed nothing, other than try to troll for votes from undecided voters every 6 years. It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.
Re. Reagan. Maybe this is what you are looking for: “The nine most fearsome words— I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Neo had it.mostly right. You.belong to a party because that is to some extent YOU.Which explains the virulence some have for their former party. Some similarities to a contentious divorce.
Neo had it.mostly right. You.belong to a party because that is to some extent YOU.Which explains the virulence some have for their former party. Some similarities to a contentious divorce!
Related:
“Things that are now rightwing”…
https://x.com/TheAliceSmith/status/2088701700332773819
H/T Instapundit.
I don’t think it’s political “change” if your political principles don’t actually change. The Dems used to (let’s agree for the sake of argument) believe what this guy believed, he still does, they don’t, so he’s “left” his party. But if he’s still a Clinton Democrat or whatever, he’s not a changer, he’s a stayed-the-samer.
The Democrats have become invested in rotten, nay evil, political positions, and it is in process of committing suicide by ignorant-driven stupidity. Call me any bad word, OK, but dare not call me a Democrat. Lo, how many decades ago I sided with them, before my great awakening. I even voted for McGovern in
’72! But that was in the days Democrats of different ilk ruled the South.
Regardless of your politics I don’t think it makes sense in Massachusetts to register as anything but ‘Unenrolled’. Which means you aren’t registered to vote with an affiliation to a political party. In MA if you’re registered this way you can pick which primary you want to vote in. I can vote in the GOP primary or the Democrat primary.
Niketas:
My political principles never have changed.
And yet I have experienced a major change of politics. However, it happened over twenty years ago.
DPOTUS delenda est…
https://instapundit.com/817126/
@neo:My political principles never have changed.
I have had that impression for a while. Mine certainly have, at least twice since I was a young adult, when I was a sort of New Deal Democrat. Two big changes and a lot of small changes, to sum up, all deriving from finding out that the world does not work the way I thought it did and I needed to change my mind about it. Voting differently was just one consequence of these changes.
I think there’s something different psychologically about deciding that you yourself were wrong about some things and need to change your mind, versus deciding that other people are becoming wrong about things you have decided you have always been right about.
I don’t mean that in a pejorative way, either might be necessary or right. We shouldn’t change our minds if we don’t think we’re wrong, we shouldn’t follow a crowd going the wrong way. But they are not the same kind of change internally even if they result in the same social outcome.
For some people the social change is more costly than deciding they were wrong about things and need to change their minds, and for others it’s the other way around.
Niketas:
I don’t understand the distinction you’re trying to make. What principles did you change?
I didn’t change principles. I always believed in the same things. The change (which I’ve written about in depth) was realizing I’d been lied to about certain historic and contemporaneous events, and about the principles of certain politicians I had trusted to uphold the principles in which I believed. Then, as time went on, another thing that occurred was that Democrats went even further to the left and then further again.
Look at how long it took Dershowitz to FINALLY understand that his party had been hijacked.
To be sure he was already canceled years earlier by the usual suspects…
DPOTUS: the party of hijackers, liars, criminals and massive coverups (and meta-coverups). And it still took Dersh ages to realize it….
@neo:I don’t understand the distinction you’re trying to make. What principles did you change?
I’m not going to give an exhaustive history of my thinking, but the primary principles involve the role of what government should and not attempt to do for people and what kinds of foreign policy objectives our government should pursue. Like I said, I started out as a sort of New Deal Democrat. I used to be reflexively pro-choice, pro-Social Security and Medicare, pro-union, etc; the sort of things a fifty or sixty year old liberal voter in 1990 would have thought very reasonable. (I read a lot of old books and was around a lot of old people.)
Secondary principles are more about reality versus ideals. Since I used to think that the government operated under the Schoolhouse Rock model I thought there were certain things I should do or support in order to see my primary principles realized. Since I have learned that it does not work that way, I’ve concluded that doing or supporting those things is a huge waste of time even if they might otherwise be good things if the government did work that way.
— Charles R. Harris
The Dems were anti-American way before 911. They’ve hated their own nation since the 1960s. The reflexively sided with the USSR during the Cold War, they sympathized with mullahs all the way back in 1979, they lionized Fidel Castro, it was endless.
They did start pretending to moderate under Bill Clinton out of sheer desperation, but the hard core libs (the equivalent of the DSA in the 90s) hated every minute of it.
The real takeover of the Dems by the radicals is not happening today, it happened 50-60 years ago, when the McGovern faction started driving out the Scoop Jackson Dems.
@ Nik and Neo (sounds like a vaudeville team!) – thanks for clarifying the discussion, I think you two revealed an interesting distinction between ideological principles as goals and political practices as the implementation of ways to reach them.
In that context, I think perhaps Reagan was accurate when he said, “the party left me”.
As for the question of who, if anyone, “believed government could improve people’s lives without becoming the center of them” I would propose Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell. His nonfiction writing comes close to describing that as a principle of socialism. When he discovered that the party leaders did NOT in fact want to be anything BUT the center of people’s lives (the message of “1984”), he never “left” the party, but remained a socialist-of-his-own-sort.
Checking Wikipedia, to see when he shifted his nom de plume from Blair to Orwell and why, TIL “Blair was taught French by Aldous Huxley” and “At this time Jonathan Cape rejected A Scullion’s Diary, the first version of Down and Out. On the advice of Richard Rees, he offered it to Faber & Faber, but their editorial director, T. S. Eliot, also rejected it” and “At the end of August [1941] he had a dinner with H. G. Wells which degenerated into a row because Wells had taken offence at observations Orwell made about him in a Horizon article.”
Connections, connections.
Also, which I knew about but not the extensive details, he was (still is) one of the (very?) few socialists of the West who came from a poor background, worked in menial jobs, and lived among the poorer classes deliberately to understand their situation. Although some claim he was never really at home with or accepted as one of them.
Politically, this fits the opening question:
He never went Full Communist, unlike our current DSA crop (in spirit if not in name).
Of course, Blair was acquainted with the Real Thing and knew them for the thugs they were. He was onto the Russians’ true nature from quite early:
My favorite quotation from the article:
Nothing seems to have changed since he wrote that: see the Western academics in re Hamas/Palestine and certain other Islamic countries in general.
*********
Found what I was looking for: he had published quite a bit of work in periodicals and other minor outlets under his own name, but as he