Here’s Bookworm, writing a month ago in response to a question about what she used to believe about Republicans:
He was curious as to what I believed.
My answer was a simple one: “When I was a college Democrat, I believed that Republicans are evil people who hate blacks, children and poor people, who want to force everyone to convert to Christianity, and who want to weaponize America to take over the world.” In other words, my understanding of my ideology was simply that I, as a Democrat, existed to thwart evil Republicans. By voting straight down the “D” column on my ballot, I was protecting blacks, children and poor people, and keeping the proselytizers from my state house.
I believed all of this absolutely. I was unconcerned about more sophisticated issues of limited government; the moral rot of welfare; the economic damage wrought by government’s heavy hand in the marketplace; the genuine threat totalitarianism posed to world stability and American security; the danger of allowing government to pick winners and losers amongst its own citizens through taxation, spending, legislation and police action; etc.
All I knew was that Republicans were evil, and I was not evil. They hated people, and I wanted people to do well. Whatever they were for, I was against it.
Bookworm, of course, has since changed her point of view. But the question interested me: what did I used to think about Republicans? I’m older than Bookworm, and so not only do I have to think back further to come up with my childhood and young-adulthood memories, but the memories are of a different era, before liberalism had quite taken over so forcefully in the school system.
I never could have believed that Republicans hated blacks, for example, because I had personal memories of the 50s and very early 60s in the South, and I knew that it was Democrats who had stood in the way of civil rights there. Who could forget Orville Faubus or George Wallace? And who didn’t know they were Democrats? It was almost unavoidable to be aware of that, if you followed politics at all. So revisionist history about noble Democrats and racist Republicans could not touch me.
Likewise, I had been a child during the lengthy (seemingly interminable, at the time) presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. His election campaign slogan was “I Like Ike,” and everybody did. It was nearly impossible to dislike him, or think of him as evil, even if you were a liberal Democrat, as were my “All the Way With Adlai” parents. He was a war hero, for starters. And he seemed a genial, non-extreme sort of president.
What’s more, I grew up in a part of New York that had a fair number of Republicans (for New York, anyway), and I knew some of them. They were just—well, they were just people. So there was really never any chance of demonizing Republicans in general. Maybe the John Birchers, whoever they were.
I also watched the decidedly odd Bill Buckley on TV and had to admit he was an intelligent sort, and humorous, too. It’s true that when Barry Goldwater conservatives started to take charge of the Republican Party it was a new breed of cat, and one with whom I disagreed at the time (I was still pretty young). But I never thought he wasn’t motivated by a sincere belief in what he was advocating, nor did I think he hated anybody.
At worst, I thought he—and other conservatives—just didn’t care all that much about poor people. I thought the worst they were was selfish and perhaps mean, rather than evil. But that was “mean” in the way of tough, hard parents who wanted their children to struggle and learn things on their own. As a child, I had no sympathy with that—I wanted things done for me! I wanted to be coddled! But at least I understood that it could be motivated by what we would now call tough love, rather than hatred.
Maybe I’m whitewashing the past. Maybe I was more intolerant and narrow-minded than I care to remember. But I don’t think so. Half the time I hadn’t a clue what party my friends belonged to, and didn’t care; we simply didn’t talk politics as a rule. In fact, I distinctly recall that when Clinton was running, I was very surprised to be part of a group conversation among about ten of my friends and to learn that all of them were Clinton supporters and Democrats. Until then, I’d had no idea.
Never such innocence again.
