The Grand Old Party and the Good Old Days

The primary election in Texas is over.  I voted.  I won’t shame those who did not vote, but I will tell you that the Australian plan of fining every registered voter who does not vote makes sense to me.  It also makes sense to me to require 18 year-old women to register with the Selective Service.  We are able for the most part to force the guys to do that and there is no reason other than sexism to not ask girls to do that as well.  It also makes sense to me that registration for the Selective Service should include an automatic registration to vote.  

By voting in the primary I joined a political party.  That is how it is done.  If I show up and cast a vote to help select the candidates for that party I become a member of that party, complete with more junk mail and solicitations for money.

And as I sit and watch the national news coverage of the Super Tuesday election several things are obvious to me.  First, very few Americans actually participated in this process.  That is beyond sad.  That is scary.  Affluent Anglos have the highest sense of political efficacy and confirm that with every election.  White folks who earn above the median income, and retired White folks consistently vote.  Women not so much.  African Americans not so much.  Hispanics nowhere near as much.  Hispanic voters outnumber Black voters, but more Blacks vote than Latinos.  If Latinos ever showed up at the polls they would control election outcomes.  It is really no surprise to me that rich White folks (whether they think they are rich or not) tend to vote Republican.  The poor, the minorities and women tend to vote for Democrats.  It angers me that the data shows that most women vote as their husband votes.  So if your husband is an executive in an oil company and you are a teacher making less than $50,000 a year you probably voted Republican with your husband even though it is very clear that the Republican Party in Texas is strongly against public education and strongly for keeping teacher salaries low, and teacher evaluations test score based, etc.  Remarkably, such folks vote for the party that will most harm their chosen profession.  I have witnessed crazy stuff, and this one is not the craziest, but it is the most consistently crazy trend for educators. 

I break it down like this.  The Republican Party for the most part thinks the United States of America is great and if anything they want it to be great again implying we are not nearly as great now as we were in the past.  Their definition of greatness comes from the past, from the Good Old Days for which they yearn.  White folks are scared, and that fear makes them angry at the people they fear.  They are scared of income re-distribution, industry regulation, registration of guns, and government structured health care.  They are equally opposed to the greatest American socialist program, public education.  The rising Hispanic tide is a good target for this fear and anger.  Influx from the Middle East and Southern Asia is equally scary.  To get the Republican vote one has to paint a very scary picture of where we are now, and glorify the days and heroes of yesteryear.  Do that bluntly and you can win.

The Democratic Party for the most part also thinks the United States of America is great, and if anything they want it to be greater.  Democrats tend to look at the current state and long for a different future rather than the past.  Democrats are willing to change stuff.  They are not enamored of the Good Old Days and will fight tooth and nail against returning to a time when a woman’s place was in the home, a minority’s place was in clearly defined subdivisions, schools were segregated, and special needs children were not served.  The Democratic goal is to never return to those days and to continue to march forward with ever new initiatives to improve the future lives of all citizens.  Democrats tend not to be scared or angry which I think makes Republicans more scared and more angry.

Yep, I’m a Democrat.  Among others, I have a degree in history, and there really is no time in the past I can think of that is better than what we have now, assuming the Garden of Eden was an allegory.  I want to go forward.  I want us to improve.  I support being politically correct because it took hundreds of years to get the bias out of our language.  To use such language now is the tool of bullies.  I do not want to change things for the sake of change.  I want to see a problem and address that problem with a solution that propels us to a better future.  I do not want to return to policies we know do not work, like the reduction of federal oversight of the market in 1929 and in 2008.  Those strategies did not work.  I do not want to see us engaged in military conflicts that sap our resources and kill and wound our young men and women.  I do want a military that stands ready to defend us against attack.  I do not want any more Korea’s, Viet Nam’s, Afghanistan’s or Iraq’s.  We have yet to learn from those mistakes in the past.  And, if you want to secure this nation for an oligarchy the first thing you would have to do is dismantle and belittle public education.  I see such efforts as un-American. 

So, there you have it.  Few people will have voted today.  Those few that did will shape the direction of the state which may or may not be where the actual majority really wants to go.  I see the Republican Party seeking a return to some greatness as defined in the past, and the Democratic Party seeking new solutions to old problems so that we may enter a future greater than what we have now. 

It is not called the Grand Old Party for nothing.  And there really are no Good Old Days.  Yes, I have romanticized images from my childhood.  But I also see the water fountains and bathrooms labeled “Colored”.  No one had a computer, no smart phone, no satellite or cable TV, etc.  We are living in the best of times.  And I believe we can still make it better.