The dust settles. Paul Ryan blames it all on unexpectedly high numbers of “urban” (read: poor, non-white, minority) voters turning out to vote. Mitt Romney blames it all on a fantasy that Obama put on a modern-day bread & circuses act, handing out freebies and condoms hither and yon to those gullible enough to pony up a vote in return for a cheap gift.
Which I find intriguing. I don’t need condoms. I’m not poor. I’m not a minority. I don’t take freebies. I’m not a taker at all; I’m a giver, a member of that immense class of Americans, working taxpayers. I put a lot into the system every year, not just with my money, but with my daily contributions to the ongoing health and future hopes of the nation. I’m a teacher, after all. We teachers are givers by definition.
Adding fuel to the fire: I’m upper-middle-class, male, and white down to my toes. I come from Anglo-Saxon stock, mostly English but with a few northern Germans and Danes thrown in—that’s how the last name got shoehorned in there.
On the surface, it would appear that I’m tailor-made for the Republican party. In addition to my various stats, I’m a firm believer in individual responsibility—hardly earth-shattering, that—and hold that less government is, on the whole, good. But I’m not Republican; in fact, I wouldn’t touch a GOP candidate with a ten-foot pole. The current Republican party scares the whazziz out of me. I may be physically and economically in line with the GOP’s overall demographic, but culturally, emotionally, and intellectually I couldn’t be farther away.
Because I’m a giver. Because I care about the worth of individuals, and because I care about civil rights and privacy and rational thinking. There’s no reason that the GOP should stand against such things, but the Republicans have sold their collective soul to the far-right evangelicals whose avowed purpose is to drag America into a near-theocracy, hardcore Christian of course, and in the process have distanced themselves from the values of vast chunks of the nation they aim to govern. The big news for the GOP is that America, while notably more religious than most developed countries, is nonetheless firmly on a path that swings far away from traditional organized religion. As a teacher of today’s youth I see just how quickly those dwindling percentages of Christian practitioners are heading down to zero. Visit any newly-built American suburb outside of the redneck zones and take a look around. Note the absence of church steeples. They used to poke up everywhere. Churches are rapidly becoming architectural dinosaurs in America, just as they have in Europe. Their future: condos, museums, community centers.
The shrillness and hysterical tone taken by so many evangelicals gives witness that they’re running scared; they’re ridiculed, avoided, and even detested by educated people who refuse to jettison the intellectual advances made by humanity over the past five hundred years. Churches are closing, not opening; congregants are leaving, not joining; seminaries are shrinking, not growing. The croaking of Christian fundamentalism is a death-rattle. But a sizeable swathe of the GOP has its wagon firmly hitched to the dying brute.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the GOP stayed squarely in the saddle of Protestant denominations that are its natural habitat: Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and other such lily-white, middle-class faiths that take a soft line on just about everything, including belief and devotion. The GOP’s swan dive into the religious gutter is almost inexplicable, in fact: what do bible-thumping morons and their intolerant ravings have to do with the GOP’s suburbanite, country-club bling? Well, nothing—but the GOP has embraced the bible-thumpers, since the intelligentsia have mostly taken up sides in the Democratic camp and have a tendency to chortle benignly at those spiritual poltroons with their hillbilly accents and fake compassion. Somebody had to pick them up, so the GOP got them. In the process, the GOP has alienated much of educated America—consider how sparse Republican numbers are on your average American campus, save the bible-belt schools named after Billy or Bobby or Bubba. The higher up you go on the academic food chain, the less likely your chances of running into a full-tilt Republican. I don’t deny that they’re out there—just as you’ll find devoted and church-going Presbyterians and Episcopalians even in Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, or the like—but they’re a tiny minority, and they know it.
The GOP has become the party that wants to send women back three or four generations, the party that has every intention of butting into people’s private lives and telling them who they can love, who they can marry, and what they can do. The GOP is the party that wants to rip the safety net out from under millions of Americans—a safety net that was erected slowly and painfully over generations. Maybe it’s a bit too safe here and there. But abandon it? No. Fiscal prudence is one thing, downright cruelty is another, and attempting to turn Social Security or Medicare into for-profit, commercial undertakings is a turning back of the clock to a much messier, and much more dangerous time. A civilized government is government of the people, by the people, and for the people—and that, to my mind, means health care just as surely as it means freeways, air-traffic controllers, and international diplomacy.
So there I am: white and reasonably well off and a giver to charities and a taxpayer and self-reliant and other such things the GOP values. But as long as the GOP toadies to the ignoramuses who are so empty-headed to think that by denying Darwin they are proving the fabulist tales of Genesis, who are so foolish to express their compassion with intolerance, who seek cultural control via clerical fiat, I will not vote for a Republican candidate. To do so would be denying almost everything I hold most dear—that we humans are gifted with intelligence, that we can make up our own minds without being subjected to one-dimensional indoctrination, and that we—not our governmental/clerical overseers—are the masters of our own fates, bodies, and minds.