My Sad Little Identity Crisis

What do dorky insomniacs do in the middle of the night? We think about our political ideology.

So sometime this morning, say around four o’clock (a time I call my “witching hour” for its when my thoughts are at their most devilish) I was lying in bed with my eyes closed, wishing I was asleep, and thinking of my political ideology. This is not a good way to start my week and my summer, but hey, it’s a lot better than some of the things I’ve worried about in the middle of the night.

There I was trying to classify my political beliefs into some concrete ideology. What do political parties do? They make your life easier. For the most part, the party tells you what to believe, and it makes voting easier. If you are so inclined, you just have to pull one handle instead of diligently sift through a bunch of names. Since I am not an idiot, my party is no help to me.

Did I reach a conclusion? Nothing concrete. I realized that the one thing that has remained constant in my life since childhood has been a healthy mixture of moral idealism and constant cynicism. The former is there because I like the idea of ideals more than I like to hear people talk about them. The latter is brought upon by my constant disappointment in politics and politicians. Someone once told me “I was way too young to be this cynical.” I thought, “This guy is way too old to be this big of an idiot.” How could a person living the way we do now not be cynical.

But like most humans, I am political being. I love following politics because I love the disappointment, the manic awfulness that we see weekly in national debate, by the bad behavior of terrible and spineless politicians, and through the constant reminder that Hobbes was right after all. Let the world be brutish, I am content being nasty and short.

I was up thinking (mostly) about whether I was a Republican or not. This is my true dilemma. I loathe the President and his policies. I am in favor of fair shakes and decency for all people, especially those who really need it. I am against the Iraq War. I believe in preserving and protecting our natural world. I have no respect for religious fundamentalism because it is narrow-minded and for lack of a better term, stupid. I run from wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage because I believe both should be legal and left up to the individual as a matter of conscious. I am a man of nuance in a party that punishes people who like to think about things.

So how can I be a Republican? Well, as much as I sound very much like a lefty on the major issues, my natural reaction to everything, whether its dinner or a bill before the state house, is usually reserved. Although I am not a conservative in the modern sense, I believe in that very conservative principal of caution. I believe in responsibility and moderation as life mantras. I am super square. I love button down shirts and cocktails before dinner. I am a cautious man in every way.

This is, I think, the same type of caution that reacted against the French Revolution. It’s Burkeian legacy of not reinventing the world solely to watch the old order burn, for there is some wisdom in traditional things we take for granted. There is an institutional memory that is just as alive as the spirit of radicalism, though never as vocal, and seldom as cool.

I suppose my dilemma is that my party has taken Conservativism and radicalized it as a reaction to the supposed “cultural” threats that are really no threat at all to our society. This is nothing historically new for the Republican Party, a party, which was born as a radical anti-slavery party, back when we were the good guys on race issues. You know before people like Karl Rove placated racists and handed over the moral credibility of Lincoln’s Grand Old Party to Confederate Flag waving racist yahoos.

And this just sucks because the moral credibility of my party has been sold out by this Administration’s corruption, wars, and societal deceptions. It has left those of us in the center-left (I am using these terms of categorization as a convenience not because of their supposed accuracy) of the Republican Party, people who believe in progress AND prior wisdom, cast out into the wilderness and pining for a solution. We are an embarrassed lot at this moment of history. Most of us voted for Bush, at least once, and we are stuck now with I Told You So’s in front of us and the Radical and Crazed Republican Base with a knife to our backs and calling us soft. There is no place for the progressive Republican because we have been marginalized by the venomous polarization of our political culture.

I blame the President. Well, it probably isn’t directly his fault, but that doesn’t stop anyone else from blaming him so why should it stop me? The people who we should be really blaming are the toady Republican Congressmen who have given the Administration a license to destroy the credibility of the party and create a political machine in Washington that is more interested in self-preservation than in creating a better world. These guys believed everything the administration told them about the War and many are still too afraid to go against the President even in districts where Bush is as popular as herpes.

This is all just sad. Not I don’t know a lot about how “sins” are graded in heaven, but if I were keeping score up there, I think that the Iraq War is a bigger sin that a couple of dudes getting married in Massachusetts. For me, I know I was sold a bill of goods and I can’t help but feel tremendously cheated by President Bush and his court of imbecility. Most people are looking forward to 2008 because they want change. I suppose I should be too. But I’m not. I’ve been hopeful before. I’ll stay cynical – it’s a lot healthier in the long run. At least I can get some sleep this way.