Why I’m now a Democrat. (And not just ’cause I live in Santa Cruz.)
In all the time I’ve lived in Santa Cruz County, I’ve never registered to vote here. I’ve usually been going to school, and so I’ve thought of myself as a resident of Solano County, and voted there. (Except for the times I didn’t, because I didn’t order an absentee ballot.) But since I’m gonna be living here, I suppose I’m gonna be voting here, so I need to get a voter registration, hold my nose, and register Democratic.
I really don’t want to register Democratic, but I look at it this way.
I need to be a member of one of the two main parties. It’s either Democratic or Republican. Nothing against the Greens or the Libertarians or the Peace and Freedomers (though maybe something against those idiots in the Reform party), but they have no chance. They never back viable candidates. It would be one thing if they could just get behind someone who had a snowball’s chance, develop some halfway decent funding, and make a plausible run for it; but they never do. The only third party that’s had any success in the past 50 years is the Reform party, and that’s only because the party doesn’t stand for a bloody thing; the party only exists to elect whatever guy manages to seize control of it for the current election. And Pat Buchanan shouldn’t be elected to anything. Everyone who voted for him should be deported to some land where they can build a giant fence around themselves so that nobody else gets in and disrupts their internal trade, English-only policies, and the inevitable inbreeding that comes from a whites-only population. There’s some open space in Antarctica, I believe.
Side rant aside, I want to be able to vote in the primary elections for someone who might actually get elected. So that limits me to the two major parties. That means I either join the Democrats, who are incompetent; or the Republicans, who are hypocrites. And since I have less and less patience for hypocrites all the time, it’s gonna have to be the Democrats.
This after a lifetime of being Republican. Hey, what can I tell you; I like the platform. I like the idea of shrinking the federal government, lowering taxes, fiscal responsibility, and the like. It’s just that the Republicans don’t do that.
When the Republicans took control of the Congress in 1995, they said, “Elect us and we’ll finally have the power to do something about all the corruption.” They forgot power corrupts. So now they’re corrupt. And they’ll stay that way until we finally vote Democrats back in and corrupt that party all over again. And then I’ll probably switch back because I’ll get tired of the Democrat hypocrites.
Most of the political types I know are single-issue voters who vote Republican because the Republicans are against abortion. “Single-issue suckers,” I call them. Republicans may speak against abortion, but their social policies actually encourage more of them by stigmatizing unwed pregnancies, removing funding from “welfare queens,” and keeping kids ignorant about reproduction because “it’s the parents’ job to tell them about sex.” (If parents were actually doing that job, they might have a point.) But I’ve already ranted about abortion, so that’s enough of that. Republicans have never made abortion illegal; they’ve never made any serious attempt to create an amendment banning it; they just pay the issue lip service and say they’re “pro-life” (even though they’re often pro-death penalty) just so they can make nice with the Christian Right. More hypocrisy. At least the Democrats are consistent—they believe in abortion and the death penalty, and in many cases euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Death to everyone! But save the whales.
As I said, I’ve been a lifelong Republican, so this oughta horrify a lot of people who knew me. Particularly the people from the Solano College Republicans, a few family members, the entire city of Dixon…. I suppose I’m just getting more liberal in my old age.
Update, 12/9/2024: And now I’ve been a Democrat for 19 years, ’cause the Republicans didn’t get any better. Instead they turned into the Reform party.