Ever since I decided to start a career as a writer, starting in journalism all those years ago, I began to look at history, literature and even politics in a different light.
I look at literature from the viewpoint of a writer, gaining inspiration and insight on writing styles of others who have followed a similar profession.
I look at history with a critical eye, realizing that it is always written by the winners in any situation and looking for the back story behind all historical events, as there is always another side. A series on television explores historical myths we have been taught in school and breaks it down into actual facts.
I look at politics as a neutral observer, looking at all sides of any issue and trying to make sense of it all.
Over the past two years of writing this blog, I have focused on many sides of all three of those topics. As my readers know, I have explored historical truths that have been mistaught, explored writers who have impacted me over the years and, even, in some cases, actors who have expounded upon journalism in some way through their various roles. I have, sometimes, even written about politics as it relates to historical events. I even worked - briefly - within the halls of power in my role as a journalist.
For more than two decades, I have tried to make sense of political currents in both parties, often to the consternation of readers on both sides. I have been called a corporatist and Republican apologist; more often, I am called an elitist who pumps out Democratic talking points.
In all that time, I have not felt as utterly repulsed from the mainstream of both parties as I do right now. And I am pretty sure I am not alone.
Like most children who grew up politically engaged in the Northeast (Full disclosure, I am a native of Washington, D.C.), I started political life as a registered Republican, casting my first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan during his second term (it helped that I had actually met him in person while I was in college and was hooked on his personality). In my mid-20s, when Bush ran for president and I decided to become a career journalist, I changed my registration to independent, and I have never gone back.
For many years, when I told curious politicos or readers that I was an independent, they would nod knowingly, as if we both understood this was a necessity of the job - a veneer covering my obviously leftist sensibilities.
In fact, I never thought party registration had anything to do with my credibility as a reporter. I chose to be an independent because, temperamentally and intellectually, that is how I am wired. Although recently, I have found myself leaning more toward being a Constitutionalist.
I was not comfortable with the increasing tribalism of party politics. And once you have covered cops, courts and local politics in cities of any size, it is hard to maintain a belief that government has all the answers.
Through numerous presidential campaigns and counting, I have found much to disdain in both parties, but also plenty to admire. I like politicians generally, and I have written positively about both Democrats and Republicans who had the courage to rethink old orthodoxies.
I have never bought into the idea that journalists should not vote - that refraining from the exercise of citizenship somehow made us any less biased. Since I reached the proper age, I have cast my vote for candidates on all sides, including outliers and third-party candidates.
All of which is to say that, like a growing number of Americans who eschew party affiliations, I leaned in one direction more often than not, but I was not a loyalist.
Lately, however, I find myself feeling not so much ambivalent about the parties as alienated. I am confronted with two extreme interpretations of what it means to be American, and I emphatically reject them both.
It seems self-evident that the Republican Party - more a celebrity fan club than a political organization at this point - would, if left to its own devices, destroy the foundation of the republic. I never thought I would write those words about any United States political party, but here we are.
It is not just that Donald Trump and his imitators would blow up the integrity of our elections, or that they have expressly countenanced a violent insurrection against the federal government, or that they basically admit to having no governing agenda beyond the reclamation of some mythical white heritage.
It is also that the Trumpist GOP advances the notion, in all kinds of ways, that citizenship alone does not mean you belong here - that your race or ethnicity, the language that you speak, or the identity you choose can somehow make you less American than your neighbor.
We have seen this interpretation of Americanism before - in segregated schools and diners, in the internment of Japanese Americans, in populist disdain for Catholics and Jews. No patriotic American should entertain it, and no politician with an ounce of integrity would excuse it.
You might think, given this Republican calamity, that any political alternative would be sufficient. And, yes, a party that does not seek to limit ballot access and install an autocrat is definitely a step in the right direction.
But that does not mean, as I have often been accused of, a lot of us who consider ourselves liberal feel kinship with today’s Democratic Party - or that we would even be welcome if we did.
Rather than focus on traditional American ideals of citizenship over race or origin, the left is in thrall to its own misguided cultural revolution (yes, I use the term deliberately), embracing a vision of the United States that lays waste to the 20th-century liberalism of its greatest icons.
I have always liked and respected President Biden, and in most ways he has governed well. His $1.2 trillion infrastructure package was a major achievement. His efforts to counter the pandemic have been steady. He seems poised to make a historic addition to the Supreme Court.
For all of his successes, though, there is a fire raging in his party that Biden has not even tried to control - and probably could not extinguish if he did. For me, this is more than a backdrop to his presidency. It is a dealbreaker.
In their zeal to beat back Trumpism, the loudest Democratic groups have transformed into its Bizarro World imitators. Tossing aside ideals of equal opportunity and free expression, the new leftists obsess on identity as much as their adversaries do - but instead of trying to restore some obsolete notion of a white-dominated society, they seek vengeance under the guise of virtue.
One of the bibles of this movement is a book called How to Be an Antiracist, in which Ibram X. Kendi declares: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
This is not - as the celebrated author claims - an expression of support for Lyndon B. Johnson-style affirmative action, which still makes sense to me. It is a case for the kind of social upheaval that occurred when foreign empires relinquished their colonies. It does not end well.
Liberals used to believe in civil debate about such ideas. But now, the arbiters of language are constantly issuing Soviet-style edicts about which terms are acceptable and which are not (“woke” was okay, now it is not) - a tactic used for controlling the debate and delegitimizing critics.
We can disagree about whether this radical uprising is necessary or politically self-destructive. But it is clearly not in keeping with the principles that are supposed to unite the country.
I was taught - and still believe - that in the United States, we are bound not by common origin, language or culture but by a series of laws and values that make us who we are.
As long as you swear allegiance to those laws and values - racial equality, free speech, unfettered worship - then you are no more or less American than anyone else, and no less deserving of respect, protection and opportunity.
That we have failed to honor that promise over the life of the country, and are failing still, does not mean you throw up your hands and abandon the project. It means you rededicate yourself to the ideal of true equality, rather than reducing individuals to a box on a census form.
This is the ideology that both parties used to call liberalism. There is no longer room for it in today’s stark political dichotomy.
In part, it is a testimony to the damage that one shameless and unprincipled man managed to wreak on our politics. Trump always had a talent for bringing out the worst in everyone; more than a year after leaving office, he remains the decaying star by which everyone else in our political solar system must orient themselves.
But it is also the result of an antiquated primary system - at the presidential level and below - that plays to an ever-winnowing group of fervent believers in both parties.
The more people grow disgusted with extremist party politics, the more only those extremists are heard and the more power they exert on anyone who wants to run for higher office.
This is about the point where some (most likely some in my own business) will scream: “Both sidesism!” That’s the now-cliché argument that any criticism of Democrats whatsoever must be some kind of journalistic reflex to equate the parties, when clearly one is worse than the other.
One is worse than the other. But that does not mean we have to feel jazzed about supporting a party that would grade our worthiness as people on a sliding scale of identity. It does not change the fact that the broad center of the American electorate - traditional conservatives and liberals both - no longer has a political home.
So where do we go?
For years, I have predicted the eventual triumph of an independent president, outside the two-party system. That candidate has not emerged, but the lane for a credible independent has never been wider.
There is also the probability that some reformist Democratic governor or political novice is looking at the political landscape and thinking that, if you could unify that liberal constituency inside the party, you might just be able to commandeer it.
I have never been very good at predicting the path ahead. What I do know is that politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum - and, one way or another, a force will arise to fill the space at the eye of our destructive political storm.
Until then, you can call me a dissenter.
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