Why I am/am not an Ultra Conservative, Moderate, Ultra Liberal

Loretta’s world was nothing but politics. Every gallery opening she covered, every NPR fund-raising telethon she did volunteer phone duty for, and every grant application she helped write oozed liberal elitism.

Back in the day, liberalism created in her a heady new cachet of ideas and concepts—social justice, economic and political equality, diversity, enlightenment, world peace, universal education, suffrage, and tolerance. Lately, however, she had begun to feel stultified and trapped by an inbreeding of ideas turning stale with age and exposure to the open air—the sacred cows of liberal thought.

They were not so much ideas anymore, but rather commandments requiring rote responses dictated by political correctness, the Democratic Party, and the Eastern Liberal Establishment. The nabobs of the movement became increasingly inflexible and dogmatic as it and they aged. Liberalism became less an integrated and cohesive social belief structure and more just pure and simple knee-jerk anticonservatism. The two political parties seemed to orbit around each other like a binary star system, like two circling boxers less concerned with right and wrong and more concerned with beating the other to a pulp.

Statesmanship had given way completely to partisanship, gamesmanship, and blatant one-upmanship. Petty “gotcha” campaign tactics and political strategy had driven first-rate people out of the game. The two parties in the American system appeared to be in a death struggle oblivious to the fact that the house of state blazed around them.

But what alternatives were there?

Prior to his first desultory run for county sheriff, Jenks was as apolitical as it was possible for a big-city lawyer to be. He had become active in Republican Party politics, at first, because it was necessary to attain and then retain his present position. Now, it had become an addictive hobby.

Secretly, he disagreed with most of current Republican thinking. He did not believe that Christian Right or any other religious belief structure had a place in what had, until recently, been a very secular government system. He disagreed down the line with the party on abortion, stem cell research, right to life, intelligent design as a reasonable scientific alternative to evolution, gay marriage, and the death penalty.

He believed that President Bush had co-opted 9/11 for his own agenda of jingoistic imperialism in the Middle East and war-and-hysteria-fueled civil rights grabbing at home. He believed the party had sold out completely to the Big business lobby. Although a registered Republican, in the privacy of the booth, Jenks often voted—except for local elections—straight Libertarian. Twenty-first century politics, he knew, was not about furthering idealistic moral positions. It was about getting elected and grabbing the power—and the money.

Although officially still a swing state after the 2000 election, Florida was so red these days that a vote in the national general election for either major party was pointless. Everything, at least in Northwest Florida, had already been decided in the Republican primary. Every protest vote for a third party, on the other hand, helped it get more federal matching funds.

Yet, practical considerations aside, Jenks could not bring himself to vote for a Democrat. Doodle had aptly stated it—“They just make me want to puke.” Political correctness, harebrained social policies, gun control, and their historical assault on individual rights “for the greater good” and faith—against all historical evidence to the contrary—in big federal government and Clintonesque hypocrisy had forever tainted the Democratic Party in the mind of Jenks McCracken. Unfortunately, the party of Lincoln had become, in many ways, far worse.