A View from Exile

As we enter the active phase of a presidential election fight - a campaign about which I will be writing often (d.v.) - new readers of this gazette deserve to be brought up-to-date on one important fact about the author.

I am a man without a party.

Growing up in a political family of Virginia Democrats, I waited until finishing law school before steering my own political course.  Though I'd gone into practice with my father - a lawyer-legislator whom I greatly revered - I knew I was a progressive Republican at heart.  Drawing my inspiration from a tradition which reached its apogee in the vital times of Teddy Roosevelt, I hoped that modern conditions would make possible a revival of TR's assertive, confident brand of progressive nationalism.  All my personal ambitions focused on such a revival.

So, in 1978, I joined the GOP.  While holding appointive office under Republican Governor John Dalton, I dared to campaign actively for John Warner for the US Senate - against Dick Obenshain, the darling of Virginia's right-wing, Reaganite Republicans.  Obenshain won that nomination fight, dying shortly afterward in a small-plane crash while campaigning.  Warner replaced him on the ballot and went on to serve with distinction for thirty years.

Two years later - when Reagan forces took decisive control of the national and state GOP - I resigned from the party.  A year later, I was driven from office, and turned myself into a high school history teacher.

But, despite several efforts to re-invent myself as a Democrat, I have never really made the transition.  I'm simply not a Democrat - and probably never will be - for three reasons.

• My strategic ideas render me uncomfortable with a party which is, and has always been, more of a coalition of competing identity groups than a cause.  The Democrats' various groups perpetually struggles for influence, short-term gain, and the realization of personal ambition.  The Democrats have no unifying body of principles - no allegiance to anything like the Founders' notion of the commonwealth.  And that is essential to me.

• My relatively fortunate life experiences have ill-fitted me to be at ease in a coalition of groups which work from competing narratives of exclusion and/or victimization - and my education in history makes me suspect that any government run by the tribunes of society's least-favored elements will prove short-lived, ineffectual, and costly.

• My understanding of our Constitution doesn't square with the Democratic Party's historic obsession with presidential leadership - and consequent neglect of the potential of the legislative branch.

But of course, since the Reaganite takeover of the GOP, I couldn't possibly remain a Republican.

While I've made fitful efforts to refashion myself as a Democrat, I've never even tried to rejoin the GOP.  The Republican Party has become the party of bigotry, superstition, ignorance, and greed.  If Donald Trump personifies the worst aspects of the GOP - at least, so far - he is only the last instance of a decline which runs back through George W. Bush (and his puppet-master, Dick Cheney), Newt Gingrich, and Ronald Reagan - and eventually to Dick Nixon.

And there's no reason to think the rot will not continue.  If there are worse men - or women - than Donald Trump, today's GOP will find them, nominate them, and try to elect them.

Observers such as Tim Alberta (American Carnage) argue that this process of Republican decay runs back a decade.  As a Virginian with a sense of history, I could see the process taking place in 1978 - and triumphing in the summer of 1980.  I didn't need to stick around to participate in what followed.  The triumph of the Reaganites marked the death of the Party of Lincoln.

Ronald Reagan might have been a nice enough fellow - if somewhat dim - but his Virginia supporters included a phalanx of segregationist die-hards from the Byrd wing of the state's Democratic Party.    The massive influx of Dixiecrat Southern segregationists - and the simultaneous influx of Bryanite Midwestern and Southern evangelicals - transformed the Republican Party into a second, darker version of the Democratic Party.

For progressive and centrist Republicans, the only options were to stay "loyal" and be slowly, inexorably corrupted and degraded - or to leave and make the best of it.

So, in 1980, I left - becoming an independent who longs for a party which does not exist.  That is where I remain today.  As a patriot, I do what I can - when I have the heart - to help the better sort of Democrat win an election against the more execrable sort of Republican.

I am doing that right now, as an active volunteer coordinator for Elizabeth Warren in Oregon, my new home state. Elizabeth Warren, after all, is a commonwealth-minded progressive - and a former Republican - just as I am.

But if Senator Warren has found a way to be a Democrat, I have lived - and will almost certainly die - a man without a party.

Everything I'll be writing here comes from that grim - but I hope, not bitter - perspective.