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Confessions of a Former Republican
I found reading "Confessions of a Former Republican", by Jeremiah Goulka, to be a heart-warming experience because I love to see examples of people who have the courage and honesty to re-think their most adamant beliefs. Reading this brought tears to my eyes. Goulka worked as an official in the Bush II administration. He begins his article by explaining where he came from:
This is the story of how… I discovered that what I believed to be the full spectrum of reality was just a small slice of it and how that discovery knocked down my Republican worldview… Like so many Republicans, I had assumed that society’s “losers” had somehow earned their desserts. As I came to recognize that poverty is not chosen or deserved, and that our use of force is far less precise than I had believed, I realized with a shock that I had effectively viewed whole swaths of the country and the world as second-class people. No longer oblivious, I couldn’t remain in today’s Republican Party… The more I learned about reality, the more I started to care about people as people, and my values shifted.
We believed in competition and the free market, in bootstraps and personal responsibility, in equality of opportunity, not outcomes… We were tough on crime, tough on national enemies… I intended to run for office on just such a platform someday… I did my best to tune out liberal views…
We believed in competition and the free market, in bootstraps and personal responsibility, in equality of opportunity, not outcomes… We were tough on crime, tough on national enemies… I intended to run for office on just such a platform someday… I did my best to tune out liberal views…
As I was reading Goulka’s confession I thought it would be worthwhile to consider what he had to say in the light of my own values and those of other liberals (The DU mission statement includes the sentence “We are always looking for friendly, liberal people who appreciate good discussions and who understand the importance of electing more Democrats to office”). I found something on that issue that I wrote and posted on DU almost two years ago:
Moral values that almost all liberals can agree on
The right to an opportunity for a decent life (or economic justice)
We believe that everyone should have an opportunity to obtain the necessities of life. And when they don’t, for example when so few jobs are available that millions of Americans descend into poverty, homelessness, and hunger, then it should be the responsibility of our government to step in and vigorously attempt to rectify the situation. We also believe that our government has an important role in protecting the civil rights of minorities and our most vulnerable citizens against discrimination.
Holding corporations responsible for their actions
In our country today, corporations and those who control them receive numerous privileges from our government that aren’t afforded to ordinary citizens. The result today has been a multitude of corporate actions that increase their wealth at great cost to the rest of us, ballooning wealth inequality, and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Corporations have these advantages over the rest of us because their enormous wealth enables them to buy… I mean influence our elected representatives. We would like to see these outrages addressed in an equitable manner.
Military intervention
Recognizing the enormous human and financial costs of war, and believing as we do that our country has frequently been driven into war and other military adventures mainly on behalf of corporate power seeking ever more profits, we would very much like to see our nation adopt a much more skeptical attitude towards war. We believe that a military budget approximately the size of the military budget of all the other nations on earth combined is a great waste of resources, and we would like to see our money put to better use.
Rights of accused persons
We believe that a person should not be held or punished for a crime without being charged, should have the right to be informed of the nature of the charges against him and to face and answer one’s accusers, should have the right to a fair trial by a jury, and should not have to endure “cruel and unusual” punishment – as granted by Amendments V, VI, VII, and VIII to our Constitution.
Election integrity
We believe that all American citizens should have the right to vote, that it should be illegal to attempt to obstruct that right – as so often happens to our poor and minority fellow citizens – and that our votes should be counted in a transparent and verifiable manner, rather than on unverifiable electronic machines.
Our First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech and of the press
We believe that the First Amendment to our Constitution is absolutely necessary for the functioning of democracy. If people cannot criticize their government, and if a country lacks a free and independent press there can be no democracy. We believe that no corporation or other institution has the moral right to monopolize the right of speech by amassing control of communications media, including television, radio, the print media, or the Internet.
Goulka’s description of how his eyes opened to the moral failures of the Republican Party
I was happy to see that Goulka addressed in some detail three of the six issues I noted above. I don’t know his positions on the other three, but I believe that he has rethought them as well. Here are excerpts from his confession on how he changed his mind on some issues that greatly affect the well-being of our country and its people:
On the right of the opportunity for a decent life – and economic justice
The Bush administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina made a deep impact on Goulka:
Then came Hurricane Katrina. In New Orleans, I learned that it wasn’t just the Bush administration that was flawed but my worldview itself… The Bush administration’s callous non-response to the storm broke my heart… Soon, I was involved with a task force trying to rebuild the city’s criminal justice system… I was appalled… to find overt racism and the obvious use of racist code words by officials in the Deep South…
Discovery of an unlevel economic playing field:
Then something tiny happened that pried open my eyes to the less obvious forms of racism and the hurdles the poor face when they try to climb the economic ladder... My tour guide mentioned that parents were required to participate in… a field trip to a sit-down restaurant… It turned out that none of the families had ever been to a sit-down restaurant before. The teachers had to instruct parents and students alike how to order off a menu, how to calculate the tip. I was stunned… Who knew? … From then on, I started to notice a lot more reality. One of my roommates wasn’t surprised. He worked at a local bank branch that required two forms of ID to open an account. Lots of people came in who had only one or none at all. I was flooded with questions: There are adults who have no ID? And no bank accounts? Who are these people? How do they vote? How do they live? Is there an entire off-the-grid alternate universe out there?
On the illegitimate use of American military power
I joined a social science research institute. There I was slowly disabused of layer after layer of myth and received wisdom, and it hurt. Perhaps nothing hurt more than to see just how far my patriotic, Republican conception of U.S. martial power – what it’s for, how it’s used -- diverged from the reality of our wars. Lots of Republicans grow up hawks. I certainly did… My sense of what it meant to be an American was linked to my belief that… the American military had been dedicated to birthing freedom and democracy in the world, while dispensing a tough and precise global justice… Whatever those misinformed peaceniks said – we made the world a better place.
But then I went to a war zone. I was deployed to Baghdad as part of a team of RAND Corporation researchers… I was only in Iraq for three and a half weeks, and never close to actual combat; and yet the experience gave me many of the symptoms of PTSD… That made me wonder how the Iraqis took it. From overhead I saw that the once teeming city of Baghdad was now a desert of desolate neighborhoods and empty shopping streets, bomb craters in the middle of soccer fields and in the roofs of schools. Millions displaced. Our nation-building efforts reeked of organizational incompetence… Precious few contracts went to Iraqis… This incompetence had profound human costs. Of the 26,000 people we were detaining in Iraq, as many as two-thirds were innocent… So much for surgical precision and winning hearts and minds. I had grown up believing that we were more careful in our use of force, that we only punished those who deserved punishment. But in just a few weeks in Iraq, it became apparent that what we were doing to the Iraqis, as well as to our own people, was inexcusable.
But then I went to a war zone. I was deployed to Baghdad as part of a team of RAND Corporation researchers… I was only in Iraq for three and a half weeks, and never close to actual combat; and yet the experience gave me many of the symptoms of PTSD… That made me wonder how the Iraqis took it. From overhead I saw that the once teeming city of Baghdad was now a desert of desolate neighborhoods and empty shopping streets, bomb craters in the middle of soccer fields and in the roofs of schools. Millions displaced. Our nation-building efforts reeked of organizational incompetence… Precious few contracts went to Iraqis… This incompetence had profound human costs. Of the 26,000 people we were detaining in Iraq, as many as two-thirds were innocent… So much for surgical precision and winning hearts and minds. I had grown up believing that we were more careful in our use of force, that we only punished those who deserved punishment. But in just a few weeks in Iraq, it became apparent that what we were doing to the Iraqis, as well as to our own people, was inexcusable.
On the abrogation of the rights of accused persons
Goulka first noticed our country’s lack of concern with the rights of accused persons in connection with his military duties, dealing with indefinitely detained persons:
My office was tasked with opposing petitions for habeas corpus brought by Guantánamo detainees who claimed that they were being held indefinitely without charge. The government’s position struck me as an abdication of a core Republican value: protecting the “procedural” rights found in the Bill of Rights… It seemed to me that waiving {habeas corpus} here reduced us to the terrorists’ level. Besides, since acts of terrorism were crimes, why not prosecute them? I refused to work on those cases. With the Abu Ghraib pictures, my disappointment turned to rage. The America I believed in didn’t torture people…
Not too long after that he noticed the racist component of our justice system:
I noticed that the criminal justice system treats minorities differently in subtle as well as not-so-subtle ways, and that many of the people who were getting swept up by the system came from this underclass that I knew so little about. Lingering for months in lock-up for misdemeanors, getting pressed against the hood and frisked during routine traffic stops, being pulled over in white neighborhoods for “driving while black”: These are things that never happen to people in my world. Not having experienced it, I had always assumed that government force was only used against guilty people.
On his failure to notice what was “hiding in plain site”
I dove into the research literature to try to figure out what was going on. It turned out that everything I was “discovering” had been hiding in plain sight… institutional racism, disparate impact and disparate treatment, structural poverty… and on and on… I wondered why I had never heard of any of these concepts. Was it to protect our Republican version of “individual responsibility”? That notion is fundamental to the liberal Republican worldview. “Bootstrapping” and “equality of opportunity, not outcomes” make perfect sense if you assume, as I did, that people who hadn’t risen into my world simply hadn’t worked hard enough, or wanted it badly enough, or had simply failed… The enormity of the advantages I had always enjoyed started to truly sink in… Up until then, I hadn’t really seen most Americans as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping, loving, dreaming, hurting people. My values shifted – from an individualistic celebration of success (that involved dividing the world into the morally deserving and the undeserving) to an interest in people as people…
On the psychology of being a Republican
It’s important to consider the mind-set that is associated with the beliefs of today’s Republican Party, not only because we need to communicate with them, but because all of us to one degree or another have faults in our thinking processes that should cause us to reflect on and improve upon them: This is what Goulka had to say on the subject:
Today, I wonder if Mitt Romney drones on about not apologizing for America because he, like the former version of me, simply isn’t aware of the U.S. ever doing anything that might demand an apology. Then again, no one wants to feel like a bad person, and there's no need to apologize if you are oblivious to the harms done in your name – calling the occasional ones you notice collateral damage…
My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality. To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their "just" desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way. I think this shows why Republicans put so much effort into “creating our own reality,” into fostering distrust of liberals, experts, scientists, and academics… It explains why study after study shows that avid consumers of Republican-oriented media are more poorly informed than people who use other news sources or don’t bother to follow the news at all. Waking up to a fuller spectrum of reality has proved long and painful. I had to question all my assumptions, unlearn so much of what I had learned… I came to understand why we Republicans thought people on the Left always seemed to be screeching angrily (because we refused to open our eyes to the damage we caused or blamed the victims) and why they never seemed to have any solutions to offer… I was so mis-educated when so much reality is out there in plain sight…
My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality. To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their "just" desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way. I think this shows why Republicans put so much effort into “creating our own reality,” into fostering distrust of liberals, experts, scientists, and academics… It explains why study after study shows that avid consumers of Republican-oriented media are more poorly informed than people who use other news sources or don’t bother to follow the news at all. Waking up to a fuller spectrum of reality has proved long and painful. I had to question all my assumptions, unlearn so much of what I had learned… I came to understand why we Republicans thought people on the Left always seemed to be screeching angrily (because we refused to open our eyes to the damage we caused or blamed the victims) and why they never seemed to have any solutions to offer… I was so mis-educated when so much reality is out there in plain sight…
My own confession
Four years or so ago I probably would have been content to end this post with Goulka’s confession. But – largely because of the expanding influence of money in politics, both parties have been drifting rightward for many years now, with a sudden acceleration of the rightward drift as a consequence of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Furthermore, my own political education has caused me to rethink many aspects of my former comparatively ideal view of the Democratic Party. For example, President Clinton, whom I never found much fault with during his presidency, did much damage to our country through the adoption of some Republican ideas, including his deregulation of the financial industry and the telecommunications industry. President Obama too has adopted some Republican ideas that I very much disagree with. The differences between the Democratic and Republican Parties are not simply a matter of good vs. evil. Though the Republican Party is much worse, much fault can also be found with today’s Democratic Party. Therefore, it is not enough just to support the Democratic Party against the Republican Party. Katrina vanden Heuvel said it about as well as it can be said in "A Politics for the 99 Percent":
Committing to electoral politics need not mean – cannot mean – simply folding into an existing campaign and trumpeting a politician’s exaggerated promises. Progressives should see elections as an opportunity to identify champions, drive issues into the debate and hold politicians in both parties accountable. This requires building an infrastructure independent of the Democratic Party, and a movement willing to challenge compromised incumbents… Even without primary challenges, movements can raise the public’s awareness of progressive issues and force politicians to adopt positions they might otherwise avoid… Progressives should use the election to hone our narrative on how we got into this mess and how we can get out of it…
Progressives must therefore be willing to expose the corruption and compromises of both (emphasis mine) parties. This requires not only detailing the threat posed by the right but honesty about the limits of the current choice… Sustained efforts to mobilize and drive issues into the debate, while using nonviolence and direct action to defend people in peril, are vital. At the same time, progressives can champion candidates who will fight to transform the Democratic Party into an instrument of the 99 percent… It will require new ideas, new ways of organizing, new strategies… Now we must reach out, teach, engage and mobilize millions of Americans. We must provide them with a sense of hope, a story of possibility, and enlist them to create change. It won’t be easy. But it never is.
Progressives must therefore be willing to expose the corruption and compromises of both (emphasis mine) parties. This requires not only detailing the threat posed by the right but honesty about the limits of the current choice… Sustained efforts to mobilize and drive issues into the debate, while using nonviolence and direct action to defend people in peril, are vital. At the same time, progressives can champion candidates who will fight to transform the Democratic Party into an instrument of the 99 percent… It will require new ideas, new ways of organizing, new strategies… Now we must reach out, teach, engage and mobilize millions of Americans. We must provide them with a sense of hope, a story of possibility, and enlist them to create change. It won’t be easy. But it never is.
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