augustlan, I recently read something that put a lot into perspective on this issue. You mentioned your husband’s fierce loyalty, and I guess one of the main differences between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives value loyalty above just about anything. This explains why Republicans in Congress almost ALWAYS vote along party lines. This explains why McCain had such a hard time connecting to his base, because of the relatively few times he’d gone against party orthodoxy on matters of importance to the base. And it explains people like your husband.
But that’s not all that uncommon of a theme this time, there are a surprising number of Republicans who have broken with party loyalty this time around. I saw something similar with my father.
My dad basically left home at age 17 and joined the military, and pretty much remained in the military in some form for the next nearly 25 years (most of the later years were national guard and/or reserves). He actually volunteered for Vietnam and though he didn’t see heavy combat, he is very proud of his military service. The military was good to him, gave him opportunities he wouldn’t have had otherwise when he was younger to make a good living, in mid life it gave him a chance to go back to tech school and learn a new vocation (and get student loans which helped the family tremendously), and now that he’s retired with full disability and full pension, he is enjoying a level of financial independence he never had when he was a working stiff.
For him, the #1 issue was the military, and when he was in Vietnam, Democrats were the ones who would spit on veterans, Republicans were the ones who were strong, pro-military men. My dad LOVED Ronald Reagan and even Bush, Sr. He voted for Dole in ‘96, and for W both times, not that he liked W all that much, at least not in 2004, but his mantra was that Republicans are pro-military and Democrats are anti-military. I guess I used to look at that as “set in his ways,” which is certainly in line with conservatism (he’s never been exactly enlightened about cultures or situations other than his own, but he’s also never been a hateful person), but after gaining this perspective about how conservatives think, I came to believe it was more a sense of loyalty than just “being set in his ways” that led him to vote the way he did.
He is fiercely loyal to whomever he thinks will be the best military candidate, and to me, logic would dictate that John McCain would have his vote, and there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it. But my dad reads the newsletters he gets from the VFW. He visits the VA hospital for his medical needs. He is seeing what Bush’s war has wrought in terms of newly disabled veterans. He is seeing that Republicans (like McCain) are voting against things like the new GI Bill while Democrats (like Obama) are voting for it. And what I thought would be a war I wasn’t even going to try to wage for his vote, never even materialized, because way back in the primary, he told my mom he thought Obama was the best candidate.
I can’t tell you how floored I was, the Republican/military thing was what cemented the deal in my mind, something that would keep him on the other side forever. And I was doubly shocked, because as I said, he’s never been all that “enlightened”, having been a white man born in northern Minnesota in 1941, his teen and young adult years pre-date the civil rights movement. I often felt growing up like he was Archie Bunker and I was Meathead with some of the arguments we got into. He was clearly on Nixon’s side in the late 60s and early 70s. He was a guy who didn’t think twice about telling racist jokes. He was the kind of guy who’d claim that when he was in the Air Force “some of my best friends were black” but would turn around and tell me (when I was a teenager) that I shouldn’t ever date a black girl because if we ever got married and had mixed race kids, society wouldn’t accept our family (and that’s my cleaned up version of what he said). I guess I knew him to be unenlightened, but never malicious.
So, I didn’t think he’d EVER support a black candidate for President (I remember him saying some pretty choice things about Jessie Jackson, and even Martin Luther King, and he’d say his problem with them was that they were preachers, not that they were black, but I could see some hypocrisy and half truths there). But really, he’s a kind hearted guy, he actually is ideologically more in line with the Democrats and has been for years, and sincerely thinks it’s his duty to vote for the best person regardless of race, but to him, it’s about who is going to be better for the military. Up until now, Democrats haven’t made their case effectively enough to him. But I think 8 years of W throwing our military into harms way for the wrong reasons without justification, and his (and the Republican led Congress’) less than stellar treatment of those who served our country, finally led him to question the long held assumption that Democrats are anti-military, Republicans are pro-military.
I think that’s the key to it. If you know someone who is stuck in Republican mode, not because they are a true Republican (if you believe what they believe, then that’s whom you should vote for, no question), but because they react out of a sense of loyalty to the party or to an ideal that the party once held but no longer does (could be any issue, really), then I think it’s worth fighting the good fight and confronting these people with example after example of places where what they believe does not match how they are voting.
Like cheeb said, I don’t think we should be striving to get everyone to vote just like we do, but I think if we see someone who is voting against his own set of beliefs and values, we owe it to that person to make sure he/she is aware of what the world REALLY looks like today. Some people need to wake up, and I’m sure there are Democrats who support what the Dems used to be, but aren’t anymore. It’s in this spirit that I think what you’ve done is a wonderful thing, and I applaud you for it.
Composing members:
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Composing members:
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