Hold Up, am I a Conservative Now?

Tribeless in an age of tribalism

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I was raised by hippie parents who didn’t believe in sugar long before it was cool. They also didn’t believe in the Vietnam War, and had a firehose or two turned on them at protests. In the 1980s my mother took me to ERA marches, and cried when it didn’t pass. We didn’t eat grapes for years in solidarity with a farmworkers’ strike.

We were a progressive, liberal family who believed in some basic truths: guns are bad, war is bad, nuclear power is bad, limiting a woman’s right to choose is bad, the death penalty is very bad, tax cuts are bad. Public schools are good, the social safety-net is good and should be expanded.

Well-off people were obligated to help the less fortunate, so paying taxes was an honor if it was going to food stamps or low-income housing programs. But if the taxes were funding a war, then paying them was bad. Obviously racism, anti-semitism, homophobia and misogyny were all bad. Science trumped religion at all times, and answered all questions.

Lefty moms wore chunky Native American turquoise jewelry and caftans, and their houses smelled like sage and green tea. They served cloudy apple juice and oily peanut butter you had to stir before you could spread it on sprouted Ezekiel bread. If a dream catcher was hanging from a Volvo’s rearview mirror, you knew the driver thought Reagan was monster. These things comprised the pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook virtue signalling.

But at some point style swallowed up substance. When bussing became a reality in mid-1970s Los Angeles, my parents pulled me out of public school so fast I got whiplash. They proclaimed their decision wasn’t racist — remember, we were progressives — but was instead due to the structural racism that undermined the education for the new kids I was about to meet, who simply weren’t up to speed through no fault of their own.

That’s what they said, but let’s be real: it was obviously racist. Even as a kid I knew my parents weren’t walking the walk, and might be downright liars. When the rubber met the road, their politics were little more than a carefully crafted style.

With this new idea that politics was little more than branding (although my childhood brain wasn’t able to articulate it this way), I tried to identify whether the adults in my life were were progressive or conservative by what they wore, did or ate.

Was the adult wearing an embroidered Mexican dress with clogs? Progressive. Or was she wearing a St. John’s suit with heels? Conservative. Was Our Bodies, Ourselves on the bookshelf? Progressive. Did the house smell like Comet cleanser? Conservative. Did the dad play the acoustic guitar during group camping trips? Progressive. Was the dad absent from the camping trip? Conservative.

This was a fun game, and my predictions turned out to be surprisingly accurate, although I started to notice another layer of complexity to the whole endeavor. The St. John’s suit mom probably voted for Reagan but was also working long hours as a lawyer. The Mexican dress mom thought Reagan was the devil incarnate, but she was at home baking carob brownies, completely reliant on her husband’s income. The lawyer mom didn’t have time to go to ERA marches because she was too busy taking a battle ax to the glass ceiling. The conservative dad wasn’t on the camping trip because he was trying to get his small business off the ground.

People’s brands ultimately had little to do with the reality of their lives, and they probably agreed on more than they thought, which makes the current climate of “they/them” so downright awful. I still think of myself as a member of the left, a progressive liberal, but I’ve started to crack: sometimes I have secret, conservative thoughts and I’m afraid to say them aloud, lest I get kicked out of the turquoise/caftan/oily peanut butter clan.

I guess it started in 2015 when I joined the board of a horse rescue in a more conservative part of California. I met women who wore cowboy hats, had long sparkly nails, bedazzled jeans, and tattoos of American flags. They also all owned guns.

I almost passed out. I had never met a woman who was pro-NRA, pro-Second Amendment, who knew how to shoot a Glock. I was enthralled. After a school shooting — I can’t remember which one — I asked R whether she now, finally believed in gun control.

“You want to take away my gun, Adeline?” she asked winking at me, knowing that her simple question held much more meaning: R was a single mother who fostered and adopted kids with Down’s Syndrome. She was the only one in the household who could protect them if something terrible happened.

“Well,” I stammered, “I’m okay with you having one.” R laughed. “Okay, well let’s just hope that they let you decide who gets to keep guns and who doesn’t.”

I couldn’t get R’s point out of my head. I often geek out about constitutional law, and I think the restrictive abortion laws sweeping the nation are turning us into a bad episode of the Handmaid’s Tale. But if the right to choose is anchored in the same constitution as the Second Amendment, how can I on the one hand justify regulating guns, but on the other hand fight to keep abortion unregulated?

I realize, of course, it’s more complicated than that. But R’s point made me think. And more importantly, her good-natured kindness about the whole thing was shocking, it was so unusual in the current political climate, where kindness and good humor are in very short supply.

While R. was being kind and funny, Bernie Bros were terrorizing me and every other woman on social media excited about Hillary. (People claim the bros were just a figment of our imagination, but you really haven’t lived until a twenty-something white guy mansplains that you’re voting with your vagina). Students started chasing speakers off college campuses. Now documentaries get shut down. In 2020, libraries are now canceling speeches for fear of upsetting people.

It’s gotten so bad that Obama had to step in to remind us that the free exchange of ideas is actually a good thing. In response, some folks wanted to cancel him.

In addition to forgetting that free speech is the cornerstone of a free society, the left continued to go batshit in other ways. (To be clear, I’m not talking about ringing the alarm about Trump; his winks to white supremacists do in fact make his presidency an emergency). In 2016, Susan Sarandon took one too many bong hits and decided that Trump would be better than Hillary, because he would usher in “the revolution” sooner. (Someone should let Susan know that actual revolutions are a bloody, violent mess and hardest on the most disempowered). Kirsten Gillibrand single-handedly fed Al Franken to the wolves, based on bogus #MeToo allegations, silencing an actual champion of women.

Elizabeth Warren trotted out a geneticist to confirm that she did indeed have a miniscule amount of Native American blood in an effort to win a minor spat with Trump, apparently forgetting that defining race by blood alone leads to some pretty dark times. AOC chose not to vote for the funding bill to reopen open the government after the longest government shutdown in history because it included funds for immigration enforcement, apparently forgetting that her district probably had a lot of federal workers. Ilhan Omar threw a temper tantrum when she was asked about combating FGM. Rose McGowan recently tweeted at Iran that 52% of Americans were “sorry” and were trapped here, conveniently forgetting that no one is “trapped” in the United States, unlike women in Iran.

I realize that Rose and Susan aren’t elected officials, but they, like other celebrities, have somehow become associated with the branding of the left which has become a swampy mess of outrage and suppression of free speech. Bernie supporters and Warren supporters are now at war over whether Bernie said a woman can’t win the presidency, somehow forgetting that if he did say it he may have well been right. The left has finally morphed to all branding and no substance.

Perhaps we’ve arrived at this empty, sad, undignified place because no one on the left stands up to call out any of its excesses, in contrast to the right which has a number of folks criticizing both the president and the Republican party for supporting him. They have George Will, Bryan A. Garner, Max Boot, Justin Amash, and George Conway who helped to start Checks and Balances, a group of attorneys standing for the rule of law.

But on the left: crickets.

I don’t like it. I don’t like this new brand, it’s completely uncool. I miss political discourse, lively good-natured debate, the ability to hold progressive views on almost everything but flirt with a conservative thought or two. That’s where I find myself now, but I’m afraid to say anything aloud. I definitely cannot afford a St. John’s suit.

Here’s a sampling of things I want to talk about, in no particular order: a proposal that welfare recipients should be drug tested before getting benefits sounded reasonable to me, especially since my job requires random drug testing. A couple in a local desert town tortured and killed their child, and all of sudden my opposition to the death penalty started to soften. My friend tried to get a small business off the ground, but his insurance payments under Obamacare got so high he had to shut it down and go back to a job he hated. (So much for entrepreneurism). Sometimes I wonder if the Iraq war might have been legitimate after all, not because of the fake intelligence about WMDs, but because Saddam Hussein engaged in the genocide of the Kurdish people, among other gross human rights abuses, and doesn’t America have the moral authority to intervene in situations like that?

I cringed as I wrote the above paragraph, anticipating the comments I might get. And to be clear, I don’t know if I actually believe in drug testing for welfare recipients, the death penalty, revamping Obamacare, or defending the Iraq war. I’m just desperate to have a conversation about these things and more, but having that conversation in the current atmosphere just isn’t worth the risk.

Recently, however, I’ve somehow collected a new set of conservative friends. Over the last few years, they emerged to find me like some sort of underground, lurking in plain sight in otherwise progressive Los Angeles. Like R, they’ll have measured but lively conversations with me about anything. We talk about foreign policy, law enforcement from libertarian perspectives. When my conservative friend said he didn’t want to pay for “my” birth control if we had Medicare for all, I told him that was fine because I wasn’t really interested in paying for “his” Viagra. “Touché,” he said, and we both laughed, each getting the other’s point. He, like my other new friends, doesn’t call me an idiot or tell me that I vote with my vagina. One of them found me crying on the street after Hillary lost in 2016 and gave me a bear hug.

A few months ago, after yet another ridiculous tweet from an elected Democrat that is frankly too stupid to repeat, I sadly changed my party registration from Democrat to “no-party preference.” Apparently, I’m not alone. In California, the number of voters who switched to no party preference from both parties has exploded. It makes sense why Republicans did this, given the loose cannon in the White House. But why Democrats? If this isn’t a wake-up call for the left, I don’t know what is.

I feel adrift, tribeless, sad. But I can’t join the Republican party. I am firmly pro-choice. I am against tax cuts for the the rich. I believe in regulating businesses, to reign in corporate greed. I believe in the FDA, the CDC, the EPA. I want clean air and water. And national parks. I love those.

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that is the great puzzle” — Alice in Wonderland.

So like Alice from Wonderland, I’ll just wander through this strange new place, muttering questions under my breath and getting no real answers. But to paraphrase the Cheshire Cat, if you don’t know where you want to go, it really doesn’t matter what path you take.

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