The Party Left Me

Is there a more irritating genre of political commentary than that of yoosta-bees? That is, generally ill-informed dilettantes who can’t keep talking about their banal move to the right as they get older and richer (preferably with lots of references to apocryphal cocktail parties) as if it portended some kind of new politics? After 9/11 their ranks grew to an appalling extent (cf. the pathetic Pajamas Media), and the upcoming elections are likely to be their Waterloo, as their once-fashionable bedwetting imperialism is rejected by the electorate. But they haven’t given up yet, alas. Roy Edroso finds quintessential “I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick” Democrat Orson Scott Card yet again making an Instapundit-tabbed claim that he has no choice to abandon the Democratic Party because it hasn’t moved quite far enough to the right to accommodate his extremely reactionary views on most domestic and foreign policy issues. This has caused me to reconsider my longtime Republican loyalty, and I hereby endorse Roy’s equally painful reaction to Card’s declaration of himself as a “Tony Blair Democrat”:

I’d really like to vote for a Republican someday. But how can I, with the current batch of greedy, stupid Republicans? They are not at all like the real Republicans with whom I grew up — men like John Lindsay and “Fightin’ Bob” La Follette.

Today, I consider myself a Nelson Mandela Republican. By which I mean, until the Republican party returns to its roots and embraces abortion rights, national health insurance, legalization of drugs, gay marriage, and doubling the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, I will by God vote for the Democrats, difficult as that is for an old GOP loyalist such as myself.

It was hard for me too, but sometimes you just have to do the courageous thing.