Confessions of a Reformed Republican (Why I Shut it Down)

These days, I’m having a hard time explaining to my friends why I’m a Republican.

“I’m an old-fashioned Republican,” I tell them. “A moderate… You know, Mitt Romney… John McCain…”
(Or Howard Baker, for those of you old enough to remember Tennessee’s “Great Conciliator” Senator.)

“I’m a fiscal conservative… but socially liberal,” I plead.

Or I play the “I’m running a business,” card. Hey, that bureaucratic red tape is not just a myth.

My girlfriend, a good-natured and gentle Cambridge gal, half-jokingly accuses me of being a Republican just to start trouble at parties with her Cambridge friends.
I admit, that is just the sort of thing I’d do (back when we used to have parties with friends).

“You’re not really a Republican,” she’d laugh. “Are you?”

Oh, I am.

My Dad was a Republican. A true fiscal conservative/social liberal, he ran a small business for 35 years, doing people’s taxes, keeping their books, and helping them grow their small businesses, here in Central Massachusetts.

His father was a Republican, too, in Western Pennsylvania. He was a Pennsylvania State Rep, and the Majority Whip until he died.

Dad used to say, he died on the floor of the Statehouse, when he had a heart attack.

I think the expression is, I come by it honestly.

*          *          *

Maybe you’ve heard. We’re at war now.

Well, yes, there’s “the invisible enemy” as Donald Trump likes to call the Coronavirus.
But right now, I’m more perplexed by the civil war with ourselves.

You’ve seen the battle grounds at the various statehouses – Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and just this week, here in blue-blood, blue state Massachusetts.

Protesters – armed with guns, MAGA hats, and Confederate flags – blocking traffic, or slamming up against the doors of the state houses, or even taking over the Michigan statehouse with their rifles, demanding that governors open up their states allowing them to get their haircuts, their tattoos, their guns…

I watch them and I hope and pray that they are just the lunatic fringe element of what used to be my party. Reports say that they are organized by far-right, NRA-supported Internet chat rooms.

But they are spurred on, once again, by our divider-in chief, as Trump tweets out encouragement: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!…LIBERATE MICHIGAN!!”

At home, we fight the war with our friends, with our own family members.
We all know people who don’t take this thing seriously.
Or maybe you’re on the other side, and you know people who take it too seriously.

*          *          *

I’ve run my small business for almost 20 years, here in Central Massachusetts.
I remodel homes, and I’m one of the lucky people who can honestly say I enjoy going to work every day. I’ve had a great crew of guys to work with, and I’ve had a great bunch of homeowners to work with over those 20 years.

On March 16, I was going to start a double-bathroom job near Concord, a couple miles from the Old North Bridge.

I shut the job down.

The homeowner and I were on the same page.
The schools had just shut down the day before, having found their first cases of the virus.
The town building department was following suit, along with the town hall.
It became an easy decision – there would be no permits, no inspections.

I naively thought that we would get through this in two or three weeks. Four at the most.

That was eight weeks ago.

It wasn’t an entirely popular decision with my guys. Some of them told me, “I gotta work.”
I knew what they meant. I gotta work, too.
“Yeah,” I told them. “But you gotta live, first.”

Part of it is, I’m 62. And I take an immuno-suppressant drug (Humira) to defeat arthritis.
Between those two things, I’m technically high-risk.
(Though I’m feeling fine, thanks, and I’m strong as an ox. Knock on wood.)

*          *          *

Obviously, this is taking a little longer than the three to four weeks that we thought we were in for.

(If you really want to scare yourself, check out this story on Laurie Garrett, a Newsday reporter who predicted the pandemic, and how long she thinks it’ll last.)

One of the failings of this administration is that we were never prepared for any long haul. Instead, we were told by the man who’s supposed to guiding our country through this, the following things:

• “The Coronavirus is a hoax.”
• “It’s just going to go away… like a miracle!”
• “Soon there’ll be zero cases!”
• “We’ll reopen the country for Easter!… It’ll be beautiful!”

Those are all direct quotes.

And when it didn’t happen, his followers reacted like impatient little kids.

Kathleen Sebellius, former US Secretary of Health and Human Services, and former governor of Kansas, hit the analogy perfectly on NPR’s On Point show, two weeks ago:

“One of the things that is troubling to me is, we don’t have a plan that takes us from mid-April to vaccinating the country. And all we hear about is, ‘When are we going to open up.?’
It feels like I’m in a car with my two-year-old, and we come out of the driveway and he says, ‘Mommy! Are we there yet?… Are we there yet now?… Are we there now?… How about now?… How about now?’
Every parent has had that conversation. And it requires saying, “No, this is a long trip. We’re going to grandma’s house. It takes five hours. That’s a long time. We’ll stop halfway.”
And you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it.
We have nobody at the leadership level at the White House, who could then be echoed by every Governor in the country, saying, ‘We’re gonna get through this. But it’s going to be a marathon. And it’s going to have steps and phases along the way. Here’s how we’re planning for them, and here’s how it’s going to happen.’ ”

*          *          *

Inevitably, there will be a coming together of the two camps.
We can’t live like this forever.
We can’t continue to support our nation on the backs of just a few strong, brave workers: the nurses and the doctors, the police and fire fighters, the kids bagging our groceries, the men and women getting our materials at the lumberyards, the construction workers piling into their trucks because they have to feed their families…

We will need a strategy to get to the day that we get to a vaccine – 18 months is an optimistic estimate. (And that’s if we can get the anti-vaxxer wing nuts on board.)

But when it comes to that strategy, I choose to listen to the medical professionals.
Not the right wingers who told us, the Coronavirus was a hoax, and “take your family out to eat at a Bob Evans restaurant!” (as the West Virginia Governor suggested).
Now those are the same people who are saying, “Sorry… we can’t keep things shut down.”
They solemnly shake their heads, and say, “We gotta make sacrifices – some people will have to die.”

I’m not taking my advice from the same people who told us, “This is no worse than the flu.”
I’m taking advice from medical professionals.

*          *          *

There are four things that the “open it up” argument fails to take into account.

First: It’s not just the old and weak who will fall.

Make no mistake – plenty of young people are dying, too. Sorry, it’s not just the “Goodbye Boomer” disease. (Hey, I didn’t make that up. Blame Twitter.)

Second: When our health care system falls apart – and it will, if we keep going this way – other people will fall by the wayside.

If your family gets in a car accident, the ambulance won’t be there in five minutes – it’ll be more like an hour. If you have a heart attack, there won’t be enough doctors and nurses to help you. (I’m quoting doctors here.)

Third: How is the economy going to succeed while the country is falling apart?

Seriously – how’s business going to be when you’re losing a lot of your clientele?

Even the red state Governors who opened things up are coming to realize: not everybody’s thrilled to go to restaurants while this thing is still in the air.

Fourth: The economy will bounce back after we defeat this – the right way. It will take some time. That’s where it involves sacrifice (although not the human sacrifice that Trump’s followers have proposed) but it will come back.

*          *          *

So, after all this… I’m still really a Republican?

Sigh… Maybe it’s time to find a 12-step program for recovering GOP members.

Naw… I still am Republican, after everything.
It’s not just my father, and my grandfather.
It really is because I still believe in small government, local government, a balanced budget, accountability, a strong defense, and justice and mercy.
As usual, Aaron Sorkin said it best, in his masterpiece, The West Wing:

Those were the things that the Republican party used to stand for.
I just want my party back. (That’s why I joined The Lincoln Project, formed by George Conway, Rick Wilson, and other recovering Republicans to vote Trump out of office.)

It’s not about left vs right anymore, or conservative vs liberal.
Your political beliefs don’t matter at this point.

This is about blindly following a “leader” who actively divides the country.

Who openly mocks his opponents – or members of his own party who disagree with him – like a 5^th grade bully.
Who refuses to listen to the scientists and doctors and military experts who advise him.
Who claims to be smarter than the scientists and doctors and military experts who advise him.
Who suggests bizarre remedies, which the medical experts later have to refute.
Who then denies suggesting those bizarre remedies, claiming it was sarcasm.

This is about cowardly, sycophant Republicans – Lindsay Graham, who said “Trump is unfit for office,” before becoming his most stalwart supporter.
Or Mitch McConnell, who privately despises Trump and privately admits that he is not suited to run the country.
This is about people like them, turning tail and running to get behind Trump, because they fear for their political lives should they have the temerity to dispute him.

This isn’t about Republican vs Democrat.
This is about right versus wrong.
This is about being decent human beings.

*          *          *

I spend a lot of time wondering, what would my Dad do now?
I miss his quiet wisdom, his uncanny ability to de-escalate the most emotional situations.
I miss the way he found common ground with anyone, how he could find the calm in the stormiest waters.

But at the same time, I’m glad he’s not here to see this.
It would confound him, to see what’s happened to his party.
It would break his heart, to see his country being torn apart. 

And I know one thing, as sure as the day I was born.

He would not stand idly by, and let this happen.
No good Republican would.