This essay will make its way to some very pointed, bitter criticisms of the Democratic Party over its betrayal of women and girls. It’s been a painful thing to write, like a breakup letter to someone you’ll always love but who’s taken you for granted and let you down one too many times. To make matters worse, you don’t have anyone better waiting in the wings.
But I can’t get there without first taking the time to explain why my party identification feels like hard-wired operating equipment that maybe shouldn’t be tampered with. To do that, I’ll need you to join me in the Way-Back Machine for a minute, to visit the early 1970s.
My parents were both 36 when I was born. By then, they had their preferences dialed in: they dressed like country-club Republicans but voted like ‘Bernie Bro’ socialists. They both read The New Yorker cover-to-cover each week. They occasionally threw lively grown-up parties: I remember cocktails with olives, cigarettes, long dresses, hairspray. On a regular evening, my dad would put on a record before dinner — Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger — or he would pull out his guitar and we’d sing folk songs. He and I were way into Simon and Garfunkle; I still am.
I remember our Formica dinner table as a place for serious conversation over unserious food (Hamburger Helper, tuna noodle casseroles, Jello embedded with canned fruit). I was the youngest, by nine years, of three kids, so most topics went right over my head, but certain themes didn’t require sophistication: for instance, our president, a Republican, was a criminal who’d sent thugs to break into an office to steal campaign secrets. When not busy plotting street crimes, he’d doubled as a war criminal, sending working-class kids to die in a quagmire he already knew the U.S. was going to lose.
Democrats, by contrast, were men like Dr. King, President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, each gunned down in his prime for championing a politics of equality, opportunity and peace. The lines of demarcation between right and wrong, good and evil, were crystal clear. Nobody we knew was a Republican. I hoped if I ever encountered one, it wouldn’t be in a dark alley.
Decades later, while training to do legislative advocacy for California’s statewide PTA, I understood my family history in a broader context that reinforced my identity as a Democrat:
Before I was born, my parents had bought a modest but new Joseph Eichler-designed house1 with a loan provided to my dad through the GI Bill of Rights, a veterans’ benefit which had already seen him through graduate school at U.C. Berkeley2. Our neighborhood had sprung up in a newly imagined suburb that wouldn’t exist but for the passage of the Interstate Highways Act of 1956, a massive federal infrastructure spending package aimed at supporting America’s post-WWII economic expansion with 41,000 miles of interconnected roads, employing tens of thousands (that’s just a guess — maybe it was hundreds of thousands? Millions?) of skilled and unskilled mostly-union American workers, many of them veterans.
As it happened, my future father-in-law was just then beginning his career as a highway engineer for the Illinois Department of Transportation, which meant my husband’s family of five would be supported and shaped by the same federal spending initiatives mine was. Like my dad, my father-in-law was educated at a flagship land-grant public university at very low cost to himself. Both men would subsequently repay the government by hitching their careers to their respective state employers, the Illinois D.O.T. and the University of California. It’s not a stretch to say both families became fully self-actualized as a direct result of the federal government’s commitment to a positive social-progress agenda. (I described the contemporaneous social-equality movements of this period in two earlier posts, ‘Civil Rights Then and Now,’3 and Civil Rights 2.04.)
It’s hard to believe today, but The Highways Act was actually the achievement of a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, with bi-partisan Congressional support. Such a thing would be inconceivable even a decade later and is way beyond inconceivable now, but if it did happen, it would have an undeniably ‘Democrat’ vibe. Starting with Ronald Reagan and continuing to the present, Republicans get elected by promising not to make any big investments in society.
To look at my life through a political lens is to reach these conclusions:
1) My three kids— and their parents— are direct beneficiaries of the massive investments that were extended to, and fulfilled by, their grandfathers, both of whom played a part in a sweeping national experiment in domestic planning and spending.
2) That experiment proved beyond a doubt that governments are capable of enabling positive transformational change at scale.
3) Any big-picture political visionary looking to invest in America’s future is now, by definition, a Democrat —or at least is definitely not a Republican.
Maybe you’re thinking: wasn’t this supposed to be about a breakup, though?
Yes. I’m now refreshing the timeline to a couple of weeks ago, when I read a lovely Substack essay by a mother chronicling the beginning, middle and end of her son’s ‘trans’ identity. When I really like a piece, I sometimes go on to read the comments, and this time I felt compelled to reply to one of those comments.
Here’s how it went (I added the bold type for emphasis):
OTHER READER’S comment: This is such an uplifting story. Congratulations to the brave mother who shared it, and who used common sense and critical thought to guide her son out of a cult. What confuses me is her need to self-identify her politics in the first few sentences. If there’s anything I’ve learned from the trans disaster, it’s that political affiliation need not be a lifelong commitment. If your group decides to go crazy, you’re free to join a different group or none at all. That said, I don’t want to take anything away from the remarkable story shared here and my best wishes go to the family.
ME: I can't speak for the author, but I am similarly situated and here's what I would say: for many, our politics reflect our long-considered views on morality, community, fairness and (though even this word sounds hackneyed now) justice. To understand what it's like for liberals to find ourselves in this Twilight Zone unreality, think of some other tribe, then imagine one of its most basic tenets being reversed in secret, then repackaged as 'received divine wisdom' that leaves most adherents unscathed but a select few utterly destroyed, and their destruction is celebrated while their dismay is mocked by the unscathed. (I think I might take this over to my own Substack and write a whole essay now -- thanks for the inspiration!5) That said, I wholeheartedly agree with your praise of this piece and its author. It deserves to go viral.
OTHER READER: I was a Democrat for 23 years. Now I’m not. I utterly disagree with any conception that my old party is more moral, fair or just than any other party, and this became obvious to me once I moved out of the echo chamber area I previously lived and started actually meeting people who didn’t grow up there. I do, however, give my old party lots of credit for virtue-signaling how wonderful they are.
ME: That's fine, but I was trying to address your question about the way others of us feel about our politics. For me, it goes back to first principles like prohibiting race-based housing and lending restrictions, the right to a free public education, the abolition of child labor, workers' rights to organize for a 40 hour work week and a living wage, allowing women to borrow money and own a home, the right to privacy in matters of birth control and abortion, environmental health and safety regulations, limits on access to weapons, etc. Those are all issues in which one party won my total support at the expense of the other party by appealing to my personal sense of morality and fairness. Of course yours can differ. The fact that my party is now embracing and doubling down on a destructive, nihilistic cult is a big problem precisely because of all those other issues which I can't stop caring about.
You can’t tell, but that exchange sent me reeling! For the next few days I interrogated everything I’d written in my last comment, until it hit me: most of the ‘first principles’ on my list belong to history. They’re not live issues.
Setting aside abortion and gun control for now, it’s a list of wins by a party that’s since gone AWOL. It’s worth noting that the reversal of Roe v Wade was unfolding at the same time progressives were busy marching to ‘protect trans kids’ from their parents, defund the police and shutter the nation’s schools for two years. Some have since moved on to campaign for the rights of terrorists to attack Jews.
Taking my stated ‘principles’ one by one, I had to ask myself these questions:
Am I welded to this party because I’m worried about discriminatory housing and lending? Thanks to the Democrats, they’re illegal now.
Free public education? It may need an overhaul, but it’s been a thing forever, and it’s free.
Child labor? Very illegal, though it still affects migrant youth in complicated ways that bear on immigration and trade policy, not labor law.
The labor movement has major unresolved challenges, but who gave them NAFTA, the mother of all labor challenges? We Democrats! Insanely, right now the biggest threat to labor might be the effing ACLU! Democrats seem to be allergic to helping anyone targeted by the ACLU, so maybe it’s a toss-up issue? I don’t know.
Women still don’t have an Equal Rights Amendment, but we can all borrow money and own homes, last time I checked.
Environmental regulations are controlled by the courts and administrative bodies, but Republicans are bought and paid for by the worst polluters and poison merchants. This extends to the food we eat, and it remains a serious problem. Democratic leadership is definitely needed here.
Regarding abortion, a pro-choice president would certainly be my preference the next time there’s a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Lower courts are important too, and abortion rights lose ground in myriad ways under Republican control. The current status quo in red states is 100% anti-women’s health, safety and dignity, and elected Republicans appear satisfied by this result. Democratic leadership is critical on this issue.
As for gun control, Democrats have not exactly delivered us to safety or sanity, but at least many of them would like to. Party primaries and campaign finance laws seize every perverse incentive and magnify its awfulness: of this, there’s no better example than the gun problem. I am sufficiently outraged about guns in America that I’m dying to make it my main issue, alongside women’s reproductive rights.
There’s just one issue in the way, and it’s poised to steamroll over all the others left standing. Should I let it?
I have some thoughts on that! Next week, I’ll pick it up here.
Eichler was known for his iconic mid-century architectural design aesthetic as well as his progressivism: he built strictly equal-opportunity-housing developments, prohibiting the racial segregation practices that were ubiquitous at the time. This might help to explain the absence of Republicans in my neighborhood.
My dad had enlisted in the Coast Guard during the Korean War
Yeah, thanks a lot [read in sarcastic eye-roll voice].
Back in the day there were real inequalities that still stood out to be levelled. Your parents generation mostly enacted this, but the liberation movements didn't cease agitating - and actually increased their denunciations of how bad things are. One of my major political awakenings was noticing that the closer society gets to effective equality the GREATER claims of oppression get. The very culture which enabled egalitarianism to take root as normative is the very culture being denounced as colonial, white supremacist, patriarchal etc. These people are sawing the branch they stand on (which we all stand on).
You say “As for gun control, Democrats have not exactly delivered us to safety or sanity, but at least many of them would like to. … I am sufficiently outraged about guns in America that I’m dying to make it my main issue, alongside women’s reproductive rights.”
The democrats cannot deliver us to safety or sanity because their policies are insane. The Democrats have had decades to learn about the issue of guns so that they can advocate for effective policies and have done the opposite. It almost seems like lack of knowledge about guns and gun policy is a virtue on the left! This persistent, willful ignorance suggests to me that most Democrats are not serious about reducing violence, but rather merely use gun control as a cudgel against their political opponents.
The issue of guns is to me as the trans issue is to you; it led to my first real suspicion that there was something wrong with leftist reasoning, that perhaps the left was no longer a truth-seeking movement. As I dug deeper, it revealed a dogmatic politics that rejects or distorts science to push ideological goals, no matter who is harmed in the process. Sound familiar? If you do end up devoting energy and attention to the gun issue, I think you’ll be shocked by what you find, though, judging by your disillusionment of the left from your work in the trans space, I don’t think you’ll be surprised.