me and democrats
May. 27th, 2023 12:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishPorted over from Twitter, written 30 December 2022, lightly edited.
I should write this up formally sometime, but: I was raised by Reagan Republicans, my dad was an Army officer, and both my parents were quietly but intensely churchy. My teenage rebellion came in the form of libertarianism and backing away from the Church.
Specifically, in the 90s I was a middle-class-straight-white-dude with a bunch of peers from higher socioeconomic strata, so I had a firm belief that Racism Was Over, sexism wasn't real, and the only oppression was me getting speeding tickets. I also read a lot of PJ O'Rourke. I absorbed the whole 'republicans aren't great but democrats Want To Take Away My Freedom' thing.
A few things happened in the early oughts to shake that. First, I started reading Boing Boing and picking up on Cory Doctorow [et al]'s distaste for the Bush admin's anti-intellectualism. Second, the Iraq War was obviously, transparently, bullshit. And third, PJ O'Rourke stopped being a libertarian and started being a bog-standard conservative. In a later book he talks about riding with cops on a drug bust, and I was just "... no, no, this ain't right."
And then in late spring 2004 we got the revelations that the US Army had been torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Understand that I'd been raised to believe that the Army were the good guys. That whatever their faults they played by the rules. I genuinely believed that this would be a huge deal, with resignations and prosecutions. Because We Don't Do That. Instead from the get-go, Republicans defended it.
(It was a post on Patrick Nielsen Hayden's old blog, with the human-pyramid photo, that actually broke me.)
So for maybe a month I flailed around. What the hell did I believe, if the things I believed in were so obviously wrong? And then I stumbled on a post by Matt Yglesias that included the phrase "Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society."
That opened my eyes. Gave me a framework for not just politics but the whole endeavor of civilization. We all pay taxes to make things better, for all of us. Beats the hell out of every-man-for-himself libertarianism.
It took years of learning and some doing to get to a point where I could see systemic inequality (etc etc etc), but by summer 2004 I was firmly committed to the Democratic cause. (And then Kerry lost, which taught me an important lesson about US politics: people suck.)
I'm not sure where I encountered the phrase 'none of us without all of us' but I think it was in Graydon Saunders's writing about his 'egalitarian fantasy' Commonweal series. I like it, though. It's aspirational and worth aspiring to.
None of us without all of us.
"Why are you a democrat? Me: lived in poverty - even had a Salvation Army Christmas as a kid; was a single mom; and I am a dual citizen US/Canada - I know what it is like to live in a nation with healthcare, maternity leave, few guns, etc. You?"I switched in summer 2004 because Republicans didn't give a shit about the torture at Abu Ghraib. The current answer is "because I try to believe in 'none of us without all of us.'"
--Wyona M Freysteinson, PhD, MN, RN, FAAN (she/her) @ wyonaf on twitter
I should write this up formally sometime, but: I was raised by Reagan Republicans, my dad was an Army officer, and both my parents were quietly but intensely churchy. My teenage rebellion came in the form of libertarianism and backing away from the Church.
Specifically, in the 90s I was a middle-class-straight-white-dude with a bunch of peers from higher socioeconomic strata, so I had a firm belief that Racism Was Over, sexism wasn't real, and the only oppression was me getting speeding tickets. I also read a lot of PJ O'Rourke. I absorbed the whole 'republicans aren't great but democrats Want To Take Away My Freedom' thing.
A few things happened in the early oughts to shake that. First, I started reading Boing Boing and picking up on Cory Doctorow [et al]'s distaste for the Bush admin's anti-intellectualism. Second, the Iraq War was obviously, transparently, bullshit. And third, PJ O'Rourke stopped being a libertarian and started being a bog-standard conservative. In a later book he talks about riding with cops on a drug bust, and I was just "... no, no, this ain't right."
And then in late spring 2004 we got the revelations that the US Army had been torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Understand that I'd been raised to believe that the Army were the good guys. That whatever their faults they played by the rules. I genuinely believed that this would be a huge deal, with resignations and prosecutions. Because We Don't Do That. Instead from the get-go, Republicans defended it.
(It was a post on Patrick Nielsen Hayden's old blog, with the human-pyramid photo, that actually broke me.)
So for maybe a month I flailed around. What the hell did I believe, if the things I believed in were so obviously wrong? And then I stumbled on a post by Matt Yglesias that included the phrase "Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society."
That opened my eyes. Gave me a framework for not just politics but the whole endeavor of civilization. We all pay taxes to make things better, for all of us. Beats the hell out of every-man-for-himself libertarianism.
It took years of learning and some doing to get to a point where I could see systemic inequality (etc etc etc), but by summer 2004 I was firmly committed to the Democratic cause. (And then Kerry lost, which taught me an important lesson about US politics: people suck.)
I'm not sure where I encountered the phrase 'none of us without all of us' but I think it was in Graydon Saunders's writing about his 'egalitarian fantasy' Commonweal series. I like it, though. It's aspirational and worth aspiring to.
None of us without all of us.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-28 11:14 am (UTC)My grandpa was a Marine Corps drill instructor who didn't even yell and swear at his troops. "You have to raise your voice, you've already lost control of the situation," he would say. He had clear notions of the honor of an American. I was glad he was still with us in 2004. I was absolutely heartbroken to see what those photos did to him. And also: I was so glad that it did. That he did not join the "they musta deserved it" crowd. That he, at least, had really meant it all along.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-31 03:02 am (UTC)