A lot of Republicans are not actually Republicans [View All]

[WilliamPitt]

I know a lot of Republicans. Weirdly, I had Christmas dinner with a Representative from the New Hampshire state legislature. I didn't know she was coming to dinner until she came. Die-hard Republican, head of the New Hampshire chapter of the Republican Women of America.

She was also the one who fought the fight to make sure people who leave their jobs to serve abroad in the National Guard have jobs to return to. Before she fixed it, New Hampshire had no law on the books protecting the jobs of Guardsmen who get deployed. They'd leave, serve, and come home to find their jobs gone. She got the law passed.

Her husband was there, also a Republican. He was a retired General in the Air Force and a doctor; told me a story about treating General LeMay way back in the day. He had just run for a House seat himself this time around, and lost by 131 votes. But the woman who beat him apparently lives in New York, and had not fulfilled the residency requirement, so she may get booted and he may wind up in the seat.

They were two of the nicest people I've met, totally engrossed in the work of local politics but doing work that, for a variety of reasons, other Reps don't feel like doing. It blew my mind that New Hampshire had no Guard protection law, and I could tell she was really proud of having fixed that.

My grandfather was also a Republican, and he was an epic human being. He was able to construct utterly seamless arguments for what he believed in. He was a litigator for 60 years, one of the aces in our legal community here, smarter than any three people combined I've ever known. Rock-ribbed Republican, and easily the most honorable and admirable man I have ever met.

I actually know a lot of Republicans, and only a few of them make me want to break a glass and eat the pieces when I talk to them or debate them.

I think a lot of Republicans out there aren't really Republicans, but are hypnotized: By fear, by the television (not the media but the television entire, which stills people and separates people and pacifies people), by racial tensions they inherited with mother's milk (the unavoidable dark side of our pluralism, and a source of so many central problems), by preachers who capitalize on these things for reasons of profit, or any combination thereof.

I think a lot of Republicans aren't really Republicans, and can be convinced that fear is a tool being used against them, that the mind is meant for reading and doing instead of sitting and staring, that the Americans all around them are brothers and sisters and patriots, and that men who preach the word of the Lord with their hands on your wallet are not to be trusted.

We got it light. Imagine trying to overcome a millenia of feudalism and barbarism and dark ages and the absolute rule of popes who acted like emperors and burned people who strayed from the party line.

Yet the Enlightenment happened. They already did the heavy lifting.