A Time to be Partisan

Yes, I have become rather partisan. I have to.

Readers of this substack and even more so of my GETTR may have noticed I can come across as rather partisan.  And I’ve noticed I have become more that way of late.

But as I evaluate my thinking and evaluate my thinking out loud, I believe I am right to be partisan, that it is needful.  I am convinced this is a time to be partisan.

And that not because I think the Republican Party is worthy of wholehearted support.  I throw my RNC solicitations in the trash.  I used to be quite enthusiastic about the Republican Party, but ironically, my years as a Republican Precinct Chair in Denton County (1992-2000) opened my eyes.  I already knew there were RINOs about, but I was shocked at how key office holders were more interested in their own power than in the values of the Republican Party.  That included seeing people with good values being passed over to put cronies in office.

After observing more in the years since, I now do not trust the typical Republican office holder.  Oh I love some of them — Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis — but most of them?  Not so much.

So why have I become more partisan while becoming less enamored of the GOP?  The Democrat Party has devolved from a party usually wrong on key issues and prone to lying into a party with a dangerous totalitarian streak.

It is one thing, say, to want to tax too much and spend too much, as destructive as that can be in the long run.  It is quite another to attempt to vilify and criminalize political opposition, to suppress and criminalize free speech, to nullify freedom of religion, to turn the justice system into one’s political weapon against opposition while going easy on favored criminals, and, perhaps most importantly, to permanently rig elections.  This goes beyond American political disagreement into a kind of totalitarianism, certainly into transforming America into a post-America no decent person wants.

Today to see the two major parties as morally equivalent is intellectually lazy at best.  I freely admit the Republican Party all too often is banal and unprincipled.  But that is far less dangerous to the country and to our freedoms than the enlarged totalitarian streak of today’s Democrat Party.

Most of us would prefer to be nonpartisan.  Heck, I have frequently voted for Democrats (although that probably will not happen in 2022) and have even actively worked with a number of them to preserve local beach access some years back.  There are a number of Democrat politicians I’ve respected (although among today’s Democrats I can probably count them on one hand).

Nonetheless there are times to be doggedly partisan.  It was right to be partisan and to expose and fight against the evil of the Nazis.  It was right to expose and oppose the evil of the Communists during the Cold War and since.  More recently, it was right to expose and oppose the extremist anti-semitic evil of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party even if Boris Johnson has since become a horrible disappointment.

When a party descends into such evil and becomes such an existential danger as today’s Democrat Party, we not only should not apologize for being partisan, we should be partisan as long as the profoundly evil and dangerous party remains so.  Our country and our freedoms require it.

In addition it may turn out to be for the good of the party being opposed.  But I will leave that for another post.