Welcome Aboard #ExGOP

Over the past year, as Donald Trump defied every political obituary written about him, maintained a steady presence in the opinion polls and moved from victory to victory in the Republican primaries, I have watched with some bemusement as conservative opinion leaders wrestled with the prospect of not voting for the Republican candidate for president come this November.  The latest example is an article by Jay Nordlinger in the current issue of National Review.  I am bemused because not voting Republican is a practice to which I reconciled myself some twenty years ago.

I come from a Republican family.  Both my parents consistently voted Republican and leaned conservative.  My paternal grandfather served two years as a Republican congressman from the Bronx - a most rare creature.  One of my earliest memories as a child is watching Richard Nixon announce his resignation on television.

But as a teenager my circle of friends were almost exclusively progressive Democrats from progressive Democrat families.  And as a teenager one invariably sides with one's friends against one's parents.  So as the 1980 election approached I parroted whatever left-wing propaganda I picked up, accusing Ronald Reagan of all manner of sinister deeds, plans and attitudes.

Then in my sophomore year of high school I found myself with a free period in my schedule, which I spent in the library.  In the periodical section was a magazine I had never seen or heard of before - National Review.  To this day I am mystified that such a publication was ever allowed into a public school library.  I was immediately drawn to it.  It had an irreverent sense of humor and I found in it conservatives who defied the caricatures of conservatives that much of popular culture uncritically accepted.

Within months facts and reason persuaded me to become a conservative.  I became a full-throated defender of Reagan and Reaganism.  When I turned 18 I registered to vote and enthusiastically checked the Republican box for party affiliation.  I voted for Reagan in 1984 and Bush in 1988 and 1992.  I, like many conservatives, was disappointed with the lack of success in rolling back progressive power grabs by the federal government but I reasoned that little was possible so long as the Democrats controlled Congress.

Then in 1994, in reaction to early overreaches by Bill Clinton, the voters elected a Republican Senate and, for the first time in over 40 years, a Republican House.  I thought to myself, "Now you're gonna see something."   But, like the Joker at the end of The Dark Knight waiting for the two ferry boats to explode, I was disappointed.

It turns out that, for the most part, Republican politicians are just as addicted to power, and the perks that accompany it, as their Democrat counterparts.  It also turns out that Republican voters may like to imagine themselves as rugged individualists but most of them are as fond of federal handouts as any welfare queen.

At this time I also began to take a deeper interest in the Constitution and I realized that much of what the federal government does is not just bad policy, it's illegal.  The Constitution vests  the federal government with a finite number of enumerated powers.  Anything not on the list is off-limits to the Congress and left to the authority of the states.

Then, in the 1930's the Supreme Court adopted a progressive view of the Constitution that one clause, giving Congress the authority to regulate "Commerce ... among the several states," could be twisted into an almost unlimited grant of power.  It was a patently absurd interpretation to any objective observer but, with a depression going on, New Dealers convinced a lot of people that greater federal power was necessary.

A lie doesn't become true simply because it's repeated over and over again for decades.  And I realized that virtually every office holder who took an oath to support the Constitution was, in effect perjuring himself so long as he acquiesced to the federal power grab begun under FDR.  I now saw the two major political parties as rival crime families who may despise each other, but neither one was about to give up theft.

In 1996 the Republicans nominated Bob Dole.  Dole had been on one government payroll or another almost his entire life, beginning at 19 when he enlisted in the army.  He was a consummate deal maker and moderate, working with Democrats to grease the wheels of government and keep the whole machine running smoothly.  Newt Gingrich famously called him "the tax collector for the welfare state."

But the 1996 Bob Dole had donned the mask of a conservative.  As a gimmick, during his stump speeches he would pull an index card out of his jacket pocket and read the 10th Amendment - "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."  But he had no clue what it meant.  It was almost as if he were delivering the lines phonetically.  But this was the Republican Party's pattern:  make comforting noises to the conservatives during campaigns and then, when the balloons are dead and the confetti's swept up, go back to logrolling, empire building and doling out favors (no pun intended).

I decided somewhere along the line that I would no longer vote for someone whose first official act would be to commit perjury.  I changed my registration to unaffiliated.  I voted Libertarian in 1996 and 2000.  After September 11 I no longer had confidence in the Libertarian party's approach to national security so I haven't cast a vote for president since then.  With one exception:  In 2008 I voted for John McCain because it was the only way I could think of to vote for Sarah Palin.  It's a decision I have come to regret.

So this year I will not be voting for either major party candidate for president, but not for the first time.  For all the #NeverTrumpers who are new to this, come on in, the water's fine.

The Russian Mama Bear

Look at those veins!  That's Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) from a recent episode of FX's The Americans.  She is obviously enraged at something or someone - but what, or whom?  A little backstory for those not following this excellent show set in the early 1980's:

Elizabeth and her husband Philip (Matthew Rhys) are Soviet deep-cover spies.  To all the world they appear to be a typical American middle-class couple living in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.  They infiltrated the United States as a young couple in the 60's and began building a life, a cover, and a family.  They had two children, Paige and Henry, who are teenagers when the series begins. Paige and Henry were born American and, at least at the beginning, have no idea about their parents' true identities.

Much of the show's tension arises from Philip and Elizabeth's struggle to maintain the facade of a normal life while carrying out various operations for the Sword and Shield of the Party, the KGB.  These operations involve late-night assignations with various agents and assets, high-risk infiltration of sensitive installations and frequent violent confrontations with anyone who gets in their way.  Both have had sexual affairs outside of marriage, with the full knowledge of the other.  Philip actually had a bigamous union with a second wife.  All of this activity has to be kept secret, not just from the outside world, but from the two American teenagers living in their home.  And, to top it all off, their neighbor across the street is an FBI agent who hunts Russian spies for a living.

During the last season, season 3, the inevitable cracks that result from this kind of stress began to manifest themselves in the life of Paige.  At the invitation of a friend, Paige becomes involved with a church youth group and begins to attend Bible studies and Sunday services.  Eventually she professes faith in Christ and becomes baptized.

Elizabeth's first instinct is to put an immediate halt to Paige's spiritual exploration.  Of the two, she has always been the True Believer, totally dedicated to the state and the party.  Philip, on the other hand, has displayed signs of wavering or going native.  He occasionally breaches the idea of defecting or running but Elizabeth won't hear of it.  But Elizabeth is eventually persuaded that forbidding Paige's religious life would provoke a rift between them that would be personally painful and professionally unhelpful.

For at the same time that Paige finds herself drawing closer to God, the KGB is hoping to bring her into its fold.  Philip and Elizabeth's handler tells them that the Center, the colloquial term for KGB headquarters, has hit upon the idea of recruiting the children of its deep-cover agents as "second-generation illegals."  It has a vision of a vanguard of Soviet agents with impeccable genuine American identities.  The first step is for Philip and Elizabeth to bring their daughter into the fold.  In the series premiere, when it appears the FBI is onto them, Elizabeth's greatest fear is not death or prison, it is that her children will learn her secret and despise her for it.  Now she has to face that fear head on and tell Paige the truth.

Well, not the whole truth at first.  Don't tell her about the sleeping around and the murders and the lives ruined.  Instead, tell her that your job is about preventing war and stopping the United States from exploiting third-world countries.  Tell her it's actually not that different from the nuclear disarmament campaigns that her church is involved in.

Unfortunately, and ironically, for Philip and Elizabeth, they raised a daughter who is constitutionally incapable of deceit.  And in the last scene of the season 3 finale she is seen on the telephone telling her pastor that her parents are Russian spies.  And, because she is so honest, she tells her parents that she told her pastor.  And the pastor turns around and tells his wife.  The pastor assures Philip and Elizabeth that he will respect the confidentiality of Paige's disclosure but the Center isn't willing to take that on faith (pun intended).

The Center's first plan is to arrange an "accident" for the pastor and his wife but that has to be scrubbed at the last minute when a crisis interferes with Philip and Elizabeth's alibi.  (And for those who watch the show, the phrase "going to Epcot" will forever have sinister overtones.)  Besides, Paige is honest but she's not naive.  If anything happened to the pastor it would be difficult, if not impossible, to convince her the Russians had nothing to do with it.

Since the pastor and his wife can't be eliminated, they have to be monitored.  And that's Paige's new assignment.  But she doesn't like it and begins to balk at spending so much time around them.  That's when Elizabeth really lays into her as seen in the picture above.  She's had it with Paige's whining.  Furthermore, the whole situation is Paige's fault because she didn't think before taking action that risked the destruction of ... their family.

The family.  Not the mission or the operation.  Not the party, the state, the proletariat, the revolution or the Socialist International.  All the things that Elizabeth has dedicated her life to.  She's worried about her family.  Could there be a more bourgeois sentiment?

As a young girl, Elizabeth would have been raised to venerate Pavel Morozov, the teenage boy who turned in his own father for anti-Soviet activities and was later murdered by his relatives in revenge.  The lesson is clear - the state is everything, family is nothing.

To be fair, Elizabeth had spent the better part of twenty years pretending to be a typical American woman and explicit appeals based on Marxist-Leninist ideology would never prevail against the American-born and -raised Paige.  Nevertheless, in an apparently unguarded moment, with anger rising and veins bulging, the vanguard of the proletariat, the hero of the Soviet Union, the sword and shield of the party is, in the end, a mother, fighting for her family.

Lamentations

I've been re-watching the HBO series John Adams and its jarring, and depressing, to see how far we have fallen in statesmanship and citizenship.  There has been no politician on the national scene in my lifetime that equals the intellect and the public spirit of Adams, Jefferson or Washington.  Look at the collection of ciphers, reprobates, thieves and carnival barkers we had running for president this time around and weep for the republic.

To be sure, the founders were not perfect.  Jefferson and Washington owned slaves.  Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Act.  Jefferson was too ideologically-blinded to recognize that the French revolutionaries were building, not a liberal republic like in America, but the first terrorist, totalitarian state.  Recent events have shown he was not the last secretary of state to exhibit such myopia where foreign revolutions are concerned.

But despite their faults, they and their compatriots were dedicated to establishing government that would preserve liberty and they produced between them the two greatest legislative/political documents in the history of the world, the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. They bequeathed us a fortune and we, the wastrel heirs, have pissed it away, some by design, some by negligence.  Now Barack Obama seems to devise a new unconstitutional outrage every day and his successor seems guaranteed to be a dishonest, self-interested tyrant, regardless of which party wins, and only a small minority of citizens seems to care.