From time to time I feel the need to explain myself to my readers.
But first off, thank you for reading. I know I must be a great frustration to you. Just when you think I’m going to go left, I go right. Just when you think I’ve become a conservative, I go the other way. I send mixed signals, usually in the same post.
If that seems inconsistent to you, it’s perfectly consistent to me. I’m a moderate, center-left, nonpartisan Democrat. Let me explain.
Moderation is as much a way of living as it is a form of political commentary. I believe in moderation in all things. I drink, but not too much. I’ve cut my red meat consumption, but I’d never be a vegan. I like to cross-country ski, but I’ve never done a Birkie. I’ve done half marathons but never the full deal. And, when it comes to politics, I’ll settle for a half loaf most days and, on really bad days, even the crumbs look pretty good to a guy who’s hungry for any progress at all.
Being center-left is an ideological distinction. I support the free market as the basic way of organizing our economy and our society. But I don’t think the market has all the answers all the time. The broader society holds values that the market, left entirely to its own devices, might not respect. So we need sensible regulations to, for example, protect workers and the environment.
And my political designation of “nonpartisan Democrat” has two parts. I’m a Democrat in the sense that, given only two real choices, I find the Democrats generally closer to my views than the other guys. And that’s become even more true now that we’ve lost the old Republican Party as it once was, and it has been replaced by a cult of one very bad and very weird man.
So, I always find myself voting for Democrats. In fact, I’ve voted for only one Republican in my whole life. That was Donald Hanaway for attorney general back in 1986. Hanaway was a moderate Republican, when there was such a thing. But I voted for him because his Democratic opponent, Bronson La Follette, had disqualified himself in my book by having some shady dealings with lobbyists who were also his business partners.
But here comes the “nonpartisan” part. I don’t avoid criticizing Democratic pols or the party as a whole when it does stuff that I don’t agree with or which I think is politically stupid. (And there’s a lot of that going around these days.) And I won’t criticize a Republican just for being one. In the rare moments when they do something I agree with, I don’t have any trouble saying so.
I find myself in the middle, shading to the left of dead center. On the one hand, the Republicans have just gone off the cliff, devolving into something very close to a fascist party. And yet the Democrats have evolved into a party of condescending, college-educated snobs who hold views on social issues that I find both odd and extreme. What I mean by that, mostly, is the penchant on the hard-left to view everything in terms of race and gender, literally black and white. They see a world of victims and oppressors and all that matters is your membership in one group or the other, a membership assigned to you and over which you have no control.
By stark contrast, I see people primarily as individuals and mostly responsible for their own lot in life. I think people have a lot of personal agency. I don’t see them as helpless victims of the system. I believe in a color blind society. I’m for equality but not “equity,” which has come to mean active discrimination to make up for past discrimination. And all of that sets me apart from a good chunk of the activist part of the Democratic Party.
As the late liberal political columnist Mark Shields used to like to say, “Politics is about making converts, not punishing heretics.” But I often feel like the activists in the Democratic Party are looking to burn people like me at the stake.
Now, of course, the sins of each party are not equal. The Democrats, still my party, are mostly just very annoying. The Republicans are now pretty much fascists. So, I remain a Democrat. I’m blue, but light blue. (I actually wrote a whole book by that title, “Light Blue.” Sales were slow. I think most people have been waiting for the movie, probably. I hope to line up Clooney to play me.)
When I was coming up in politics this kind of thinking wasn’t at all unusual. As reported in an excellent piece on this overall subject by Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times, in 1994, half of Democrats described themselves as moderate while 25% said they were liberal and 25% identified as conservative. Today, the percentages are 55% who say they are liberal or very liberal, 34% moderate and 9% conservative.
So, I was once solidly in the majority of my party and today I’m an outlier, a significant minority, but still a minority. Moderates like me do not define my party and, I believe, that’s the main reason we find ourselves in the wilderness. The image of my party is just way too far to the left, especially on social issues, to be acceptable to a broad swath of voters. In fact, according to CNN, the party has its lowest approval rating — only 29% —- since that has been measured. The fascist-Republicans? They’re at 36%.
My wife and I have a place in the Upper Peninsula. When I’m home in Madison, I feel like a conservative. By the time I arrive in Watersmeet, I’m a Marxist. I figure somewhere north of Stevens Point I fit right in. The trouble is that that area is sparsely populated.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
