The Political Pilot

As a student of political science, and as a generally pragmatic person, it’s long been clear to me that neither political party has the “right” answer. A country of hundreds of millions of people boasts millions of diverse ideas, attitudes, backgrounds and experiences, so assuming that your political ideology is always the best answer for all Americans, on all political issues, represents either ignorance or arrogance.

Oftentimes, the right answer is not on the left or the right, but somewhere close to the middle. The right answer in a political science context can lean left or right, but is usually still mostly centric in its orientation. There are some issues that, in my opinion, are clearly better advocated by the Democrats (civil rights, for example), and others are historically owned by Republicans (public safety, national security, Christian values). (I highlight historically because the GOP has shifted on some of these issues.) However, generally speaking, the right answer usually involves a mixture of influences from the left and the right, representing the diversity of the attitudes held by the hundreds of millions of political stakeholders (the American voting bloc).

This is why, for more than 30 years, I was fiercely politically independent. I have such a wide range of political opinions that cross both political platforms, so I’ve spent most of my adult life committed to avoiding formal political alliances, which left me free to vote my conscious instead of the “party line”.

I voted for George W. Bush in the first election I was old enough to vote, followed by voting for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Notwithstanding my strong support for President Obama, I was ready to entertain what direction the Republicans sought to take the nation after him, in fact I was looking forward to seeing what a well-intentioned and qualified Republican had to offer the country.

This was a formative period in my life, at this point, I had been a military officer for over a decade, was preparing to transition into a civilian airline career and military reserve service, and I had been a volunteer law enforcement officer for for some time. At that time, the Black Lives Matter movement had permanently reshaped the image of law enforcement (in my opinion, in a way that is detrimental to public safety in America generally, and the black community especially), and the decline of safety and the popularity of anti-law enforcement protests weighed heavily on my mind. I was ready for a Republican to turn the tide on public safety in America.

Until Donald John Trump emerged as the GOP standard bearer. I had been fundamentally unimpressed by Trump ever since he resurrected the Obama Birther question in 2011… there were many very valid political objections to Obama’s policies, but the Birther attacks were baseless, evil and rooted in racism and… as far as I’m concerned, they only resonated among people who couldn’t digest the sight of a black man in the White House.

The 2016 election revealed some very disturbing, shocking true colors about the Republican Party. The GOP of the generation I grew up in boasted all-American features that were common across both political parties: strength of character in its candidates, a devotion to the democratic principles that were the foundation of our country, and the destruction of racism/xenophobia, and sexism.

In Trump, the 2016 GOP embraced a man who was openly hostile to every single one of those principles, so it’s no wonder that the GOP leaders I respected (i.e. the Bush presidents, John McCain etc.) never supported Trump. While it was instantly clear to me, thanks to the Birther controversy, that Trump would inflame racism for political gain, he quickly fortified that strategy by smearing Muslims: “Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” Trump later doubled down with the racist dogwhistling, this time on Mexican immigrants, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

While I support strong national security, public safety (I’ve worn uniforms in service of both!) and secure border and controlling illegal immigration, using racist dogwhistling to generate fear-based hatred and gain political support is a very toxic tactic with dangerous, potentially catastrophic implications. I studied the Holocaust, auf Deutsch, living as an exchange student in Germany during my junior year of high school, and I quickly recognized this tactic straight out of Hitler’s playbook. (It comes as no surprise, then, that Trump’s first ex-wife, Ivana Trump, claimed in her divorce proceedings that Trump kept copies of Hitler’s speeches in his nightstand.)

There were other signs that Trump was of substantially poor character or held dangerous anti-American attitudes during the 2016 campaign. There was his dismissal of Federal (“so-called”) Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s legitimate judicial authority, because he was of Mexican descent, during the Trump University lawsuit. (Trump was successfully sued for fraud, and Trump University was dissolved in response.) My goodness, there was the Access Hollywood tape, where Trump infamously bragged about sexually assaulting women at will (an assertion which was validated by over a dozen women in a group interview, who eventually would become vindicated by E. Jean Carroll’s back-to-back $83 million judgements against him for the same).

Then there was the-oh my goodness-the consistent barrage of (baseless!) claims by Trump that the 2016 election was rigged against him, a very obvious ruse to give Trump cover to challenge any *inconvenient* election results. Ironically, Trump won the “rigged” election, yet he somehow successfully revived this tactic in 2020, to a disastrous end.

The 2016 GOP Primary was a rude awakening for me. Somehow, this deranged lunatic who was patently antithetical to the values that Made America Great defeated 16 other respectable candidates of character who, for the most part, represented the values that made America strong. As far as I was concerned, the GOP selected a standard bearer who disregarded-and would seek to destroy-the founding principles of what made America the greatest nation in the world.

I’ve served in a military or law enforcement uniform for approaching two decades, I’ve personally dedicated much of my life to defending this country and protecting my community. I grew up in the church and raise my family to serve Jesus Christ. I’m personally invested in preserving the principles that are the pillars of American democracy and society. The fact that the Republicans had united behind a demagogue who sought to set all of these on fire are why I became a registered Democrat. My ethics trump my politics-despite all of my fundamental disagreements with the Democratic Party, they are the only powerful counterweight to the lunacy that would define the Trump presidency, so I became a Democrat, not because I’m particularly motivated by the Democrats’ platform, but solely to get behind stopping Trump.

It worked, for a while.

In any case, the Republican Party has proven that it will not only tolerate racism for political gain, but it gets actively excited by it-Trump won more votes than any Republican in history in 2016, running largely on a racist and xenophobic platform. That action alone, but justified by others since 2016, have made me a become a lifelong Democrat.