It was a long, upward climb

I came from a Republican family. My mother has, since her childhood, unthinkingly regarded the Republican party as if it were her religion (it’s no surprise that she now thinks Trump is wonderful). Her loyalty to the R’s seems to stem, from what I can figure out, from her veneration of her father, who was a rock-ribbed Republican. My late father, who had come from a Democratic but not very political family, was, from the time he married my mother, a low-tax, gun-rights Republican who thought that local governments were the only good kind of government. Ironically, both of my parents belonged approvingly to a teachers’ union.

During my youth, the Republican Party was part of my identity, even though I had a shallow understanding of political issues at the time and much of that understanding was parroting of things my parents said. In middle school, I was Mr. Republican. My mother loved to brag about how conservative I was. I became a political junkie during the 1976 election, when I was ten years old, and loved to watch the election coverage on TV every two years. I even created my own map of which parts of the country leaned toward one major party or the other when I was a middle-schooler.

The small town I grew up in happened to be the home of a congressman who was routinely described as an “archconservative.” His personal lodge for political parties was next to my parents’ property and I encountered him various times while I was growing up, usually in the presence of one of my parents. To me, at the time, it was like meeting a big celebrity, although he had an affable, down-to-earth demeanor. His sudden death at a relatively young age from a mysterious ailment was a major shock and quite a downer. However, I still idolized him enough to write a term paper about his life in my high school American History class.

Then I grew up and got out from under my parents’ roof.

My political conversion was a slow process that lasted from age 19 into my early 30’s. First I took an intense dislike to the Religious Right because they didn’t accept evolution. I’d always been deeply interested in biology, and the discovery that anyone at that point in history could still deny that evolution existed was a serious blow to my view of human nature. My parents were mainline Protestants and had no problem at all with evolution, so I hadn’t been exposed to Creationism until that point. My mother even looked down on fundamentalists as being “radical” and belonging to “the Church of the here and now.” I also became pro-choice—not because I was concerned about women’s rights at that time in my life, but because I was worried about world overpopulation (I still am deeply concerned about that, by the way). Then, after a conversation with a gay friend, I became pro-gay rights and pro-gay marriage. This was in 1986, long before gay marriage was a mainstream issue. I began reading newspapers a lot during that period and that certainly broadened my views.

Meanwhile, I roomed for two years in college with a fellow who was a Creationist as well as a right-wing political hack. When I challenged him about evolution, he always had some talking point about how there was a logical fallacy in what evolutionists said, the oddest of which was that, in his way of thinking, evolution had to occur exactly as Darwin had described it or it wasn’t evolution—never mind the modifications of our understanding of evolution that had occurred in the previous century. He was also homophobic and racist against both African Americans and Latinos. (Surprisingly, he ended up marrying a woman from Columbia.) Reacting against his views and his general demeanor, I began thinking of myself as a “moderate Republican.” Nevertheless, from 1984, when I was first eligible to vote, through 1990, I voted almost entirely for Republicans, although I don’t think I ever voted a totally straight ticket.

Change was in the air, however. I began to find that conservative positions were becoming harder and harder to defend in the debates that went on within my mind. I still considered myself a fiscal conservative, but to me that meant balanced budgets, not lowering taxes irresponsibly, and in my mind I couldn’t justify or defend the budget deficits of the Reagan era. Around the same time, I began reading more environmental literature and became aware of just how anti-environmental the core of the Republican Party was. At age 26, I changed my voter registration to Independent. I watched the party conventions in 1992 and was impressed enough by the Democratic convention that, after expecting to vote for Bush all year, I cast my first Democratic presidential ballot for Clinton.

From 1992 through 1998, I was splitting my ticket about evenly between the two major parties. Although I’d never had any significant animosity toward other ethnic groups and I’d always tried to be polite to everyone (although I confess to dropping an ethnic slur on rare occasion when I was young), during that period of my life I learned more about discrimination and about a lot of the awful things that had happened to minorities during the previous hundred years. My research involved working with minorities, and as a result I had to dig into their perspectives far more deeply than I’d ever had to before.

Al Gore’s environmental policies appealed to me, so by 2000, I was ready to jump aboard the Democratic Party. I’ve been a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party ever since. Democratic positions on practically every issue, including fiscal ones and national defense, have come to seem more sensible to me than Republican positions. I finally got around to changing my party registration from Independent to Democratic about a year ago, but that was a long overdue formality, since I’d been a de facto Democrat for twenty years and had been voting in Democratic primaries the whole time because the state I live in allows Independents to vote in party primaries.

So yes, it’s possible for a person to change, and yes, we should welcome converts with open arms. There would be no more effective way to shoot ourselves in the foot than to impose the purity test of expecting our supporters and our candidates always to have been Democrats. Moreover, it’s equally self-defeating to suspect anyone who had once been a Republican of secretly harboring anti-Democratic views.