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Why a Democratic Liberal Became a Republican Conservative Joan Swirsky Decades after the fact, my parents – both impassioned Democrats – remorsefully acknowledged that their hero, President Franklin Roosevelt, knew about the Nazi death camps that drove 6 million Jews to their horrific deaths but failed to act in their behalf, and that their most-trusted newspaper, the New York Times, was complicit in consistently keeping the news of Hitler’s annihilation on the back burner of its coverage. Like them, I didn’t know any of this when I registered to vote in the early 1960s and checked “Democrat” as my party. My introduction into realpolitik came when my husband and I moved with our three young children to a notoriously liberal Long Island community to set down roots. We promptly invited the first of three summers’ worth of NY Times-sponsored Fresh Air children to our home but were stunned when our neighbors told us their presence would “destroy” property values and when the pool we paid to join refused to admit our inner-city guests but never questioned the admission of other members’ fair-skinned nieces and nephews. A couple of years later, our school board president proposed that 75 black children be bused from a community in Queens, N.Y., the better to introduce them to a more “evolved” education. After a community referendum rejected the idea, I attended a meeting where the board president declared, “The community has spoken, but the community is wrong” – and that the board would overturn the community’s vote. While I had voted in favor of the busing, I was immediately aware that democracy was being violated, overruled by the “opinion” of an ideologue who believed he knew better about democracy than the electorate – or, for that matter, our country’s Founding Fathers. His gesture was not lost on the superintendent in Queens, who knew his students weren’t welcome and turned the “invitation” down. A few years later, we moved to a new house on a block where many of the most activist left-wing Democrats lived. They exhorted me not to buy lettuce, to support Cesar Chavez’s farm-workers’ boycott. I didn’t buy the lettuce but was shocked to bump into many of their children buying lettuce for them! When a swampland near my home was earmarked for low-income housing, I applauded the decision, but one of my liberal neighbors started a Save Our Swamps campaign, the better to preserve the sanctuary for birds instead of people. I knew there was hypocrisy in both parties, but it hadn’t escaped my notice that a Democrat, President Kennedy, brought our country to the brink of war during the infamous Bay of Pigs incident and was the first to send our troops to Vietnam, and that a Democrat, President Johnson, while championing the civil rights I embraced, mired our country in the devastating and true decade-long “quagmire” of Vietnam, a war that was lofty in motive but doomed to failure because of cowardly leadership. And then came Jimmy Carter, whose embrace of dictators (to this day) and stunning ineffectualness in both domestic and foreign policies was a downright embarrassment to card-carrying Democrats like me. Still, I remained a Democrat, and was for several years a Democratic committeewoman. But by Carter’s tenure, I had become a conservative – just in time for other “Democrats for Reagan” to embrace his decisiveness in facing down the air controllers’ strike and his triumphs in bringing down the Berlin Wall and dismantling the USSR, among other stellar accomplishments. Still, I remained a Democrat. Even as I recoiled through every day of President Clinton’s tenure, hoping for more than an incoherent foreign policy that forced Israel to cede everything to a career terrorist like Arafat, numerous wag-the-dog military actions that had everything to do with the president’s posturing and nothing to do with the security and safety of America, and an economy that was fueled by more than an ephemeral Internet bubble. Still, I remained a Democrat, although, with notable exceptions, I voted for Republicans. By that time, I was so deeply disgusted by Clinton apologists like Lanny Davis, Susan Estrich and, yes, the leftist mainstream media that abandoned any semblance of objectivity, that I decided not to change parties so as not to credit the Clintonistas with what I now believe was one of the most positive actions of my life. Enter George W. Bush. Like everyone else, I witnessed the Gore-Bush campaign of 2000. The high-born heir apparent and Washington insider versus the high-born heir apparent and Texas “cowboy”; the earth-in-the-balance guy vs. the guy who actually tilled the earth; the articulate Harvard graduate who never got through graduate school vs. the less-than-King’s-English guy who graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School; the guy who garnered blue votes in a few states vs. the guy who seemed to blanket the entire country with red votes. And then came the Florida dead heat, the laborious recount and the Supreme Court decision that deemed Bush the president of the United States. To this day, Democrats are rankling, so deeply unable to accept Bush’s ascendancy to the presidency – and his superlative leadership – that they are blind not only to history but also to the very meaning of the Electoral College (read about the Tilden-Hayes vote of 1876). President Bush has served almost three years of his term and, to me, has fulfilled virtually all of his promises: to “change the tone” in a Washington culture that was obsessed during the Clinton years with spin and vacuous glamour; to introduce an education agenda that relies on accountability and empirical data and not on fuzzy theories about what makes kids learn; and to give hard-working citizens some of their money back. And since Sept. 11, the president has addressed with laser-like focus a war on terrorism that has made our own country safer by dismantling the murderous and America-hating Taliban and Iraqi regimes; made significant inroads into “peace” between Israelis and Palestinians; put nations that have historically sponsored terrorism, like Saudi Arabia and Syria and Lebanon, on notice; forced the murderous president of Liberia to leave the country he mired for decades in despair and internecine battles; and presided over a faltering economy with decisiveness and, to my mind, wise tax cuts. That is not to omit his initiation of a breathtakingly comprehensive AIDS care-and-prevention program in Africa and, from day one, his choosing the most diverse Cabinet in our nation’s history … the list goes on and on. Finally, I didn’t remain a Democrat. It had taken my husband and me, as it had taken my parents, many decades to “smell the coffee” about the failure of the Democratic Party, both nationally and internationally. But last year we became proud Republicans, as have so many of the people we know. Today, when I see the Democratic presidential candidates flailing desperately to discredit President Bush by intoning Terry McAuliffe–inspired “talking points” ad nauseam, and realize that none of them have suggested even one original idea to improve the economy or make our country safer, the impoverishment of their positions stands out in bas-relief. A fulminating Howard Dean and a waffling John Kerry or any of the other focus-group-dependent, throw-money-at-the-problem candidates are clearly unequipped to face the perils with which international terrorism has confronted our county, to energize the economy or to fix our energy crisis, which was neglected for eight long years under the former president and his amazingly incompetent energy secretary. To me, being a conservative is simply logical. As in medicine, safety comes first. Then comes everything else we value: a good education for our children, compassionate care for our elderly, and independence from government control. To liberal Democrats, this logic is anathema. To them, our safety should be forfeited to political correctness, the education of our children sacrificed to the demands of teachers unions, and the care of our elderly debated (as it was endlessly during the “I care for people” Clinton years) unto death – while dependence on government, they believe, should be encouraged! When it comes to defending our relatively young country and vanquishing regimes that value tyranny over freedom, we have the best track record in world history. Indeed, history has proven that it is Republicans like Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and conservatives like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush who have established this track record. Does anyone doubt that they are still more capable of effectively vanquishing al-Qaeda and other America-hating terrorists than any Democrat or any liberal on earth? Joan Swirsky is a New York–based journalist and author who can be e-mailed at joansharon@aol.com.
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