My Father was a Democrat

There’s a Chinese curse that translates: “May you live in interesting times.” My father and his generation knew the meaning of this curse. Born in 1922, he grew up on a ranch that was tucked under the continental divide in eastern Idaho. At age fourteen, in the darkest days of the Great Depression he dropped out of school and left home to join the Civilian Conservation Corps and then, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the navy to serve in the Pacific during WWII. He returned to civilian life with no education and only one asset, the ability to work.

He was a hard-rock miner and excelled at running heavy equipment. He made good money when working and seldom had trouble finding a job, but due to alcohol and a stubborn intelligence that had trouble accepting that some stupid SOB was the boss, he had trouble sticking with them. He travelled the west from mine to mine, dam site to dam site, or worked on ranches when in a bind. He never owned a piece of real property, but he pulled his own weight and didn’t ask for handouts. He joined a union when it was beneficial to do so, but hated strikes, yet wouldn’t cross a picket line.

He was a Democrat.

Like most poor people that had struggled through the depression he thought of Franklyn D. Roosevelt as something of a demigod and considered the Democratic Party the party of the working man. His view of history was a collage of depression, poverty, and war, and through it all there had been Roosevelt - never mind that through his first term and well into the second the depression deepened, and didn’t ease until war in Europe began to put American factories back to work; the man truly cared about the working class, and he gave them hope.

I think my father began to question the Democrats during George McGovern’s campaign; I’m not sure how he voted that year if he voted at all. During the Carter administration he became more disillusioned and then he couldn’t ignore the contrast between Carter and Reagan, a Republican he admired.

When a man has embraced a political party for a lifetime it’s difficult to change, but despite his lack of education my father was always an observer and thinker, and in the last years of his life he began to realize that the Democratic Party was no longer the party of the working man. It had become the party of those that would rather not work, and of the environmentalists that shut down the mines and sawmills that created jobs, and were threatening the fundamental rights of ranchers, farmers, and other land owners. He came to realize that the Democratic Party had turned against the working class to represent the liberal elite.

I don’t think he could ever bring himself to vote Republican; he didn’t agree with them either and things didn’t seem to get any better when they were in power. He just quit voting and didn’t talk about it much except to cuss the environmentalists and the moochers – or the government in general. He was part of the aging “Greatest Generation” and was depressed by the future he foresaw for the country he had fought to save.

He died during Ronald Reagan’s second term, but if he were alive today there’s no question that he would be appalled at the national debt and deficit, the invasion on our southern border, and America’s continuing slide toward socialism. He might even be able to muster a vote for a rare Republican.

Many people cling to one political party or another by habit or because that party once represented their values. Now our country is at a critical crossroads, and each of us must question whether our habitual party continues to represent our core beliefs. In many cases neither major party will do so, and we will often be given the choice between the lesser of two evils, but choose we must because there is too much at stake to allow the more evil of the two to continue leading us down the path my father only glimpsed.