Metropolitical
: John Robb complains about the Republican Party:
Isn’t it funny (maybe not) how the roles of Republicans and Democrats have shifted over the past 30 years. The aspects of the Republican party that attracted me to them years ago are gone, and they have subsumed by the Dems. For example:
Fiscal responsibility.
A non-interventionist foreign policy.
Personal rights.
Republicans have failed on all of these counts. They are profligate spenders, able to send troops to all corners of the world on a whim, and ready to turn us into a police state. There is nothing left of the Republican party.
Meanwhile, there are Democrats like me, Totten, and Simon, to name a few, complaining that the Democratic party has lost its focus and resolve in important areas, including, for me:
Humanitarianism and human rights
An interventionist foreign policy
Individual rights.
This doesn’t mean that everybody just switched place; Republicans are not Democrats and Democrats are not Republicans.
But the old definitions are worthless.
And that is why America looks divided, red v. blue.
We’re not really divided, all of us living on the edges, facing each other over the new Mason-Dixon Red-Blue line.
Quite to the contrary, we’re all living in the middle, able to switch back and forth depending on who is saying what that’s worthwhile.
We’re not dogmatic.
We’re flexible.
We are metropolitical.
I frustrate some political dogmatists when I don’t fit their definition of the left: Many have yelled that I can’t possibly be a liberal if I support the war in Iraq when I argue, to the contrary, that my support for the human rights of Iraqis and opposition to the tyrant Saddam is, in fact, a just liberal cause.
Well, arguing about what the Democratic Party should and should not stand for is certainly nothing new; that’s why we have primaries (and used to have platforms), eh?
But what is new for me is that 9/11 and the explosion of new voices in media (yes, there is an explosion, not a contracting) and especially blogging have not made me more conservative or less liberal.
They have made me more open-minded.
I disagree with a helluva lot of what Bush said last night but I also agreed with a lot of what he said. I admire a lot of what Dean has done in his campaign online but I also hope he does not become President. Like the huge proportion of Iowa voters who waited until the last week to decide whom to support in the caucus, I am still learning more about the rest of the candidates before I decide.
There is no such thing as a pure Democrat and so I’m not one. There is no such thing anymore as a pure Republican and Robb’s not one.
The parties play both sides of every street and so we, the voters, have to do the same thing.
It makes us all biparty.
It makes us all flexible.
We are metropolitical.
: UPDATE: Roger Simon reacts:
But the problem for us “Metropoliticals” these days is that we have nowhere to go at election time. What if you’re one of these people who thinks that Gay Marriage is a natural outgrowth of the human rights movement and that the War on Terror is protecting those same rights? That’s not a contradiction in my mind. In fact, it’s almost evident. But neither political party seems prepared to accept this. That leaves me… and other “Metropoliticals”… making compromises (and not just about that issue).
