As a sometime-Pennsylvanian, all the recent publicity about Ex-Sen. Santorum (how I love typing the “Ex” part of that!) has dredged up a lot of memories. Most are fairly nasty. A few are wonderful, notably the day I woke up and saw he’d been defeated for re-election. One was, above all, very educational. I owe it to an ex-staffer of his that I am aware of the challenge we face in building a Democratic majority: convincing those who agree with us on social issues to get over their naïve and selfish opinions on economic policy.
Yes, I know “naïve and selfish” is harsh. But this diary is about the night I learned why harshness is sometimes necessary. Read on, I think you’ll see what I mean.
New Year’s Eve 1996 will live forever in my memory as the night of the greatest party I had ever yet attended, and still one of the best now. I was a year and a half out of college, and had moved to DC about three months before, with an eye towards working on Capitol Hill. (The reasons why I had waited over a year to move to DC, while interesting in their own way, are not important here. Suffice to say a Democrat who graduated from college four months into the 104th Congress was better off waiting a while before trying to find work on the Hill!) Those three months had had their ups and downs, but things were on the upswing that night: I had a steady job at an insurance company and a handful of new Democratic members about to come to town in need of staff. I was living in a big group house where a huge party was a time-honored tradition on New Year’s Eve, and over the course of the evening I got to meet a lot of new and interesting people.
Among the new folks I met was a woman a few years my senior who had recently ended her own Hill career. She had worked for Sen. Santorum. That was among the first things she told me about herself, and it was quickly followed by “I’m Jewish,” “I’m pro-choice” and “I’m a feminist.”
I replied to the last one with “Me too,” hoping she would take offense at a man calling himself a feminist, so I would have an excuse to tell her what I thought of a pro-choice feminist working for Santorum. But she didn’t (although she did say she would have been offended a few years before, whatever that meant). She did, however, seem to recognize that some explanation was in order. “I’m only an economic conservative,” she explained. “Rick is a sexist pig, and I don’t agree with any of what you see him saying on CNN. He thinks a woman’s place is in the home. I don’t, obviously. It’s just the economic policy where he gets me.” And then it was off to a longwinded, alcohol-addled treatise on why supply-side economics actually worked perfectly under the right conditions, and blah blah blah.
Now, it’s easy to write off any one person’s opinion as just a single data point and nothing more. (I often tell my foreign friends that when they want to know if Americans are really like what they see in the movies – “There are 300 million of us. If you look hard enough you can find one of everything.”) And at first, that’s how I looked at my new friend. Since she spent much of the rest of the evening asking the men in the room what they thought of the ample cleavage she was flaunting in her party dress, I got to thinking she probably wasn’t nearly the feminist she claimed to be anyway. But she had given me a clear picture of something I’d been only very vaguely aware of before. That night was the first time I fully understood why right-wing Republicans could win so many elections despite their extreme social conservatism: because a lot of people disagree with them but vote for them anyway.
There had been a clue for me here and there before that, such as the girl I knew in high school who came from a family of Democrats but registered as a Republican when she turned 18. When I asked why, she explained: “I’m going to be rich after college and I want to keep my money.” That, of course, was easy to write off. So, by itself, was my New Year’s Eve friend who was willing to work for a man who thought she should be home making dinner for her husband because at least he would also keep taxes low for the rich.
The thing is, she wasn’t alone, and I wasn’t long in learning that. It’s one of those things you notice everywhere once you know to look for it. There are an awful lot of people out there who are on our side when it comes to abortion rights, separation of church and state, gay rights, availability of contraception, gender equality, and so forth. But they’re blissfully unaware of how much peril some of those rights are in (or in the case of gay rights, that they haven’t yet been fully realized and probably won’t be for a while). When it comes time to choose between a candidate who agrees with them but might raise their taxes – or at least that’s what the “liberal” media says – and one who disagrees with them but can always be counted on to say s/he will hold the line on taxes, they can choose the latter and still sleep at night.
After all, they’re not the ones being hurt by the right’s push to turn back the clock – at least not that they know of.
Now, odds are most people here know that oh yes, they are being hurt in one way or another. If nothing else, their values – and ours – are under assault, and have been for a long time now. I’m sure we all have plenty of ideas of how we can take that argument to the people. I know I do. But how many of those strategies are going to get through to a person who is willing to work for a senator who hates her values, because she likes his stance on economic issues? (Not just support that senator, but work for him!) Even laying aside the fact that those economic policies were long ago proven to be disastrous, what strikes me is the enormity of the task. Who is that much in love with money they don't even have?
My view: if there’s one way to get through to people who are that selfish, it’s to bring attention to what they do have and how much danger there is of losing it. That’s why, ever since that long-ago party, I’ve never been afraid to call out the Republicans’ reactionary extremism for exactly what it is. I’ve been accused of hyper-partisanship many times, but I figure it’s worth it. If I can convince even one person that yes, the freedoms you value can be taken away if you vote for people who hate them, it’s worth coming across as a little shrill.
So as much as the woman I met that night ticked me off, I’ve always felt I owe her a great deal when it comes to awareness of just what we’re up against.