Ideas and ideologues

When I was a teenager, my passion for American history led to a passion for American politics.

I had a strong attraction to the men and women whose actions, character, and thinking built our nation and society. History.

Likewise, I had a strong attraction to the exchange of ideas among citizens and their representatives in the public square. This is what I believed would build our nation and society for generations to come. Politics.

I think my dad is the person who introduced me to the phrase: “exchange of ideas.” From an early age, I believed that is what politics should be about.

What ideas would build our nation and society into a “more perfect union” with “liberty and justice for all?” These are the kinds of questions I thought about as a teenager (and still think about even more today).

As a young man, I looked for people who felt the same way I felt about politics. Naturally, I turned to party politics. Growing up in an evangelical Christian church in a small town in America’s heartland, the Republican Party was an easy fit. In young adulthood, I was both a fiscal and social conservative who wanted to limit government’s powers.

Early on, I understood that things like fiscal conservatism and limited government are not facts that you can establish for all time. The world keeps changing, so it is necessary for each generation to figure out how to carry on the spirit of our laws, but change the letter for the circumstances in which we live now (and will live in the future).

This is where I believed the exchange of ideas was so important. Policy has to keep up with the times. That’s another way of saying that the policies that got us where we are today will not get us where we need to go tomorrow. All policymaking is a grand science experiment (i.e. you don’t know what policy will do in the real world until you try it). The best we can do is assemble the facts, reason with one another on the basis of facts, and talk about ideas that arise from the facts we consider.

The beauty of the American system is that it is set up to take into account many different perspectives on the facts. This leads to a constant “creative tension” in the public square and a rich tradition of debate and dialogue that leads to good ideas that can become workable policy.

An important aside: The American idea is that a country’s people can govern themselves and do so for the good of all–even those who are in the minority. Our system of government is set up so that the minority still has power. The Framers of our system of government knew that for the Republic to live up to its ideals, weaker voices needed to be made strong by government itself. The very idea of America came from a weak minority speaking up from a distant part of the British Empire. Some of the best ideas–the ones that made us a “more perfect union” came from minority groups and minority voices (e.g. American Civil Rights Movement).

So in order for the Republic to be truly healthy and strong and live up to its highest ideals, policy needs to consider and derive from the ideas of all Americans–even (and especially) those in the minority.

In a democratic republic, there are no perfect laws. There is no perfect policy. But, when we have a healthy exchange of ideas in a safe public square, we can make laws that are good enough for as many Americans as possible.

In short: America itself is an idea and America grows healthy and strong when ideas of all kinds are shared and worked through in public.

This is what I bought into as a young man. It is why I joined the Republican Party. At the time, it seemed to be the only party that talked about the free exchange of ideas.

“We’re not going to win by using government power to force people to accept our ideas,” we Republicans used to say back in the early 1990s. “We’re going to take our ideas out into the free market and let them win on their own merit. We’re going to earn our policy wins on the basis of creative problem-solving, critical thinking, innovation, and reason. We’re not going to force people to agree with us; we’re going to win them over.”

Later, I found out this is a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Growing up in a small town where the public schools still found ways to sneak in Christian prayer, I assumed that everyone believed the Christian Bible is God’s authoritative word. I thought changing people’s minds about Jesus Christ and his church would be as simple as citing book, chapter, and verse.

When I got out into the “real world,” I met more and more people who didn’t believe in the Bible or in God. When someone doesn’t believe in your holy scriptures, you can’t very well use those holy scriptures to win a debate with them.

Likewise, when I got out into the “real world,” I met a lot of people who didn’t grow up in the same circumstances in which I grew up. I found that there are a lot more people who aren’t like me in this world than people who are like me. The experiences those people have in life give them a different point of view. I started to learn that I couldn’t get them to see my point of view unless I first tried to see their point of view.

What I started to learn as I grew into adulthood is that the exchange of ideas in a free marketplace requires a lot more faith, hope, and love than I thought at first. My culture raised me to believe I was right, which meant it didn’t raise me to be patient or understanding. But patience (faith and hope) and understanding (love) are crucial to a real exchange of ideas.

What makes a market or a nation truly free and open? Patience and understanding! Faith, hope, and love.

One more thing I learned about the nature of faith as I grew into adulthood: To believe you are right is to renounce faith. While true faith can find its footing on the facts, it cannot grow and bear fruit if it puts those facts in a box and says “these and nothing else!” Faith is not a period. It is a “dot, dot, dot” or a question mark. Faith says: “I know these facts, but what more could I be missing? What don’t I know? What more could I learn?”

A person of faith does not find comfort and peace in her command of the facts; she finds it in believing that love is going to be there for her even if she turns out to be wrong about some of the facts.

Faith (“I believe in unconditional love that wills good for me even if I don’t have my facts straight”) leads to hope (“I know that because this love exists, everything is going to be all right”). Faith and hope are the essential ingredients of freedom. When we are no longer afraid, we are free to explore. We are free to listen to other points of view. We are free to try things. We are free to be wrong.

In 2016–after 22 years–I decided I could no longer be associated with the Republican Party.

Why?

At the time, I said it was because we were no longer a party of ideas advocating for the exchange of ideas in a free marketplace of them. We were becoming the party of an ideologue. An ideologue does not work for the exchange of ideas; he uses his power to protect and push his own ideas. Ideas are a threat to an ideologue because to an ideologue, he himself is the idea. He demands that those who follow him renounce any ideas but his own. This is not freedom. It makes a false sense of freedom for those who follow the ideologue. Meanwhile, the ideologue works methodically to take away the freedoms of those who disagree with him.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, we Republicans accused the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media of being ideologues. As Republicans, we were supposed to be fighting to make sure all people in America had the freedom to share their own ideas in the public square.

By the time we got to 2016, however, the Republican Party had become the thing we used to oppose. We became the party of an ideologue and his ideology. We gave up on ideas. We gave up on the free exchange of ideas.

Look no further than the fact that Republican Party didn’t even have a platform at its convention this year.

We gave up on ideas and replaced them with an ideologue.

But this is not the worst thing we did.

We gave up on our own fellow Americans, which is the same as giving up on America itself. We started to talk and think like some Americans are more American than others. That some of us are more worthy than others. We made our own ideology the standard for what it means to be American. Which is another way of saying: We began to believe that other ideas were un-American. And, worse yet, those who have those ideas must themselves be un-American. We started to act like half of our neighbors are enemies.

The idea of America is that we are not a nation of blood and soil; we are a nation made up all all cultures, faiths, nationalities, and races. The idea of America is not that we are American first; it is that we are human first. The rights we enjoy and espouse are not American rights; they are human rights. That is why if we are true to America, there can be no such thing as a “first class” or “second class” American citizens. In America, citizenship is not conferred; rather, we recognize every person’s rights as a human being and vow to protect those rights from anything that would infringe them.

The worst failure of the Republican Party, by far, is that we gave up our faith. We gave up our faith in America working as America should. We gave up our faith in each other. We gave up our faith in our laws and our system of government. We gave up our faith in God to be greater and surer than the things that scare us.

I have never been around a more scared group of people in my life than the modern-day Republican Party. Under all the gun-waving swagger and imitating the bully at the top, is a group whose loss of faith is belied by their constant fear and fear-mongering. There is no courage in the modern Republican party because there is no faith in the modern Republican party. Only the ideologue.

I left the Republican Party because I am not afraid and I don’t want to be around people who are afraid. My faith is alive and well. I know who gives life and love to this human race and who wills that it all comes to a good end.

I left the Republican Party because I still believe in America. The America that our Founders believed we could build over the centuries by working together.

I left the Republican Party because I still believe in my fellow Americans and in human beings from all over the world who believe in my country as I do.

I left the Republican Party because I still believe in ideas and the free exchange of ideas in a public square where everyone is safe to participate.

I left the Republican Party because I am an American; I don’t follow ideologues. I challenge them. I criticize them. I stand up to them. I tell them to mind their own business. I tell them my body, heart, and mind are my own and that when I give them, I give them to the ones I choose.

I left the Republican Party because I pledge allegiance to the idea of America and to its people, not its symbols (especially when the ideologue coopts those symbols for his own empowerment).

Nothing in my life has ever scared me more than an America that looks like what the Republican Party–my party!–has become: Angry, closed-in, closed-off, making excuses, scared, and whining all the while pledging allegiance to an ideologue that not one of us would leave alone with our daughters or wives. The party that once stood for limiting government now fantasizes about using the power of government to force its ideology on all Americans.

If you are a Republican or former Republican like me, this is not a call to join the Democrats. Choosing to be a Democrat or Republican is a false choice.

Rather, it is a call to remember and return to your first love: The idea of America. A vision for what we’ve been working to make of this nation for 244 years. It is a call to remember that America is not about “blood and soil,” it is about “liberty and justice for all.”

It is a call to remember your faith and put it where it belongs. Who is worthy of your faith? From where do you draw your belief in life and love? Who do you believe will take care of you? Who can you truly trust? Let a return to your faith grow hope in you once again.

It is a call to make love your aim. If you are a Christian, it is more important to love your neighbor, strangers, and enemies than your flag or your president. To love is to pledge allegiance to the people of this nation. All of them. Most of all, the ones who are different from you.

For in loving those who are different from you, you prove that your faith and hope are real. In loving those who are different from you, you set yourself free and make this land more free.

And when you make this land more free, you make it free for the exchange of ideas that will make this nation healthy and strong for generations to come.