Christine Flowers: Why I had to leave Trump, GOP
I am a very tribal person. I like to belong to things, to groups, to communities. Part of that is because I am a very passionate person, and hatred for my enemy comes much easier if I actually have one. Unlike my faith, which commands me to “love my neighbor” and build bridges across troubled waters, I tend to distrust my neighbor (especially the ones with the “Hate Has No Home Here” signs) and the only thing I do with troubled waters is roil them even more.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has read anything I’ve written for this paper over the past five or so years. I am a rabid Eagles fan, which means that I abhor the Dallas Cowboys. I loved Bobby Sherman, which means I did not like David Cassidy. I pick a side, and they are my people, and I will die for them like William Wallace at the end of “Braveheart” (except with slightly better hair.)
Except in politics. Ironically, in the one area where most people tend to be tribal, especially these days, I was a bit flexible on my loyalties.
In 1979, I registered as a Democrat because I (mistakenly) thought that my grandparents and parents were Democrats. Not all of them were, as it turns out. But I stayed a “D” for the next 37 years, which was kind of an unusual thing for Delaware County, which was a huge Republican stronghold in the 1970s and 1980s when I was a teen and a young adult. The thing is, I never had any problems with the Republicans back then. In fact, I tended to like them a lot more than the Democrats who seemed a bit whiny with their complaints about GOP influence. My thought was that if your party wasn’t good enough to attract voters, become a better party. Back then, the Democrats were far from the better party, and I can only remember voting for one Democratic candidate I actually liked (and still do,) my state Representative Greg Vitali.
I also began to become very disillusioned with the national Democrats as they became a bastion of identity politics and, most horrifically, pushed for abortion rights under the guise of “women’s rights.” When I would protest that there were a lot of us women out here who were strongly pro-life, we were at best ignored, at worst ridiculed.
And still, out of apathy and no great love, I stayed. Until 2016, when the primaries came to Pennsylvania. When I saw the prospect for making a real difference in the election at the primary level, and knowing I could never vote for the lady in the pantsuit, I switched my registration to Republican, and proudly voted for John Kasich. We all know that he did not win; Donald Trump went on to take the general election and actually won Pennsylvania, and is still, as of this writing, our president.
I have gone on to write columns about how I disagree with a number of policy positions that the president has since taken, most especially with respect to immigration. I know very few immigration lawyers like me who welcome his “innovations” in streamlining the system, cutting off asylum benefits for many needy people and making the process much more difficult.
However, I balanced that out with Trump’s fearless defense of the unborn through other policy initiatives, his respect for people of faith, his shattering of the Identity Politics stranglehold on our supine electorate and his willingness to speak bluntly. Some would call his language “rude,” “offensive,” and even “brutal.” That may be the case, but his actions have made a huge difference in the lives of social conservatives like me who value traditional families, unborn human life and who don’t like to be called bigots if we don’t think men dressed up as ladies belong at the Haverford Township Library telling fairy tales to kids.
And so, I remained a Republican. Until this Wednesday, when I changed my registration to Independent after President Trump did something I could not defend, namely, withdrawing U.S. troops from their position in Syria and exposing our loyal allies the Kurds to certain death.
I have known about the Kurds for a long time. As I said, I am a tribal person. I remember what Saddam Hussein did to them two decades ago, a genocidal act in which many innocent men women and children were murdered. I also know how the Turks have always hated the Kurds, in much the way they hated the Christian Armenians. And despite their denials, we know what the Turks did to the Armenians.
They are now poised to do the same thing to the Kurds, with the inadvertent (or simply negligent) help of the United States. The Kurdish fighters are some of the most fearless, efficient and resourceful in the world. Trained by the U.S., they have come to surpass even our own troops in fighting ISIS. Many, many more Kurdish lives were killed in the fight to destroy ISIS than American lives.
And now, because President Trump and his avid isolationist supporters want to “bring our troops home,” even though it seems a lot of them just took the next plane to Saudi Arabia, we are abandoning our close allies to a Turkish massacre.
It’s already started.
On my Facebook Page, I compared the Kurds and their valiance to that of the 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. The difference is that the Spartans were not abandoned by the Greeks they served, but sacrificed their own lives so that Greece would survive. The Kurds have had no choice in the matter.
And so, not being able to belong to a party whose head condoned this act, I left. I am now a proud Independent, which is what I have been in theory all of my life. I do not hate the GOP. I simply can no longer be a part of the party that allowed this to happen.
But don’t worry. I will never re-register as a Democrat. That would be like rooting for the Cowboys.