What do you do when your party lives a lie?
Fresh out of college, 45 years ago this month, I was hired by the Hartford Courant to cover the town of Glastonbury.
I would describe myself, at that moment, in that job, as “smart but incompetent.” Many Glastonburians would have agreed with one of those two adjectives.
The town was controlled by Republicans, but not in a way that called attention to itself. In fact, I had to think very carefully this morning to make sure I remembered accurately which of the people I covered were Democrats and which were Republicans.
That could be attributable to my currently waning cognitive faculties, to my general cluelessness in 1976 or to the unique circumstances of Glastonbury, which was undergoing a high speed transformation from a rural community ( with an unmissable streak of “Twin Peaks” weirdness) to a pricey suburb.
How best to manage that change was, in my memory, 80 percent of the public conversation. It never seemed like those questions were being worked out on a reflexive — which is to say knee- jerk — partisan basis.
One of my guiding principles goes like this: the most profound dividing factor among humans has nothing to do with politics or religion. It’s the dichotomy separating people who experience life as a comedy from people who experience life as a drama.
I enjoyed the Republicans because they were, on balance, funnier than the Democrats. Their leading vote- getter was a man named Henry Kinne, who liked to call himself “mayor,” though no such position existed. He could be seen every day manning the gas pumps at his Mobil station, yakking with the customers. He wore a blue windbreaker and a baseball cap, both with the Mobil logo.
The joke was that Kinne was actually quite well off, a successful businessman with, it was said, impressive investments. He was out there pumping gas so he could find out what people were talking about. He sent most of each day laughing it up with the townsfolk. There was no question about whether he thought life was a comedy or a drama.
I fell down this memory hole because this week another Glastonbury Republican, Chip Beckett, stepped down as council minority leader after quitting the party.
I wasn’t all that surprised. I know him a little. I’m usually in touch with him right around this time of year to find out whether his asparagus is up. Beckett’s a veterinarian but he has a little farm stand. If the green stalks have thrust themselves up, I’ll drive 20 minutes to buy some and walk my dog in a little- known nearby park. I’ll do that about four times during asparagus season.
Once in while, he shares his political views with me. He’s definitely a Republican, in the sense that he wants lower taxes, more efficient government, fewer regulations and less capitulation to public sector unions.
Strangely enough, he does not believe that a cabal of Satan- worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles led the charge against President Donald Trump. Because he has a heart, he was troubled by the idea of children torn from their parents at the border. He does not believe the 2020 election was stolen or that it’s good for America to keep feeding that fire.
Beckett and Congresswoman Liz Cheney are on similar journeys right now. One of the baseline components of Republican philosophy over the years is that if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to prosper in this country. And that the country should reward exactly that kind of person who works hard and plays by the rules.
So what do you do when your own party stops playing by the rules? What do you do when its standard- bearers undermine arguably the biggest rule of all — that when you lose an election you gracefully transfer your power to the winner? What do you do when your party is living a lie?
Speaking of lies, remember the ( completely fake) story of Emerson visiting Thoreau in jail after the latter has refused to pay a poll tax as an act of civil disobedience? And Emerson supposedly said, “Henry, why are you here?” And Thoreau answers, “Why are you not?”
It’s a stupid story but a good question. Why are there not more Cheneys and Becketts? Ultimately because the price is too high. If you’re important enough for your defection to matter, you’ll be giving up a lot if you break with the bosses, as Cheney has, or leave, as Beckett did. Instead, you bite your tongue for one more day and wait for the craziness to burn itself out so you can get back to pursuing the ideas that attracted you to the party in the first place.
In “Paradise Lost,” Milton has Satan say, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Satan wants to be “Free, and to none accountable, preferring hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile Pomp.”
Similar but less poetic thoughts were buzzing in the brains of the yahoos who attacked the Capitol Jan. 6. It’s how you rationalize not playing by the rules.
The price of refusing to rationalize is high. In 1980, Republican Congressman John Anderson decided Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan were both inadequate. He ran instead as, to quote his New York Times obit, “an independent, honest- dealing alternative to the rancorous businessas- usual politics of the major parties.”
Good luck with that. He got 7 percent of the vote and became politically obsolete, although durably admired by people who care about principles.
On the other side, Ralph Nader decided in 2000 that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties. He ran for president and, according to some, tipped the Florida vote away from a decisive Gore victory. More than 20 years later, Democrats treat him like Bill Buckner, remembering the catastrophic blunder and forgetting all the homers and doubles that preceded it.
These are far worse times. It’s as if the moral universe was redistricted and Hell got bigger while Heaven shrank.
But there are qualities far greater than political allegiance that bind the human race profoundly. For example, Chip just emailed me to say the asparagus are up. I’ll have to find time to make that drive.