Our last few election cycles in this country have had a lot of surprises and drama, but there has been one recurring theme among them. All of them have been punctuated with the assertion that the whole thing would have been different should only millennials voted. The sentiment surrounding the idea is that all members of that particular generation fall into a sort of group-thought that aligns them all into the progressive movement as a single entity. Anyone who would pay half-hearted to Twitter or Facebook could easily be convinced to believe that it's true. Progressive and socialist memes are retweeted and shared over and over again with a disproportionately small number of conservative answers. The world that is presented by social media is indeed portrayed in such a way that once my generation come to power, the United States will suddenly come out of mass poverty and turn into a Communist...er, Socialist utopia with absolutely no resistance or opposition. But the truth behind millennials may be even more surprising. There is a pattern emerging. It is a pattern that I actually believed at first was only me, but as I pay attention to sources other than mainstream media, I start seeing that there are more and more people like me, especially after the last presidency.
I address a lot of social issues from points of view that range from centrist to fully right-wing, and I feel that I fall somewhere between Libertarian and Republican on our present political spectrum. What I don't discuss very much is where I come from, politically. I've mentioned it here and there in passing, but I definitely grew up in a Union-worker Democrat household. My dad works through a union as his father did, and while my mom does not work through a union, her father did as well. I can honestly say that my sister and I were raised to form our own ideas and draw our own conclusions based on the facts that were presented to us, but that does come on the heels of saying that there was always some pressure to vote straight down the ticket Democrat no matter what. It wasn't all from my parents either. One of the communities that I grew up in was largely supported by the same union job that my father worked at, which meant that many of the members of that community held the views that the AFL-CIO insisted upon them. I remember in 1995 during a community fair, I was given an opportunity to have my picture taken with a picture of Then-President Bill Clinton edited onto the picture, then put onto a button (Photoshop was still in it's infancy at the time and a novelty booth was still one of the premier ways to get such an item at the time). An elderly gentleman was talking politics at the booth and I remember him saying "He's a Democrat. You know, the good guys." It was that sentence that unfortunately held with me for the remainder of my formative years and into early adulthood.
There should have been a lot of signs early on in my adult life that I wasn't really a good little millennial progressive, but I largely ignored them at the time for the sake of being on what I considered the right side of history. Some of these things I can attribute to being a sign of the times and a rural upbringing. I can honestly say that even if I had stayed with the progressive movement, I'd never be able to be in the faction of Muslim apologists. My last year of High School saw too many Muslim jokes for that, and I'd definitely be a hypocrite for trying. However, that is very easily attributed to the fact that it was right after 9/11, and I was living in a homogeneous community of people who had largely never been outside of a handful of Wisconsin and Minnesota counties. Shortly after I left home for college, the military goal of our country shifted from a search and recover mission in the mountainous region of Afghanistan into a mission to overthrow the dictatorial government of Iraq. While, at the time, I didn't understand the tactical position of Iraq (I still don't, entirely), I understood enough to know that we were in a state of conflict with extremist factions of the Muslim world at the time, and that did include cells in the nation of Iraq. When the invasion happened, I saw my first real life protest. A group of students, mostly freshmen, marched the halls singing "give peace a chance" for hours on end. That was the day that I wrote my first freelance article. It was mostly a criticism, but I did hold enough of an objective stance to try and lay out the side of the protesters as well. I emailed the article to some friends, and quickly got my first politically charged comment back from a friend in the ROTC.
As time went on, the signs continued. But I did continue to vote straight down the ticket on the left. I remember a particular conversation that I had about finding a way to stop welfare for serial abusers of the system. The conversation was with a man I now know as a socialist activist, and I had a disgusted wrench of the stomach as he threw the children of these system abusers up as a shield. The man was a co-worker, and we were actually working a union job at the time. Mind you, it was a grocery store, but it was definitely union controlled. I actually remember the day that my romance for the Labor Unions ended, and it was while I was working there. We had a co-worker, an older woman in her 40s. She was one of those people who spent 30-plus years wrecking her body in every way possible, then found Jesus at the end of her 30s and was suddenly ultra-christian, and ultra-right-wing. I'm not saying any of this to put her down, she has the freedom of religion and speech just like the rest of us. I'm just setting up an outline of her convictions and her views of the union. So she obviously refused to join.
A grocery store, prior to Right To Work laws, was obviously a little different than a factory job. Especially given the fact that the majority of people that do work in that type of job are part-timers in high school or college. Therefore, at the time, the union was an option, but not a requirement. I had joined because my parents told me it was the only way to keep my dad's job from getting shipped overseas, but Kathy didn't. One day, she was late to work, which was unheard of. It got to be a half hour, and I was getting ready to call a replacement for her and she finally came in, clearly shaken. When I asked her what happened, she informed me that one of the union leaders was standing at the front door to the store, recognized her, and attempted to prevent her from going to work. She was being "ousted". My activist friend berated her, in his usual jovial voice of course, for not just joining the union, but I felt sick to the idea that someone has to join a club in order to go to work somewhere. At the time, I was completely unaware of the political ties between the unions and the Democrat Party. That would come later.
When I started to realize that I didn't belong with the way I was voting came when I was 23, as the second Bush administration was beginning to wane. It was during the primaries of 2007 that I first heard the name Barack Obama, and began to hear dissent against the young senator as a president. I knew that in some of the more recent elections, a couple of my cousins had begun to turn away from their union roots and move over to the right as far as voting, but in the beginning the cycle, I stood by what I had heard 12 years prior about the democrats being the good guys. Very early in the primaries, I was considering putting some support behind Clinton, assuming already that she was going to play the woman card and win. The discussions were starting to come up in mainstream during the 08 cycle. I definitely recall a roommate that I had at the time who told me in a discussion of the possibility of the first Black President that he couldn't see himself be a Republican, but he could never bring himself to vote for someone named "Barack Obama." (This would be the ultimate time for this to be a podcast rather than a written article. It was the voice/inflection that Timmy used that made his argument rather than the name itself.) A couple months later I would wind up moving as the rest of my roommates had graduated from our three week cyclical school, and I still had about 4 months left to go. My new roommates were a very different sort. All three were from Connecticut, and two were raised in a much higher tax bracket than I was, and the third was as well, but loved describing himself as a country redneck. All three were conservative, but only one was outspoken about it. He loved to yell about it to anyone who would listen, along with loud racial slurs. I did ask him one day why he was a Republican if he was as dirt of the earth as he tried to pass himself off as, and all he could respond with was "Why am I a Republican? Because I'm a Redneck." Growing up in farming area Unionland, I wouldn't see the connection until almost election day, but I was already having huge second thoughts about the way I had been voting. The final shift for me would come a few weeks later after Obama was officially nominated.
The day after the nomination, I was sitting in class, and a girl that I had once been very close friends with started texting me. "Obama is going to run for president. What are we going 2 do if he wins? I don't want to give away half of my money." Chelsea has no idea, but that was the the moment that ended my relationship with the Democrat Party. There has been fearmongering since the beginning of the United States, but this was the first time I had ever seen real fear over the thought of a person losing the fruits of her labor because of the executive. I quickly tried to calm her down, remembering my 7th grade Civics class and the lesson that our President is essentially a lightning rod for government criticism, and that the real power laid in the Congress. At the time I had no idea that our previous president would spend 8 years transferring more and more power into the executive branch and away from the other two. For the first time ever I started listening to the speeches and doing other research on what the President I would have otherwise voted for had said and promised, and I didn't like that I kept seeing promise after promise of a handout with no real answer as to how to pay for it, and when anyone asked for a method of payment, he was essentially shrugged off as a hate breeder and evil.
For the majority of the last 8 years, I actually considered myself as an anomaly. I knew there was such a thing as a swing voter, and that voter is the real target of political advertising. But I was never really a "swing voter". I was a pretty steady, down-the-ticket guy who turned into a steady, down-the-ticket guy for the other side. Base voters aren't known for switching sides, especially to the level that I have switched, where I became a conservative commentator and have thrown around the idea of a congressional run with an R next to my name. However, the more I pay attention to news and commentary, the more I find that this is becoming a common theme. I've heard others say it before, but Conservative podcast host Matt Christiansen was the person who caught the most of my attention.
Christiansen, like me, started a run in mass media on a completely different topic. I started writing about dating, and Matt started in gaming, but we both found our way into interpreting political news and presenting it as we see it. Mr. Christiansen has admitted on his show to being an Obama voter, and in an interview with Steven Crowder he also claimed that he was more fiscally liberal than most. But the message of freedom and smaller government rings through in every show that he does. Watching his solo YouTube show was my inspiration to revive my three year dead blog and start presenting the facts and my outlook to the people again. Others out there like Klavan, Knowles, Red Pill Black, and even Mr. Crowder himself have come forward saying that when they were younger, they also espoused views that more aligned with Democrats than Republican.
I've proposed the idea before, such as when I wrote about the President's history as a big-government Democrat. When I look at the migration of people away from the Democrat party, I don't really believe that we all left The Party. More often I feel as though The Party left us. I've heard my left-voting parents yell that the way to get people back to work would be to end welfare, and then I listen to Democrats advocate for a universal basic income (welfare for all), with the charge being led by the new face of the Democrat Party: Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders. The days of Republicans being for the already wealthy and Democrats being the representatives of the worker are far gone, replaced by a series of wealthy elites who offer to trade you an income and healthcare paid for at the expense of flyover country taxpayers, in exchange for your freedom, and your eternal vote. When I was a kid, being left-wing meant fight the power, rage against the machine, full anarchy and down with the establishment. Now, it seems that all of the liberals are only interested in the concept of "fall in line, or we will destroy your life publicly," and "support the establishment, and give them all the wealth so they can tell us how to live our lives." The spirit of near-anarchy and rebellion are still there, but they do not belong to the Democrats anymore. True, their hashtag is #resist right now, but the rebellion is to go back to a system of give it all to the government and let them provide. so we can go back to being good little followers. The "rebels" want to go back to an overreaching executive branch continuing to funnel more power away from the states and Congress into the chair in the Oval Office. No, back in November, all of America rebelled, and the #resist movement is desperate to give the power back to the overlords.
Did you swap from one political side to the other? What drove you? How deep into the opposite side were you? How dedicated are you to your current home side? I always welcome comments and discussion both here and over on Twitter. My handle is @edsblogtw1tter if you want to follow me to comment or read previous articles from my feed. If you like what you've read, go ahead and hit that like button, and consider hitting the retweet button as well. That would be cool of you. Remember, never take the words of journalists, bloggers, or podcasters as Gospel. Find all the facts, and draw your own conclusion. Thank you for reading
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