We're Here, We're Square, Get Used to It

[frigidmagi]

TIME

I am a 44-year-old woman who grew up in Berkeley who has never once voted for a Republican, or crossed a picket line, or failed to send in a small check when the Doctors Without Borders envelope showed up. I believe that we should not have invaded Iraq, that we should have signed the Kyoto treaty, that the Starr Report was, in part, the result of a vast right-wing conspiracy. I believe that poverty is our most pressing issue and that we should be pouring money and energy into its eradication. I believe that allowing migrant women and children to die of thirst in American deserts is a moral transgression that will stain us forever.

But despite all that, there is apparently no room for me in the Democratic Party. In fact, I have spent much of the past week on a forced march to the G.O.P. And the bayonet at my back isn't in the hands of the Republicans; the Democrats are the bullyboys. Such lions of the left as Barbara Ehrenreich, the writers at Salon and much of the Upper West Side of Manhattan have made it abundantly clear to me that I ought to start packing my bags. I'm not leaving, but sometimes I wonder: When did I sign up to be the beaten wife of the Democratic Party?

Here's why they're after me: I have made a lifestyle choice that they can't stand, and I'm not cowering in the closet because of it. I'm out, and I'm proud. I am a happy member of an exceedingly "traditional" family. I'm in charge of the house and the kids, my husband is in charge of the finances and the car maintenance, and we all go to church every Sunday. This month Little, Brown published a collection of my essays about family life called To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife. It's written in the spirit of one of my great heroes, the late housewife writer and feminist Erma Bombeck. It's not a book about social policy or alternative lifestyles or anything even vaguely political. It's a book about how much I miss my mother, who died recently, and about the struggles I have had fighting breast cancer without my mom around to help me. It's a book that pays tribute to the '50s housewife instead of ridiculing her.

As far as I can tell, every reviewer and reporter who has encountered my book has assumed that I'm a conservative Republican. At the end of an interview on a national TV network, a reporter said, "Caitlin, I can't let you go without asking you one question." Here was her question: Was it really true that I'm a Democrat? Those reporters' assumptions don't tell you anything about me, nor do they tell you much about the reporters themselves: they made an honest mistake. What it tells you a whole lot about is the Democratic Party and the face it projects to the world. It's a party that supports gay families, as I do, and has vast sympathy for many other kinds of alternative lifestyles. But we let the Republicans have complete ownership of the image of the traditional family. And that's one reason we keep losing elections.

Most of the 60 million people who voted against George W. Bush have lifestyles more like mine than the Democratic Party would like to admit. Most of us aren't the Hollywood élite or the nontraditional family. Many of us do what I do, which is go to church on Sunday, work hard and value my marriage. Again, it's not so much my party's platform that rejects the family; God help us all if Bush's brutality to the poor continues much longer. It's a small but very vocal minority, the Democratic pundits, who abhor what I represent because it doesn't fit the stereotypical image of the modern woman who has escaped from domestic prison. Fifty years ago, a stay-at-home mom who loved her husband would not automatically be assumed to be a Republican. The image of the Democratic Party that used to come to mind was of a workingman and his wife sitting at the kitchen table worrying about how they were going to pay the bills and voting for Adlai Stevenson because he was going to help them squeak by every month and maybe even afford to send their kids to college.

The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the great work of the '60s--civil rights, women's liberation, gay inclusion--we decided to stigmatize the white male. The union dues--paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man got nothing but ridicule and venom from us. So he dumped us. And he took the wife and kids with him.

And now here we are, living in a country with a political and economic agenda we deplore, losing election after election and wondering why.

It's the contempt, stupid.

I tend to agree with this. In alot of places I've been in the US, the joke is that the democrats will rally to protect anyone from oppression, real or imagined, long as they are not straight white males. While that's rather unfair to the democratic party, it is a good glimpse into what the alot of folks think is the democratic party. I'm currently on a college campus and it's interesting to note that alot of the students here aren't big fans of Jr. (I'll wait for you gasps of shock and surprise to die down) but most of the white males and alot of the not so white males (one black student I spoke firmly believes that the Democratic party destoryed the traditional black family in order to make it easier to keep the black vote) believe that there is simply no place for them in the democratic party. Whether this belief is right or wrong is not the issue, the Democrats have to prove to these parts of the population that they are wanted and there is a place for them within the party (pointing to Kerry doesn't help, he's seen as ultra rich and therefore not subject to the same political rules).

[LadyTevar]

This is why there needs to be a Third Party. *sigh*

[SirNitram]

This is why there needs to be a Third Party. *sigh*

Okay, overhaul your government into one that will actually be able to support one.

That's rather the problem.

[frigidmagi]

I find that comment ironic considering the Republicians were a 3rd party.

[SirNitram]

I find that comment ironic considering the Republicians were a 3rd party.

They rose merely because an existing one died. Political parties have astounding inertia; do you want to wait for one to die off before you can get a full new option?

The system in place is bias towards two parties. Sorry.

[Josh]

There's a tad more to it than that- third parties are generally the province of the stupid. Inevitably, they waste precious resources on idiotic nonsense like Presidential bids, instead of trying to build from the grass roots.

Yes, the system is biased, but we don't see any third-party advocates making a serious effort to do more than shoot for the top right off the bat.