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Confessions of a
former Republican
Daniel Silliman
This is a confession: I want to be an NPR
liberal.
I want to care about politics in India. I
want to consider new technologies in binding rare books. I want
to follow the latest trends in folk music and Canadian book
awards.
I want to embrace a kind of political world
thinking about humans not in that distanced way of wonkery and
polls and elections but with the humanist concern for individuals,
for stories about people crying or laughing, for art.
I came of age on talk radio, you could say.
In high school I worked for a beekeeper and listened to eight
hours of right-winged airwaves everyday as I painted beehives
or extracted honey from the comb. I listened to the local guys
and the national guys and I collected attacks on Clinton with
my paycheck.
I read Tom Paine and the Founding Fathers.
I looked up old issues of National Review dating back to the
80s. I read Russell Kirk and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I came
to Hillsdale College. But, slowly, I started slipping.
I think it was Solzhenitsyn first. I didn't
realize it at the time but, reading the Gulag Archipelago as
a 15-year-old political activist, I took in the horrors of ideology
and was learning to replace them with the particulars of human
stories. From a long-bearded man in a Russian prison system
to the foothills of central California I was taught a lesson:
Never place politics over human hopes and human pains; never
replace humanity with ideology; never set politics at the core
of your world.
I didn't realize what was happening until
I read Whittaker Chambers, a man hiding from Communists in darkened
farmhouses writing a letter to his children and refusing to
call himself a conservative lest he commit the sin of ideology.
As I went door to door wearing a Republican tee shirt and talking
up a Republican Senator, I began to question my political eagerness,
I began to doubt, to slip from my fortified position as a fighter
for the right, the true, the Grand Old Party.
As I sat in a Young Republicans meeting listening
to my friend and co-campaigner state definitively that all poor
people deserved to be poor I began to wonder, in the darkness
of a silence that was a fear of self-condemnation, if we weren't
guilty of the sin of political ideology. I wondered if we, arguing
against the evil that was political and working towards a political
solution, weren't guilty of the same crimes against humanity
as the Stalinists and the Fascists, of the spirit of the dirty
politics of Nixon and Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Huey Long.
This is a confession: I let the political
take over my world; I was an ideologist; I made humanity second
to candidacies and party platforms; I was a politico committed
to the sins of the fascists, the communists and poll-driven
politicians.
The summer before I moved to Hillsdale I read
a lot of Jonah Goldberg-before we knew he was the poster child
for neo-conservatism-and a bit of Russell Kirk. There was a
growing dissonance in my soul, a growing rift between the conservatism
that I wanted to believe and the conservatism I was practicing.
There was an increasing conflict between the politics I was
learning and a politics that could harmonize with philosophy,
art, culture and humanity itself.
I was Jacob wrestling in the desert night.
I was trying to save something…a political
vision, a party affiliation, a candidate, a side in the political
battles raging about my ears. I was trying to hang on to the
place I'd carved out as the aggressive young man in my local
party, the opportunity of a career in state politics, the approving
looks and the encouragement from older party members and activists.
I wanted to keep my world painted in red, white, blue and elephant.
And yet, the angel who refused me his name
kept saying, you cannot lose art, philosophy must be more than
political philosophy, you cannot fit every story to the frame
of a party platform, you cannot take every thought captive for
your candidate.
I've not renewed my subscription to National
Review this year. I've asked Hillsdale College to erect a statue
to a non-political poet or philosopher. I've tried to avoid
the daily polls and election journalism. I've reminded myself
not to dehumanize political enemies. I've begun to listen to
NPR. I've refocused, working on philosophy, poetry and poetry
criticism.
I'm a repentant politico, a recovering wonk,
and a humbled man confessing I once believed politics could
save us. This is a confession, and I pray that my penance be
accepted.
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