To Pick and Choose, and Even Vote

As I have gone from home to home in America doing my work over the past 25 years, I have heard various American men and women, fathers and mothers, try to sort out their political attitudes and, especially in election years, their sense of what each of the two major political parties has to offer them.

There is no doubt in my mind that most of the poor and working-class people I have met still look to the Democratic Party for support when and if they are in social or economic jeopardy. Yet lots of those people don’t vote--often telling me they doubt any kind of politics will really address their fundamental vulnerability.

Here, for instance, is a man who drives a delivery truck for a major national institution: “I get by--barely. My wife’s salary (she works as a saleslady) is what gives us an edge on things. We can be wiped out in a minute, we know it: one illness, and that’s that! We’re not up to our necks in debt, like a lot of folks we know, but we’re headed there.

“When I’ve voted--not very often--I’ve been with the Democrats, mostly. They’re for the ordinary folks--I mean, they’re pushing to give you a break, so you don’t go under. If they had their way, we’d have a better health plan--for families that can’t afford to get sick, the way it is now. We’d have some housing being put up for people who need it, and can’t find any. We’d have the rich paying out more, and the poor not going hungry. The trouble is, lots of those Democrats, they’re not so nice when you take a look at them--the company they keep. I mean they want to give you a boost with money, but they don’t care if the whole country ends up in some swamp. I’m talking about the weirdos you see keeping company with the Democrats.”

I pushed him about what he meant with that last sentence, but even though I’d known him and his wife and three children for several years, he wouldn’t spell it out, perhaps because he knew he’d find me in disagreement. But I’d heard him and his wife address certain issues by indirection at other moments--heard him and his wife be not at all friendly toward certain feminists, toward gays, toward those who would bus their children across town lines to ghetto schools, toward those “who--the nerve of them--defend the right of the slimey people who push pornography on our kids.”

He and his wife, at best, have mixed feelings about abortion--defending it for particular women they have known, but feeling turned off as they contemplate those who insist on it as a “woman’s right.” He wouldn’t mind his children saying a prayer or two in school, though he sees with some prodding that under certain circumstances a religious majority in a school could easily intimidate or attempt to indoctrinate a small dissenting, or agnostic, minority.

All in all, he turns guardedly, hesitantly, to the Republicans, I notice, on the so-called social issues--as do many others I know like him. The Republicans, I keep hearing from him, are “the party of the rich,” “the party that takes care of business and the really well-to-do people.” He “leaned” toward Ronald Reagan twice--especially in 1980--but didn’t vote for anyone in either of the last two elections.

From the Republicans he seems to get a sense that they attend some of his moral concerns, complex and even contradictory though they be. It is as if he has been persuaded almost against his will by the strong and oft-repeated gestures of Presidents Nixon and Reagan toward so-called “middle America,” toward a conventionality of sorts, toward the moral and religious pieties of the past (which many still yearn to see realized in life, but also at times regard with skepticism or indifference).

I notice that many parents like him vacillate significantly as voting time approaches. One minute they want to vote Democratic, especially if the candidate at the state or local level runs a conservative campaign on the social issues that touch upon family life, but an economically populist campaign centering on bread-and-butter issues.

The next minute they turn to the Republicans, especially if the Democrat comes across as all-too “liberal” on what that man quoted above once called “family matters.”

What did he mean by that phrase? He gave me a bit of a lecture on the subject, and I fear some of his remarks would be regarded as all-too strongly worded, but the gist of the message was the mixed political feelings of his family and others he knows: “We’re plain, ordinary people. No big-shot lobbyists or lawyers represent us. We pick and choose, I guess, from those politicians, and it can be hard. If someone came along who was for us all the way--he’d want to help us with our money struggles, and he’d stand for what we believe in, our values--then we’d want to help him go all the way.”

He was telling me that then he and his wife and oldest son might even vote--overcome an apathy that is in itself a major aspect of American politics.