[This post was originally published on The Living Room Tumblr.]
I have, for a long time, flirted with the idea of switching my major-party affiliation (and have been repeatedly told by conservative friends that, based on my opinions about various issues, I should switch, or even that I inevitably will switch someday). Truth is, I have a significant streak of common-sense libertarianism, which fits better in the GOP than in the more statist-leaning Democratic Party. Hence, I often disagree with the Dems about important issues. (Not all, certainly! But more than a token handful.) I rarely agree completely with the GOP, but I often feel uncomfortably closer to their position than the Dems’. And with the anti-gay vitriol, which is a deal-breaker for me, receding in the mainstream GOP as the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice on that issue, there’s increasingly been a case to be made that I belong in the GOP at least as much as in the Dem camp.
Not anymore, though. This shutdown/debt ceiling lunacy, and the self-evidently risible “arguments” being trotted out in defense of it, will, I suspect, poison me on the GOP for a long, long time, if not forever. I could have perhaps written off the 2011 debt-ceiling debacle as a one-time aberration, but this is now clearly who and what Republicans are. Unless and until the party makes a clean break from this absurd, shameful, indefensible, illogical, antidemocratic, antirepublican madness – by which I mean that it must, eventually, clearly and unequivocally dissociate from this aspect of its past – I couldn’t possibly associate myself with such a party, regardless of the Dems’ many flaws.