As promised from my inaugural post back in February, here is something that caught my eye and expressed a lot of thoughts I’ve had before. Like so many people, I feel politically homeless. Brandon Meeks, the Editor in Chief of the magazine Moonshine and Magnolias, published the column Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right, on his personal Substack called Poiema.
In the column Meeks expresses how he also feels politically homeless, but not because of the common themes you might hear from an Independent voter interviewed by Frank Luntz on Fox News.
Meeks expresses how he was raised in a conservative, Southern home where the values expressed are very similar to those expressed in my previous column A Lament for Jimmy Carter.
“I was born into a family of traditionalist Southern Democrats, a breed of political animal that has gone the way of the Dodo Bird in my lifetime. My folks went to church on Sundays, to work on Mondays, and to union meetings on Thursdays. They believed in the sacred nature of the traditional family, the supremacy of the Christian religion and its outworking in society, the inviolability of the First Amendment, and the necessity of the Second Amendment to protect all of that.”
While my parents and grandparents are Republicans, my great-grandparents were Democrats. In my own amateur genealogical research, I found in one of my great-great-grandfather's obituaries that he “voted with the Democrats and for the Second Amendment.”
That’s how he wanted to be remembered. A time when Democrats weren’t anarcho-communists with green armpit hair and a progress pride flag. When Democrats did back-breaking work, served Christ, and were upstanding members of their agrarian community.
The thing is, I do believe in the necessity of the state providing some sort of minimal assistance for the less fortunate, like many old school agrarian Democrats would say. After all, I am a Christian and I want to see a Christian state act those things out. But not to the extreme of universal basic income or wealth confiscation and redistribution that we see in the modern Democrat Party. And no, I don’t think I’m treading too closely to utopianism that Leftists often fall for. I also recognize non-profit groups and churches are likely still the best conduits for poverty assistance.
I feel politically homeless because I’m still way more conservative than the Republican Party platform, but I’m no Godless commie either.
In the words of Hank Jr., “Have pity on a dinosaur. Just hand me my hat, excuse me ma’am, but where’s the door?” Meeks explains this very well in his column. Enjoy.
Grant Allen can be reached by email at grantallen@iheartmedia.com. If you’re interested in reading his other posts, check out his archived content or learn more about him by checking his short bio here.