I am 36 years old so getting closer to 40 every day.
I've told this story many times but the first time I became interested in something political was at a Burger King with my father. President Bush was on TV and he wanted to ban gays from getting married and he wanted it in the Constitution. Gay marriage was the issue that year (there was no talk of trans people as a national issue). I was shocked that the President would want to amend the Constitution to restrict freedom - and thus I became that day a Democrat. I voted for the Democratic ticket in 2004 despite thinking they were weak simply because the opposition party was attacking my own community and I was repulsed by it.
Today I am even more repulsed by the Republicans - they've gone far beyond what I thought they would do with LGBTQ people and have become really the enemy in so many ways to our lives and our existence. They clearly do not want my vote so I clearly am not going to entertain their ideas or value anything they have to say. Any conservative ideas I might have are pushed aside, and I will remain a straight ticket voting Democrat for good.
My politics have been entirely REACTIONARY - I reacted to the political world of 2004 and I'll always still exist in that world. In many ways I can tell you not much as changed - the Democrats are still the weaker of the two parties, they're branded as soft and feminine and yet at the same time as dangerous and radical by the Republicans... much of the rhetoric and the style has remained the same. The ideologies have become more deranged, and the country more polarized, but 2004 was the beginning I feel of the current political system where the opposition candidate is the leader of the enemy.
The Iraq War and, particularly, my parents' opposition to it, is what fueled my interest in politics at the tender age of 9. I didn't particularly care about the Democratic nominee because I was too new to understand much, other than sort of liking Kerry because "he's handsome and serves a neighboring state." I never understood why a party that claims to support "freedom" was trying to ban gay marriage for strictly religious purposes. The idea of giving tax breaks to people who needed them less didn't make any sense to me. And if you opposed other intrusive Bush policies like wiretapping, or if you opposed the Iraq War, you supported the Democrats even if they voted the wrong way on the war or the Patriot Act. (But then so did beating-heart liberals like Pat Buchanan in 2006.)
In some ways I feel like we're living in the inverse of those times, where Bush Republicans are welcomed by the establishment "left." As recently as 2014, Liz Cheney was (rightly) criticized for throwing her own sister under the bus - something that her father wouldn't even do. The mental image of congressional Democrats lining up to shake Dick Cheney's hand repulses me. A decade ago, it was popular in vaguely center-left circles to call the man a war criminal. Democrats now have a net-positive opinion of George W. Bush.
My family was so pro-Bush and really because of the politics of terrorism. Some of them became completely sucked in by the conservative media, Fox News, and talk radio so that now they're ranting about things like CRT and "the Squad" and all of that nonsense.
The 2000s were so defined by terrorism, the military/the war and patriotism was always a part of it. If you were against the Bush-Cheney administration's foreign policy, you were not a patriot - that was the message that was sent by the right wing and Fox News and all of those people.
Now those issues are barely discussed. Nobody wants to talk about the war it seems - nobody wants to talk about Afghanistan or Iraq, or terrorism...
Suddenly fighting everything "woke" became so important, and I don't know if they've run out of ideas, but it's really ridiculous. We went from terrorism and war to talking about "woke" and CRT and pronouns and all of that crap... it's just very baffling... the sociocultural issues drive the electorate. In the coming weeks, it's going to be abortion most likely...
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