I was born into a family of Republicans. My parents, as well as most of my aunts, uncles and cousins are all life-long Republicans.

Like most children, I aped the beliefs and values of my parents. I became fully politically conscious in 1964, when Barry Goldwater ran for the Presidency. I was only fifteen years old then, but I was a big fan of Barry Goldwater.

Later, as I went off to college and as the Viet Nam war endured, America’s position of moral authority in the world began to erode and I came to realize that government and liberty are fundamentally and irreconcilably inconsistent. Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968, and launched such sinister attacks on civil liberties as the notorious FBI-led Cointelrpo campaign. Later, his henchmen burglarized the Democratic Party headquarters and Nixon’s regime collapsed in scandal and disgrace.

Admittedly, my views on Republican Party politics are somewhat skewed, but never did I regard the Democratic Party as a viable alternative.

That being said, my memories of what the Republican party once represented and championed seem to be at variance with what the Republican party stands for today. Since my parents were Republicans, many of their close friends were also Republicans. These included a dentist, two or three doctors, and several other professional people, all of whom were bright and well-educated. And although these friends of my parents were nominally Christian, they belonged to such well-heeled WASP denominations as the Presbyterians, who did not take the Bible literally and who did not abandon a healthy appreciation of science and learning in favor of religious fanaticism. To my knowledge none of them would have suggested that the earth was only 6,000 years old, or that creationism made more sense than natural selection. As a matter of fact, the only people who clung to such pre-scientific beliefs back then seemed to be predominantly Southern Baptists, who were also mainly Democrats.

The Republican Party of 1964 stood for limited government. It opposed welfare statism, taxation, and fiscal irresponsibility. Goldwater himself was a bit of a maverick with a long streak of irreverence. In a booklet about his life released during the campaign, it was noted that Goldwater, as a young boy, lived across the street from a church in Phoenix. The young Goldwater had a toy cannon made out of an old shotgun. Every Sunday morning, in the middle of the church service, he would drag out his cannon and fire it off. Hardly the kind of behavior you would expect from a Focus on the Family fanatic, and what is remarkably noteworthy about my memory of this anecdote is that it would not only have circulated widely in 1964, but that it would have been circulated in the Republicans’ own campaign literature and that it was not the kind of story about oneself that one ought to be ashamed of. With regard to the deepest American values and traditions, the Republican Party philosophy was best summed up in the 1964 campaign slogan, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

I did not know it at the time, but those words were actually penned by a man named Karl Hess. Hess was Goldwater’s speechwriter in 1964. In 1971, I had the good fortune to spend a couple of days with Karl Hess when I was in Tucson. Karl, by that time, had apparently glimpsed the decline and fall of the party he once served, had chucked his entire middle class lifestyle, and had become an outright anarchist. He went on to write a book about his life called "Dear America." Karl Hess remains largely unknown, but he once edited William F. Buckley’s National Review and he helped shape conservative thought in the early 1960's. He even appears briefly as a character in one of Buckley’s Blackford Oakes spy novels. Karl had taken the slogan he had coined – Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice – and had made it his own personal credo.

Today, what passes for a "conservative movement" in the United States is led by such intellectual featherweights as Ann Coulter and a mob of Evangelical Christians who collectively think that global warming is a liberal myth, that "creation science" ought to be taught in public schools, and that the best way to tackle any problem is with the ludicrous Bronze Age ritual of "prayer." These so-called conservatives no longer preoccupy themselves with such matters as individual liberty. Instead, they seek to turn America into a theocracy run by a home-grown Taliban. And like the Taliban of Afghanistan, they would strip women of the right to seek an abortion, persecute homosexuals, and make their demented religion the touchstone for determining what can and cannot be taught in science classes. They are the antithesis of what men like Karl Hess believed in. I know.

The representative conservative today is not a doctor, lawyer, or university professor, as he might have been in 1964. He is more likely an Amway Ponzi scheme huckster, a Primerica "investment counselor" or an evangelical moron who teaches his children that the dinosaurs perished in "Noah’s Flood." In the years of the Republican Eisenhower Administration, massive allocations went toward improving math and science curricula in public schools. Today, Republicans either "home school" their children or shuttle them off to some kind of "Christian Academy" for a good Taliban-like education in the "True Faith." Public schools, and particularly the teaching of science and mathematics, are largely forgotten. Instead, the public’s dollars are spent lining the pockets of corporate bandits. This is why America now ranks twenty-fifth in the world in educating its children in the rudiments of science and math. This is why America now has a "conservative" President who cannot even pronounce a simple word like "nuclear," which used to appear in high school biology and physics textbooks.

 And so when I stumbled upon an article last Friday stating that Julie Nixon Eisenhower, David Eisenhower, and David’s three sisters all support Barack Obama, I was not really that surprised. According to Susan Eisenhower, the Republican Party today is "fiscally reckless."

The Republican Party, sometime between 1964 and the present, was highjacked by savagely anti-intellectual Christian evangelicals. My poor relatives, for whom old habits apparently die hard, have not caught on to this fact, or perhaps they don’t care. In the dumbing down of America since the mid-sixties, the Republican Party has stood in the vanguard. Maps showing state-by-state voting patterns in the past two Presidential elections demonstrate this fact quite remarkably: the states with the highest incidence of highly educated professional people have voted Democratic. A few other states, such as my own, where college graduates are just beginning to outnumber the indigenous sodbusters, are the "battleground" states. The only states solidly in the Republican camp are, predictably, those where the majority are less well educated and mired in the stupefying muck of religion.

Recently, I was chastised by one cousin who could not fathom how I had abandoned my family’s tradition of voting Republican, as though voting were some kind of test of clan loyalty. An uncle attending my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary belligerently demanded to know if I intended to vote for "Bubba."   When I explained to him that I do not vote, and told him why, he proceeded to reproach me for "not taking a stand for what I believe in."  These and other relatives will vote on November 4^th for whatever clowns their party places into nomination. In their sorry eyes I am a radical misfit, a renegade who abandoned his solid middle class conservative Republican heritage.

All because, like Karl Hess, I clung to the idea that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. All because I did not wildly embrace the patently fascistic provisions of the so-called Patriot Act. All because I do not favor flushing two trillion dollars down the crapper in Iraq to prove my "fiscal responsibility." In the upcoming election, it is somehow symbolic of the decline of the Republican Party that its candidate is the one who will be accepting Federal "matching funds," while the democratic nominee, Barack Obama, is paying his way on private contributions. In this election, John McCain is the "welfare queen" my conservative kinfolk used to rail against.  Obama, the Democrat, is a highly educated Harvard-trained lawyer who struggled through college on scholarships. He edited the Harvard Law Review. Mc Cain, his opponent, got a political appointment to Annapolis because his daddy and Grandfather were both admirals. He graduated 894^th out of a class of 899, which tells you something about his intellectual credentials. He is a moron leading a party of morons.

The contradictions are there; all these relatives need do is open their eyes. Or perhaps they ought to listen a little more closely to Julie Nixon Eisenhower. The political party they continue to champion has, without them even noticing it, come to embrace the opposite of nearly every value it once held. Eight years of Republican rule have bankrupted the Treasury, emasculated the Bill of Rights, and made Southern Baptist theology the benchmark for what ought to be taught in biology class.

And here sit I, an anarchist, a non-voter, an extremist defending liberty, more closely attuned to traditional Buckley-Hess-Goldwater conservative values than these fools ever will be. 

There’s a delicious piece of irony.