Orcinus on why he stopped being a Republican:
By 1980, guys like Bob Baumann, Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were running the Republican show in Congress, and Reagan was ascendant and clearly headed for the White House. A few progressive Republicans — John Chaffee, for instance — trooped on, but everyone knew they were utterly voiceless within the party. And it has been that way for them ever since.
So it was that year, and that election, that I reluctantly left the GOP. Though I was a devout Christian, I feared and distrusted the theocratic right with whom Reagan had aligned himself — I believed, and still do, that they are no respecters of other people’s private religious beliefs — and moreover I could see through Helms and Thurmond where the conservative movement was getting its ideological fires. I couldn’t stand Jimmy Carter (a view I’ve reassessed) and voted for John Anderson.
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Put another way: The ‘Big Tent’ that the Republican Party once boasted has shifted. Where once it included mainstream conservatives and moderate progressives, it now only includes those conservatives and the right-wing extremists who comprise a substantial portion of its Southern wing. When Nixon initiated the Southern Strategy, he opened the tent to those reactionaries and forced the rest of us either out of the tent or into their arms. Many of us chose the former, while the Bushes and their power-hungry kind chose the latter.
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It became clear to me through the entire Clinton impeachment episode that the GOP was rapidly becoming unsalvageable in its hatred of all things progressive or liberal. And after Dec. 12, 2000, I came to the conclusion that I could no longer vote a mixed ticket — not, at least, until the GOP has been summarily dismissed from the halls of power and spends enough time in purgatory to genuinely repent of its ways. I do not anticipate this happening anytime soon.