Profile of a Tea Party supporter: My late grandfather

My late maternal grandfather was a Republican 'til the day he died. However, he wasn't like my paternal grandfather, who is conservative in a more traditional, pragmatic, doesn't-want-to-change-too-much-but-maybe-a-little sense, and who was also a lifelong Republican, but changed his registration to Independent after being totally disillusioned and disgusted (like so many were) by the Presidency of George W. Bush.

No, my maternal grandfather was one of those individuals who thought President Obama was a "radical", a "socialist", and who packed his administration with "Communists" who were "ruining the country." His problem with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was that they were too moderate. It should come as no surprise, then, that my grandfather was enamored with the Tea Party, and repeated many of the exact same talking points, word for word, in conversations that I had with him in his last few years.

What drew a man like my grandfather to rigid, dogmatic right-wing ideology? I have a few good guesses, but no one reason.

First, I am fairly certain that his father-my great-grandfather, who died before I was born-was also a super-conservative Republican. Born in Chicago to an upper-middle class family, my great-grandfather actually left school in the ninth or tenth grade (can't remember which) and immediately started working, eventually getting his license to sell insurance. I am told by family members that he was a natural salesman and possessed of a strong work ethic, traits which clearly served him well, since he eventually became a very wealthy man. I think that these traits rubbed off on my grandfather to some extent. Born to a Yankee Protestant family, he converted to Catholicism when he married my grandfather's mother, an Irish Catholic. My grandfather was the fifth of six children-five boys and one girl.

My grandfather's family background provides a clue for why he turned out the way he did politically. First, neither of his parents were close to their kids, especially my great-grandmother. They actually were wealthy enough to have a butler and a maid, who looked after the kids. Second, my grandfather was bullied mercilessly by one of his older brothers. The coldness of his parents, combined with living in fear of his older brother, must have impacted my grandfather in profound ways.

This was in the 1930s and 1940s. Being pretty wealthy, my grandfather's parents were relatively insulated from the effects of the Great Depression. By the late 1940s, they had moved from Chicago to Southern California, buying a new house similar to their extravagant house back in Illinois. However, their lavish lifestyle did not last, for my great-grandparents, like so many rich people, gambled a lot, eventually losing much of their money betting on race horses.

Another significant thing to consider-my great-grandparents did not value education highly, for themselves or their kids. In fact, my grandfather was the only one of his six siblings to complete his Bachelor's degree, and that was with the help of a basketball scholarship. Furthermore, it is my belief that if his friends from high school weren't all going to college as well, my grandfather may never had gotten his degree. Therefore, it seems like he was, in some sense, the most accomplished of his family in academics.

This was in the 1950s, during the height of the Cold War. I am sure my grandfather, having Republican parents, grew up hearing his father grumble about the New Deal, or curse the godless, foreign Communists who seemed to be infiltrating his beloved America. There were heated political arguments in their house about JFK (being a Catholic household in addition to being Republican), or so I am told, so perhaps not everyone was a right-wing Republican. Nevertheless, my grandfather's right-wing political views were definitely-at least, to some extent- shaped in the context of the Cold War hysteria of the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.

However, my grandfather, conservative as he was, actually admitted to me that he voted for Lydon Johnson in 1964! Of course, he also told me that he soon regretted that vote, seeing as how expansive LBJ's liberal domestic policy was, in addition to his misadventure in Vietnam. The 1960s may well have been the turning point for my grandfather, and many more like him, who were fearful of urban crime, radical activists, disrespectful students, spoiled hippies, and the ever-looming threat of the Soviet Union. They associated all of these social problems with the liberal administration of Lyndon Johnson, a Democratic Congress, an "activist" Supreme Court, and other institutions dominated by mainstream liberalism at the time.

By the time the 1970s rolled around, it is likely that my grandfather was incredibly disillusioned with the political Establishment, both Democratic (LBJ) and Republican (Nixon and Ford). And he wasn't about to vote for Jimmy Carter, who seemed to make the U.S. look weaker still on the international stage with every move he made. Watergate, the energy crises, inflation, and the Iran Hostage crisis, not to mention the rising crime rates in major cities and the broad perception that the United States was losing the Cold War because it was in national decline....well, it would take someone bold, daring, optimistic, and without the baggage of being a Washington insider. Someone idealistic and conservative. Someone who was willing to remake the United States into the conservative ideal.

That someone, of course, was Ronald Reagan. Familiar to my grandfather and millions of others, particularly Californians like my grandfather, as an actor, conservative ideological spokesman, and two-term Governor of the Golden State. Here was a man who men and women of my grandfather's background and personality could identify with. A Midwestern transplant to California and a former Democrat (unlike my grandfather in that regard, yet that served to broaden Reagan's appeal), possessed of a sunny disposition and a can-do spirit, and having a remarkably simple faith in the idea that the private sector, the 'free market", will solve domestic problems, and that federal government infringement on the rights of private individuals and families was the real cause of those domestic and social ills. The problem wasn't a mismanaged government, or a government that wasn't prioritizing the right things-it was the government itself, and the idea that it should be a tool of social reform. My grandfather probably thought Reagan was the best thing that happened to American politics in his lifetime, and so for him, he became the standard by which all politicians would be judged.

However, as we on DU know, it wasn't really Reagan's actual policies that the Tea Party has fallen in love with (though there is some of that too, no doubt). It was what Reagan represented-a uniquely American right-wing idealism. Nobody-not even Reagan himself-could possibly live up to this ideal. Yet in the case of the Gipper, the Tea Party has deliberately whitewashed his record and distorted it to a few slogans. And people like my grandfather willingly bought into the propaganda.

I loved my grandfather, and I still love him-always will. Yet he was very bull-headed and misinformed when it came to politics. Partly because of his life experiences shaping his personality, which in turn, made him that much more receptive to the right-wing "bubble" of bad information and lies. In debating politics with him, I knew he would never change his mind about anything substantial, so I eventually stopped talking about politics altogether when he was around.

Let this be a lesson, then: Even your loved ones can and will fall for things that are so far from the truth, it hurts. In my grandfather's case, it was the right-wing ideological universe that he inhabited to the day he died. Yet I still loved him, despite all of that; that's one of the true tests of love, when you love someone in spite of the things you can't change about them, but you wish you could.