Momma Was a Liberal -- What Happened to Me?

What seems like months ago (because it, well, was), I did a piece for this column, laughing at Ben Affleck for feeling the need to try to hide the fact that an ancestor of his had been a slave-owner in Georgia.  I loved doing that piece; I loved it because of his utter hypocrisy and because of the final point of the episode, which is that we are not accountable for the actions of our ancestors.

Now, that may have been the only time I will agree strongly with anything Ben Affleck says in regard to consequential matters, but it bears repeating.  Gentle Ben, forced to burnish his liberal reputation though confronted by a distinctly illiberal ancestor's actions, had to blurt out in Twitterese or the like, that we should be judged on our own belief system and actions, and not those of our progenitors.

So how do we deal with the frequency with which children -- not grandchildren, but actual children seem so often to have differences of opinion on the fundamentals of the liberal vs. conservative debates of our time?  Certainly it is not the overwhelming norm, but it happens often enough, and certainly not just where the children resent their parents.

I feel that personally.  My parents lived long and healthy, productive lives.  They were good people who even into their nineties maintained their own house, and presented a close front together for the almost 66 years they were married.  Dad would have been 100 this past December; Mom would have turned 99 a month ago, and they could certainly have lived longer than they did.

And they were both Democrats.

That is particularly relevant because they had two surviving children, my older brother and I, and while we both loved our parents, we are both very conservative adults.  My brother "took care" of our folks, in the sense of being there for them (I lived far away) for many, many years, and so had to avoid much in the way of political discussion with them to keep the peace.  I was an occasional visitor and so the topic rarely arose.

But the fact is, as the title of this piece asserts, "Momma was a liberal."  And she was.  She would be out there for Hillary Clinton now, if she weren't in the Bernie Sanders camp.  I want to tell you, she was an extremely bright and well-read lady who thought about things.  Of course, the issue is not that she was a liberal or, for that matter, that Dad was a Democrat (I hesitate to attribute the term "liberal" to him; I doubt he voted other than Democrat his whole life but I can't actually recall an actual liberal comment from his mouth in the 60 years we were both on earth).

No, the question is why my brother and I became so conservative in contrast, when we loved and respected our parents.  And I think I understand.

I believe that people's political leanings are such that opinions on various topics assort.  In fact, my very first piece here was about just that; that there are no real groups called "moderates" who could coalesce around a single candidate, because our views on even unrelated issues tend to assort along what we think of as conservative or liberal lines. And I believe that is a product of an individual's upbringing as much, or more, than anything else.

My brother and I, less than three years apart in age, had essentially identical childhoods and upbringings.  Our lives diverged quite a bit after I was 15 when he went off to college, but when we finally lived in the same state again, after some 45 years, we discovered astonishing similarities -- even down to our choice in ballpoint pens.

And politics.  That we agree upon right down the line, and it does not resemble the leanings of our parents at all.

I suspect, when it comes down to it, that we learned from our parents the value of work, thrift, risk, charity and other things.  I suspect that once upon a time those might have been values of people called Democrats.  I know that certainly is not the case now.  Perhaps it was liberalism itself that changed, and we're a lot more like Dad and Mom than the candidates we would now support would indicate.

But to feel like, say, Federal budgets should be balanced, well, that's something you extrapolate from what you learn at home -- and that, at least today, is a conservative belief.  To feel like any one group should be prejudiced against -- or favored -- based on their race, well, I don't know that our folks would feel much different from what we do.  And to agree to both sides of that is to be a conservative.  To believe that government exists to do the things that the Constitution says it does and no more -- I don't know what that says.  But my brother Rich and I are both big fans of the document as written.  And we are conservatives.

Perhaps Momma was a liberal once, but might not be now.  Were she still alive, she might support Hillary more out of subconscious obligation than actual sharing of values.  I have trouble thinking Dad wouldn't have thought more than once before voting for her, and who knows what he would have done in the booth.

I think, at the end of the day, that they may have been liberals, and we are certainly conservatives, but they raised us the best they knew how.  And that may very well explain why we are who we are.

No wonder the left doesn't seem to support strong, two-parent homes.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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