About “Independents”
A personal reflection on what “Independent” means
By Max Kintner
I’m a Democrat, always have been. But like a lot of Democrats my allegiance to the Democratic Party reflects my conviction that it’s the lesser of two evils. I certainly don’t mean to disparage either individual Dems or the party as a whole by saying that. I just think it’s naive and unnecessary to expect a political party to be more or better than “the best choice.”
That’s especially true of a party like the Democratic party, which is comprised of centrist conservatives, traditional liberals, and wild-eyed progressives. That’s too big a tent of free-wheeling principled-to-a-fault thinkers to keep everybody happy. So it’s fine with me if everybody just agrees that for the sake of some modicum of equality and basic survival, any voter with a conscience and a brain needs to vote against the Republican Party.
Except in extremely rare circumstances, that even rules out voting for decent individuals in the GOP, what few there are left, as well as the rank and file batshit crazy folks like Gozar and Boebert and the new Angriest White Man, Chip Roy. Politics is, above all, a team sport, and no matter how decent the Republican office holder, they’ll vote with the Party … which represents an existential threat to freedom, the environment, the economy, etc.
Anyway, although my emotional dedication to the Dems is at best lukewarm, I stay involved at the local level, being a member of the County Committee and probably in the near future, by default since nobody else wants to do it, as interim Chair of the local Village Committee.
Additionally, for years I have worked as an election inspector in my very conservative Republican Upstate New York community. And what I know from my experience doing this is that, at least around here, “Independent” is likely to mean “too conservative to call myself a Republican.”
Yeah, I know. It’s hard to believe anybody could maintain that view. But what can I tell you? These are generally folks who get 90% of their political information from Fox, or worse, and 10% from buddies who are even more misinformed, more paranoid, or more full of goofy conspiracy theories than they are.
The other type of “Independent” are folks who are just too uninformed or too unconfident to publicly commit to one worldview or another. These are often folks who hardly ever even watch the news because it’s boring to them or it evokes an intolerable level of cognitive dissonance between what they think is right and what their macho buddies are saying on the little league ballfield with their kids, or at the volunteer firehouse (the ruling clique here in the Village), or at the tavern. It’s easier for them, in a town like this, to say they’re “Independent,” because it says nothing about what they stand for except for “I don’t know or care enough about politics to risk putting my views out there for judgment.”
Maybe it’s different in other communities, I don’t know. And I don’t rule out the possibility of some few local folks having principled, well-considered reasons for refusing to affiliate with the party that best represents their policy preferences. In fact, I know there’s a good number of former well-known high-flying Republicans who have taken that position. People who are not inclined to join the Democratic Party, even though they now vote exclusively for Democrats. But I don’t personally know anybody like that. And I suspect that across the country my own understanding of “Independent” accurately describes the vast majority of people who claim that political non-identity.