“As long as constitutionality remains healthy…”

Found something my dad wrote in summer ‘08, just before he died that September at age 79, in reply I think to questions I’d put about his (and his generation’s) patriotism… an excessive patriotism, in my view, really a chauvinistic nationalism. 

Very interesting what he says there about the health of American democracy depending upon its fealty to “constitutionality” and honesty. He’d be appalled to know what has ensued in this country, and in the world, in the almost-two decades since his demise. He may have remained Republican, had he lived that long, but I am sure he’d have been a never-Trumper. He was already contemptuous of what he called the new “coarseness” in our politics. January 6 would have made him apoplectic. 

 But I’d still have quarreled with with his historical interpretations. On the page just before the one reproduced here, he credited his Cuban friends Pascual and Angela Garcia (who’d fled the island when Castro came to power) with raising his political conscience and warning him that President Johnson’s Great Society reforms reminded them of what happened in Cuba before the revolution. That’s crazy, of course. Bourgeois liberalism is not to be confounded with communist revolution. 

Interestingly, though, dad confesses that prior to that he might even have been a bit left of center. I do recall overhearing adult conversations, in my childhood, in which he defended Dr. King and the civil rights movement. So did my mother. 

I’m afraid he’d still have railed, Reagan-style, against big government. But compared to most of his peers he was still on the progressive side of things. I miss our conversations, and his good sense and decency. So does his party.