I welcome Jason Thigpen into the Democratic Party. I actually agree with him about a lot of things. But, on policy? Not so much.
Mr. Thigpen was a Republican candidate for the 3rd Congressional District seat in North Carolina before the party shut the government down. Now he is a Democratic candidate for the 3rd Congressional District seat in North Carolina. He’s a veteran who served in Iraq. He’s a staunch defender of the 2nd Amendment, although he does express an interest in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals. He supports a strong national defense and believes America has a duty to do humanitarian and nation-building missions. He wants us to get serious about entitlement reform and he wants to lower government spending and reduce taxes and regulations, although he supports smart investments in infrastructure. He wants higher standards in our education system, although he appears to oppose charter schools.
He seems to me to be a conventional Republican of the Bush Era, with a little bit more overall common sense.
“Enough is enough,” says Jason R. Thigpen – formerly a Republican candidate seeking election to the U.S. House in North Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District. “After discussing it with my wife and family, I’ve decided to run as a Democrat rather than a Republican. I simply cannot stand with a Party where its most extreme element promote hate and division amongst people. Nothing about my platform has, nor will it change. The government shutdown was simply the straw that broke the camels back. I guess being an American just isn’t good enough anymore and I refuse to be part of an extremist movement in the GOP that only appears to thrive on fear and hate mongering of anyone and everyone who doesn’t walk their line. We’ve received some wonderful support by numerous leaders and members within the NC GOP, as the vast majority of Republicans are wonderful, hard-working people that don’t agree with those radical nut-jobs either but unfortunately the extremists in the party, with their ‘burn it all down’ philosophy, appear to be the ones turning out the majority of voters in the primaries and mid-term elections. And I want the people to know there is a choice.”
And a bit more of his diatribe:
Thigpen further explains, “I didn’t go to war to defend the liberties and freedoms of one Party, race, sex, or one income class of Americans. Whether white, black, Hispanic, Asian, man, woman, gay, lesbian, straight, rich, or poor – we fought together as equals, side-by-side for the benefit of every American in the same. So, to come home from serving our country and see North Carolina legislators using their super-majority status to gerrymander districts and pass a law to deliberately suppress and oppress the voting rights of Democrats but more specifically minorities and college students, is absolutely deplorable. This same group of spineless legislators piggybacked a motorcycle safety bill with legislation intentionally geared to shut down women’s health clinics because of their ‘right righteous’ beliefs on abortion, while then cutting funding to the programs which help feed and provide healthcare to the babies they invariably forced the same women to have. Sounds like the Christian thing to do, huh? These legislators, acting under the guise of the religious right and morality believe themselves to be the divine judge but according to the Bible, there is only one judge. They say they’re for a smaller government and individual rights while pushing legislation for more government intervention and regulation usurping our right to choose for ourselves. They take money away from the public school system so they can call it broken, only to give the money to their charter schools that are really private schools, just so our kids don’t go to the same school as theirs all the while giving some great speech trying to convince us it isn’t segregation. Right. But all along, they seemingly want you to believe that you have a choice – like ‘cake or death.’
He’s running against Walter “Freedom Fries” Jones, who switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party back in 1994. So, that’s kind of interesting. Rep. Jones had an epiphany about his early support for Dick & George’s Excellent Adventure in Iraq and is now very disinclined to support the kind of nation-building efforts that Thigpen thinks we must undertake as part of our national duty. That’s an interesting contrast, too.
I’m not sure what the Congressional Democrats will do with Mr. Thigpen if he actually wins this race, but I do see some areas of sincere agreement. He doesn’t like racialized politics; he respects the right to vote; he sees charter schools as a proxy for segregation; he sees the hypocrisy in denying assistance to young mothers at the same time that you oppose abortion rights; he wants to make smart infrastructure investments; he can probably support immigration reform, and he might go along with expanded criminal background checks for gun purchases. On the other hand, there are several areas related to foreign policy and surveillance where I am probably more aligned with Rep. Jones.
Nothing is simple. I’ll be keeping an eye on North Carolina’s 3rd District. And I’ll be looking for other examples of solid Republicans leaving their party in disgust.
A pox on them both.
The other Democrat in the race at the moment is Marshall Adams, a USMC veteran. (Camp Lejeune is in the district.)
I expect Adams to beat Thigpen unless he is bringing some Republican money with him.
And I expect former Democrat and sometime Tea Partier Walter Jones, who thinks that Congressional seats are inherited, to be re-elected.
Because Thigpen is a predictable Republican and Walter Jones is an all-over-the-map member of Congress, this one might turn out to be interesting.
He’ll get props from me for quoting a famous transvestite comic at the end of that diatribe.
He’s a staunch defender of the 2nd Amendment
Now what does that mean?
I assume it means he interprets the first clause of the second amendment (13 of the 27 words in the amendment) to be meaningless window dressing and pays attention only to the second clause. Thus, that anyone can own any arms they want at any time without any infringement.
Well, actually, no one believes that. Even the 2nd amendment literalists concede that there have to be some “infringements” – WMDs, for example, are “arms” that the government can “infringe” upon. And on airplanes. And walking around the halls of Congress. And courthouses. And … and … and …
In fact, a “staunch” defender of the second amendment is just someone who thinks that their unwritten rules for what can’t be “infringed” upon are the right rules. Just like people who claim to interpret the bible “literally”, in fact they are just saying “my opinion rules and I’ll pretend that the Constitution backs me up.”
He wants higher standards in our education system, although he appears to oppose charter schools.
I’m not sure those are mutually exclusive, and wonder how that “although” got in there.
sigh.
Sorry, I have a very dry sense of humor, which doesn’t always come across well.
I get it…he doesn’t necessarily support charter schools over public schools, nor would you, I assume, and the although implies that he is a Republican who hasn’t been brainwashed into thinking private Charter > Public school.
That said, this, Booman, is how the Republican/Tea Party split is surely going to go, if it is going to go.
Relatively sane Republicans will join the next right-ish political party, the Democrats, and then when the Republican party is nothing but a state/local party and regional party, progressive can start to peel away from the Demopubs and then we can start to reverse the last 30+ years of idiocy.
Thanks for your tireless blogging! You, Kevin Drum, Driftglass and Charlie Pierce are the places I call home.
No, then Progressives will be purged from the Party.
Progressives who want to enact a progressive agenda will have to self-purge themselves from the Democrats eventually.
Here’s how history works. First, you have a monarch. As the monarchy proves to be inefficient and counter-productive, you get an aristocracy. Then a parlimentary monarchy, then a Democratic Republic with a monarch/aristocracy party and a liberal-leaning democratic party. As the monarch/aristocratic party loses favor, they move leftward, and the more democratic members of the democratic party move more leftward.
If you want a relatively peaceful revolution away from everything Republican, first that party has to become anathema to reasonable, rational people.
It is in the process of doing this right now. So, let’s get more tea party candidates into races against Republicans in moderate/blue districts. We need the Republicans to help destroy themselves. Which, again, they are currently doing.
Then, when the remaining sane Republicans realize that their brand is garbage, let them join with the Democrats, on the right-wing of the party. At that point, you’re basically cementing the socially liberal policies of Democrats into place, and allowing Progressive economic and social issues to become the new left wing, with issues like gay marriage, abortion, pseudo-universal health care becoming the norm.
More progressive Democrats can then lean left, tilting the Democratic party as far left as it can without toppling, before they can then start bring in the green/Progressive third party people to help form a new party.
There will always be a moderate/right party in any country with free elections. Look at Canada, Germany, France, etc.
The goal of Progressives is progress, which never ends except in fairy tales. So, if we can get the Democrats to become the new right/center-right party, Progressives can then become the more left party.
This isn’t something that happens next week or even by next decade. But it is something that is/can be starting now, if progressives and their allies keep it in mind as a long-term goal.
With a preponderance of Lieberdems, McAuliffe’s and turncoat Republicans they will have a right wing majority that doesn’t need progressives and can safely purge them.
I think we could be entering a period on the national level that is a lot like the 1930s-1990’s on the congressional level, where the Democrats basically have a lock on the White House with only uncommon and brief interludes.
And I think modern day Democrats really have a very poor understanding of how the 20th-Century Democrats pulled off that long string of dominance and what they actually believed. It was the party of Jim Crow, but also the party of the Washington Establishment, the party of immigrants and union bosses, but also the party of artists and intellectuals. It could follow Henry Wallace with Harry Truman as vice-president, and it could unite JFK’s Boston with LBJ’s Texas. It was not an ideologically coherent party, but it was big and it was nearly unbeatable. It was held together with string wire, but it held together until Vietnam and Civil Rights ripped it apart.
The country is divided differently now and the parties are much ideologically uniform. The Republicans have built in advantages in the House, and not only from gerrymandering. So, I think, at least for now, they will remain very competitive in the House of Representatives, but I think the Senate will slip away from them after the 2016 elections for a while, and we could build a very big and somewhat sustainable supermajority there. And the White House is out of the Republicans’ reach until either they change substantially or the find lightning in a bottle.
The real question that are I grappling with is what, if anything, the business community can do to get some decent representation, because throwing money at Democrats is of limited utility to them, even if it is currently their only sound strategy.
Hmmm.
All I can think is “how does he plan on pulling this off?”