You have to be a registered Republican to get elected to public office in Elbert County. You don’t have to uphold any ideals normally associated with the party, and an activist minority here loudly prefers that you don’t. Party affiliation in Elbert County tells you about as much as hair color. It’s a non-dispositive attribute.
This greatly complicates matters around election time because the signals that people normally use to read the political landscape aren’t reliable. Candidates have constituencies, but the constituencies don’t know each other and aren’t identified unless they out themselves.
Politics used to be a social affair where people could air their views and engage each other with some expectation of understanding. Political parties aren’t really necessary for that to happen. But if they exist it would be nice if they meant something because the two political parties in America now speak different languages, and they don’t generally understand each other very well.
In Elbert County, however, politics are bifurcated. They are de facto non-party, under a de jure party system. On the one hand, a common party affiliation leads to an expectation of not-wildly-divergent political views, while on the other hand, wildly-divergent political views pop up under the Elbert County Republican rubric all the time.
Moreover, the minority use this confounded landscape as a tactic to ratchet the majority into the minority’s way of doing things. Under the flags of transparency, regulation, and accountability, they use subterfuge, coercion, and harassment. Like rust, the militancy never rests.
Every now and then an activist will carelessly or proudly name-drop a dash of Marx, an Alynsky rule, or a big government maxim. But they rarely get called on it because, after all, who would expect to meet a communist principle in a Republican framework?
When someone has the temerity to challenge their leftism, the shock and dismay that anyone could even think something so dastardly about the little angels comes pouring out in teachable moments of politically correct speech proscriptions. The collectivist problem (in the Republican framework) isn’t relevant, but talking about it is a high crime.
A reasonable person would think communism to be a dead philosophy. Didn’t the Berlin wall come down? Wasn’t the Russian parliament attacked by tanks? But as the Sanders campaign and the Left’s current violence on American streets are showing, communism is alive here. It’s only dead or dying in countries that have actually been governed by it.
Elbert County’s Left never got the memo. And many of them became Republicans.
Will the coming generations cure this political mess in Elbert County? With so much institutionalized denial in local politics, with an activist minority who prefer to operate without criticism under artifice and pretense, and with the young conditioned in school to look first to government for solutions, I expect not.
A return to a functioning two-party system in Elbert County wouldn’t, by itself, fix the negative consequences of subterfuge. We have an ethical deficiency, and that’s a little more difficult to remedy.