Raised Republican? No. Not really, although I watched the Nixon-Kennedy debate sitting next to my grandfather, who said, “You & me Republicans, kid, in this room full of {Roosevelt} Democrats.”
What I find both interesting and distressing is my utter certainty that had my grandfather been confronted with what currently passes for his party, he’d have disowned them faster than the proverbial red-headed stepchild. At the same time, those Roosevelt Democrats who survive have largely become Republicans...in the name of being “values voters”. These are the same people who, in my childhood/adolescence were union members, believers in Social Security as well as national security, and who never failed to support a school bond issue.
So what happened to them, and to me? My answer is simpler, I suspect: I raised my right hand and got out of Dodge. The more I roamed the planet, the less fearful I became; that was saying something in the Cold War era. What happened to them, is more complicated, I think. The Roe v. Wade decision was part of it; the riots in the 66-69 period were part of it; and like much of American society, there was the corrosive effect of the Warren Commission and its apparent lack of transparency (I say apparent, because I don’t think ANY investigation would have satisfied the national psychic wounds at that point.)
Go forward a few years and we began to hear the drums of the ‘culture war’ with its predicate that the dominant zeitgeist was (or should be) based on fear & anger. That has continued unabated.
I don’t know where we will end up, but I am, however faintly, hopeful. I think many of the (non-)issues will prove to be generational shifts that will tend towards greater empathy and connection, and less towards a narrower, tribal, sort of structure. At least that’s what I hope.