Why I Quit the Republican Party
A year ago, Pablo Pantoja was the future of the Republican Party, courting fellow Latinos for the conservative cause and stumping across Florida with Ann Romney’s brother. “Hispanics in the area are going to realize the Republican Party is where they belong,” the Puerto Rico-born Iraq vet told the New York Times in April 2012, just a week after being named the Republican National Committee’s Latino outreach director in the electorally all-important Sunshine State. “We are going to engage Hispanics and Latinos like we’ve never done before,” Reince Priebus had told reporters that month in a conference call introducing Pantoja and his counterparts in five other battleground states. (On Election Night, Mitt Romney lost all of those states except for one, North Carolina.)
Last night, Pantoja put the Grand Old Party in his past. In a moving online letter, he rejected his half-decade of work as a Republican operative and announced he’d become a Democrat. The reason was simple: He’d become fed up with “the culture of intolerance” on the right. “When the political discourse resorts to intolerance and hate, we all lose in what makes America great and the progress made in society,” he wrote, singling out the Heritage Foundation’s recent attacks on immigrant intellectual capacities as the icing on a very large prejudice cake.
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Did you see it change much in the past five years? If so, how?
I have seen a change toward the extremes. Perhaps the last round of immigration debates brought some of the same discourse, but this is new for me. Sen. Rubio has suffered being ridiculed [since announcing his support for immigration reform] by those who now denounce him but once supported him. On the surface, Mexican hats on a picture of Rubio seem like a bad joke. But then you hear commentators saying some very misguided things that unfortunately do resonate with the base of the Republican Party. Then you hear about this extremist study. So on and so forth.
Others in the party have called Spanish the language of the ghetto, then later apologized when it was convenient. I would have thought that was old stuff, but again, look at the current immigration debate and the studies behind it.
These aren’t just gaffes out there that are made by some elected Republican calling people “wetbacks” and such. These are core issues of intolerance that are part of that culture. For example, how does it make sense to drug-test people because they are taking welfare benefits? Some may argue that it’s OK because they want to make sure the money is not going to fraud, but I’m starting to think that’s not the case.
Did you see other folks in the GOP wrestling with these issues like you? Did you ever have any frank discussions about uneasiness with the party’s direction?
I won’t mention names, but I did have conversations about immigration where increasingly I had to defend the fact that the people most affected were human beings.
I had shared some concerns here and there, but it’s difficult sometimes without looking out of place. I’m not entirely sure how others manage expectations. Some say they stay to change it from within, but that’s their choice. I think there would be too much to change; they’d have to turn the Republican Party into another party completely.
The only way some of these elected [official]s can function in the Republican Party is if they take these extreme positions, such as the immigration posturing. If they don’t denounce these racist remarks, then perhaps they actually believe in them. I can’t say for sure. Recently, the only way to satisfy the base of the Republican Party was to adopt an anti-gay and lesbian platform. Another example of intolerance. Even if within the party there are disagreements, the intolerance shouldn’t be accepted.
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I think that it is a common story, whether you are a Hispanic or just a non old, fat, White, Evangelical man it was, as Ronald Reagan famously said (paraphrasing) , “It was the Party that left me”.