Like most Americans, I’ll be watching what Congress does in the few weeks before the end of 2012 and our nation approaches the edge of what has being called “the fiscal cliff.”  My Wednesday-after-the-election sense of relief still feels good; but as the has drama moved from the larger national stage to the smaller one in Washington, I’m still feeling uneasy.  My Republican friends are also a little tense. Not all Republicans are willing to be content to wallow in the disappointment of defeat or to play the blame game.  Many are making an intellectually honest effort to examine the details of their party’s failed campaigns... to try to figure out, despite Fox News reluctance to do the math, why they suffered a rout last Tuesday.  

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winning economist, said in a New York Times opinion piece on Sunday that President Obama should not even begin to participate in the game of chicken that tea party representatives keep pushing Boehner to play.  Krugman is concerned that President Obama has already hinted that he is willing to discuss spending cuts, and that the cuts tea party politicians want would hit the poor, middle class, and elderly.  The President has said often that he will not turn to that group of Americans and ask them to pony up more of their income and assets in an effort to get the money to pay down the deficit .  The President has insisted that the wealthiest Americans can well afford to pay more, and he will continue to insist that they do so.  

The the most extremely conservative Republicans who apparently fancy themselves to be reincarnations of those folks who threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773 obviously fail to recognize that Democrats and moderate Republicans are not the biggest threats to the GOP.  They have failed to see that they themselves are the enemy.  The tea party will be the cause of the demise of the Republican Party if it happens... and I don’t want the Republican Party to disappear.  The good health of our democracy depends on dialogue, debate, and compromise in American institutions of government.  It’s not dialogue if it comes from just one kind of thinking.  America needs both intellectually healthy parties. Some of the tea party people heading to Washington were elected, and reelected, to Congress in overwhelmingly conservative districts where there were not even enough moderate citizens to vote out a pitifully inadequate representative up for reelection like Michelle Bachman.  That’s going to happen again and again... until those districts are changed by younger, more progressive voters... and that change will come eventually when many more of the older mostly white gray beards in my age group who still listen to the last-minute pleas of evangelical preachers like Billy Graham have died off. 

Many Republicans whom I know and respect are smart and have recognized that we are a diverse nation, ethnically and ethically. Some of my Republican friends don’t believe there is a big old parent God somewhere out there in the cosmos who loves America more than any other nation.  They recognize that America is not now and must never be a theocracy. They are embarrassed by the assumption by some leaders in their Party that all Republicans are Christians and all Christians should be Republicans.  Many are chagrined by the suggestion that a “good” Republican must work toward an American future where abortion, marijuana, contraception, and gay marriage are illegal.  

The Republican friends who know me well know that I am a practicing capitalist.  My house is full of stuff, much of it I don’t really need... but got because I like it and because I could get it.  Some of it I got because I was in the right place at the right time, and some of it I got because I worked extra-hard to get it.  

Most of my friends know I like to think of myself as a citizen of the world.  I have heard them describe me as a “bleeding heart” liberal.  I don’t mind that description.  I’m not pushed out of shape when someone who doesn’t know me well uses the “socialist” label to describe me because I show concern for the poor in China or India or the Sudan or in the southeast corner of my own city.  

My Republican friends recognize and celebrate America’s ethnic and ethical diversity.  I respect that they believe in an economic, fiscal approach that is different from mine.  We respect each other because we agree that we want a strong America for all Americans.  Neither they nor I want the important Republican voice in American politics to be replaced by two-centuries old, Boston Harbor- tea party thinking.