The secret ballot

I still recall a dinner conversation when I was a kid in L.A. My parents had befriended new neighbors and were talking about how much they liked them. Suddenly my dad said, I think they may be Republicans. My parents were FDR Democrats. He wondered this and changed the subject, which was never brought up again. They became good friends with the neighbors. I learned years later that, yes, the neighbors were Republicans.

Contrast this to several friends I have today who cannot imagine being friends with a Republican! What an extraordinary difference! It used to be that personal beliefs were personal. Your religion, your politics, were private matters. It was rude, rude, to ask, Who are you going to vote for? You seldom saw lawn signs pledging allegiance to a candidate. You seldom saw political buttons on a vest. Oh yes, you'd flaunt your beliefs at a political convention if you went, but then you returned to your community and played your beliefs close to your vest. It was nobody's business where you went to church or whom you voted for.

The ballot was secret, and the secret ballot was a sacred institution that deserved this kind of respect.

Where political differences were important to come into the light was in government itself. I had the good fortune to write a long profile about Oregon's former governor Tom McCall before he died. I spent a week hanging around with him, and in our long taped conversations he told me a remarkable thing about his tenure in office. His top advisor was a bright conservative Republican. McCall was a liberal Republican. In the governor's own description, "I thought he was a fascist, and he thought I was a commie." This was the way it should be in government, McCall went on, because every issue became a debate, and every decision became a careful compromise in the middle of extreme beliefs.

How different the Bush administration is, with its cadre of Yes Men and its disgraceful treatment of someone like Colin Powell who questions the party line! How refreshing for Obama to flat out say he doesn't want to be surrounded by Yes Men. (Of course, saying and doing are two different things. We'll see.)

The important subtext of a secret ballot is that our similarities matter more than our political differences. Who cares, finally, if the new neighbors are Republicans or not? We enjoy them for other reasons than their political beliefs.

Our culture has lost this respect for privacy. This has been lost in part because we've been shaped into a nation of consumers -- and political beliefs are just another product to consume. Politics is visible far, far, far more than when I was growing up -- ads, lawn signs, bumper stickers, talk shows, phone banks, door-to-door solicitations, all points of view screaming, Buy me! buy me! buy me!

One of the perpetual disagreements in our household concerns lawn signs. I will not put up a lawn sign for anyone under any circumstances. I think to do so undermines the sacred notion of a secret ballot. My wife would put up a lawn sign for dog catcher. Our house is far off the street, so now and again she puts up a sign far enough from our home that I can ignore it.

I love my parents, FDR Democrats, becoming great friends with neighbors "who may be Republicans." I don't understand my friends today who flat out declare, "I could never be friends with a Republican." Ironically enough, these same people in another context talk about the importance of diversity! "All people are equal but some are more equal than others."

Here's an irony: some of the lost older traditions of this country, like great parental focus on the education of children, are getting a shot in the arm by immigrant families, whose kids spend more time in books than at the mall. Many immigrant families respect the secret ballot because they come from state-controlled tyrannical environments. Many immigrant families behave the way Americans used to behave.